October 11, 2026 By Merritt Clifton 1 Comment
Hunter entitlement: a mother’s death & Colorado Amendment 83 – Animals 24-7
Mother shot by hunter under depredation permit in an already harvested cornfield
ELLENDALE, Delaware; DENVER, Colorado––The September 19, 2026 shooting death of Santos Maria Chilel Soto, 39, a Georgetown, Delaware mother of five, Amendment 83 on the 2026 Colorado state ballot, and right-to-hunt constitutional amendments adopted in 23 other states since 1996 have in common that they originated from a hunters’ sense of entitlement unique in the realm of sports.
Santos Maria Chilel Soto, an immigrant from Guatemala, was out for an after dinner walk shortly after 7:00 p.m. in a recently harvested cornfield beside a cemetery in Ellendale, Delaware, accompanied by two children, ages 10 and 7, and her boyfriend Minivaldo Velásquez.
Santos Maria Chilel Soto.
(Facebook photo/collage)
“Probable cause affadavit”
“According to a probable cause affidavit,” reported Sean Curtis for WBOC television, “the boyfriend told investigators the group was walking closely together when he heard an ‘explosion’ and saw Chilel Soto fall to the ground. He told police he found her unresponsive and bleeding from the front of her upper torso and applied pressure to the wound while calling 911.
“The affidavit says that before police and emergency crews arrived, the man saw an older man carrying a flashlight approach the group while apparently searching for a deer he had just shot,” continued Curtis.
Walter Moorhead, 74, of Salisbury, Maryland, arrested in connection with Santos Maria Chilel Soto’s death, is charged with manslaughter, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and three counts of first-degree reckless endangering.
Walter Moorhead. Hunter.
(Delaware State police photo)
“Cold-blooded murder”
“Investigators say Moorhead told police he had been hunting deer from a ground blind and was using a scoped rifle,” said Curtis.
“According to the affidavit, Moorhead said he was positioned inside the blind when he fired at what he believed was a doe.”
Responded Minivaldo Velásquez, to the Delaware public news outlet WHYY, “I have never seen a deer with only two legs.
“She had a yellow blouse, and I was wearing a blue T-shirt,” Velásquez added.
“That was a cold-blooded murder,” Velásquez alleged. “It was not an accident. It was 100% not an accident.”
What “depredation” could deer have been committing?
Hunting deer with a rifle was not yet in season in Delaware, but WHYY learned that the state department of natural resources and environmental control had issued a depredation permit to the property owner, allowing antlerless deer to be shot there outside the normal season.
Hunters in Delaware, including those with depredation permits, are allowed to shoot deer until half an hour after sunset. Sunset came at 7:05 p.m. in Delaware that day; dusk came at 7:32 p.m.
Police reportedly responded to the Santos Maria Chilel Soto shooting at 7:40 p.m.
Hunters immediately defended Moorhead on social media by claiming that Santos Maria Chilel Soto and her family were trespassing, and that Moorhead was shooting within legal hours, if only barely.
But what sort of purported depredation could deer have been committing there, after the cornfield had already been harvested?
Karen Wrentzel
The Santos Maria Chilel Soto death evoked memories of many others, including six detailed by ANIMALS 24-7 in Hunter gets 7 to 20 years for killing teen he mistook for a groundhog.
Among the cases most similar, Robert Trundy, 40, of Hebron, Maine, was in September 2019 sentenced to seven years in jail, with all but nine months suspended, plus four years on probation, for fatally shooting Karen Wrentzel, 34, also of Hebron, while illegally hunting on her property.
Trundy was initially also charged with failing to provide aid to a person and failing report a hunting accident, for which he could have received up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $5,000.
Those charges were dropped after Trundy agreed to plead guilty to a single count of manslaughter.
“According to a police affidavit filed by Maine warden Anthony Gray,” reported Jon Bolduc of the Lewiston Sun Journal, “Trundy said he could see what he thought was the ‘ass of a deer with a tail, skinny legs and a possible glimpse of what he thought could have been part of a head or antler of a deer.’”
Megan Ripley
Karen Wrentzel’s death reminded Bolduc of the December 7, 2006 shooting of 18-year-old Megan Ripley near Paris, Maine.
Neighbor Timothy Bean, 51 at the time, shot Ripley in the chest with a muzzleloader from 277 feet away––less than 100 yards––as she stood on her father’s posted property.
Bean pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2007, after telling investigators he thought he was aiming at the rear end of a deer. Bean was sentenced to two years in prison with all but 30 days suspended, and actually served just 17 days.
Megan Ripley’s father, Troy Ripley, told Bangor Daily News reporter Scott Thistle in December 2015 that while he had not had any subsequent trouble with Thomas Bean, he had caught Bean’s brothers tearing down his “No Hunting” signs and draining a latrine into his property.
Kevin & Karen Wood. (Facebook photo)
Karen Wood
Both the Karen Wrentzel and Megan Ripley “hunting accidents” and aftermath also echoed the November 14, 1988 fatal shooting of Karen Wood, 37, the mother of twin girls who had just celebrated their first birthday, by Bangor hunter Donald Rogerson.
Wood had momentarily stepped into her own back yard in Hermon, Maine, near twilight, wearing white-palmed mittens that Rogerson––130 feet away––apparently mistook for deer’s tails.
“News reports at the time indicated that Wood may have been hanging clothing on the line in her back yard, or may have headed into her back yard to warn hunters that there were houses nearby,” recounted Bangor Daily News reporter John Holyoke in 2008, on the 20th anniversary of Wood’s death.
“A grand jury refused to indict Rogerson in 1989,” Holyoke continued, “but a year later another grand jury did hand up an indictment.
“The trial was held in October 1990. A jury deliberated for 9½ hours before finding Rogerson not guilty of manslaughter.”
Entitled assumptions of hunters
Inevitably such cases outrage much of the public, and not just animal advocates who oppose sport hunting because it involves deliberate cruelty to animals.
Neither is the issue, for most of the outraged, simply that a fatal accident happened. Fatal accidents happen, much more often than in connection with hunting, in many other common pursuits: for instance, 36,640 people died in traffic incidents in 2025 alone.
The most infuriating aspect of hunting accidents to non-hunters, for most people, as indicated by social media comments, appears to be the entitled assumption of hunters that everyone else should for weeks or even months alter every aspect of outdoor activity to make way for hunting––or at least wear “hunter orange,” regardless of personal fashion preference, while hunters wear camoflauge.
Parks are closed during hunting season. Runners, walkers, birders, bicyclists, horseback riders, gardeners, and children who might like to play outdoors in rural and semi-rural areas cannot enjoy their pastimes because one small segment of the population is indulging in a hobby which happens to be able to kill non-target humans even a mile away.
Hunters kill five times more people than racing cars
Four times more Americans run recreationally than hunt. Six times more Americans watch birds than hunt. Eight times more Americans ride bicycles than hunt.
Yet hunting is uniquely privileged to disrupt––and menace––everyone else’s life.
The total number of active sport hunters in the U.S. is about 14.4 million, 4.4% of the U.S. population. This is approximately equal to the combined television audience for the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, and the National Hot Rod Association drag racing finals.
A case could be made that auto racing and sport hunting are approximately equally dangerous, based on days of active participation by racing car drivers and hunters, though hunters annually kill about five times as many people as die in racing car crashes.
But no state, county, or city shuts down roads for weeks at a time to accommodate auto racing. Historically some roads were temporarily closed for auto races, but only for a few hours, once a year, and not at all in more than half a century.
Stamp collecting rivals hunting in participation
Which brings up “right-to-hunt-amendments,” enshrining hunter entitlement in state constitutions.
Baseball, football, basketball, soccer, and hockey are all enjoyed by millions more Americans than participate in sport hunting. Half again as many Americans participate in pickleball as hunt. Indeed, stamp collecting, with 12 million active participants, rivals hunting in participation.
Yet hunters uniquely receive dispensation to monopolize vast expanses of public property, shoot deadly weapons on non-posted private property, commit cruelties to animals that would be illegal in any other context, and enjoy legal protection for what would otherwise be at best regarded as anti-social behavior, such as hiding in ambush near a cemetery with a loaded gun.
Colorado Amendment 83 could even jeopardize the ongoing Colorado wolf reintroduction. (Beth Clifton collage)
Colorado proposed Amendment 83
This in turn brings us to proposed Colorado state constitutional Amendment 83.
Wayne Pacelle, now heading Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, as a recent Yale University graduate, was a reporter for the long defunct Animals’ Agenda magazine when Karen Wood was shot in 1988. Pacelle helped ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton, then Animals’ Agenda news editor, who wrote the coverage, to investigate the Wood death.
Though Pacelle did not mention Karen Wood in discussing Amendment 83 in a recent email to Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy members, likely her case has never left his mind.
Dan Gates. (Beth Clifton collage)
Spokesperson for privilege
“You can tell a lot about Amendment 83, a measure to enshrine the right to hunt and trap into Colorado’s constitution,” Pacelle suggested, ” by looking at the handiwork and associations of its architect, Dan Gates.
“He’s the Colorado representative of the National Rifle Association. The president of the Colorado Trappers & Predator Hunters Association. The Colorado director of the National Trappers Association. And the vice president of Fur Takers of America.
“He’s allied with Kansas-based Hunter Nation and the Arizona-based Safari Club International that recognizes its members for killing polar bears and other bears (“Bears of the World” award) and lions, jaguars, and other felines (“Cats of the World” award).”
Gates, in other words, is affiliated with many of the most ardent and influential advocates of hunter entitlement, and of the big money that goes into protecting and even advancing hunter entitlement, against the interests, concerns, and even safety of the overwhelming majority of the U.S. public.
Protecting “traditional methods” of hunting
“Gates and his financiers are trying to present Amendment 83 — after spending $1.3million to get enough signatures to qualify it — as a benign measure to affirm the value of hunting and trapping,” Pacelle continued.
“Amendment 83 seeks to protect ‘traditional methods’ of hunting and trapping and to use them as ‘preferred means’ of managing wildlife populations.
“In 1992,” Pacelle reminded, “with a 70% majority, voters stopped the horrifying practice of allowing hunting black bears in the spring, when mothers nurse dependent cubs. When the mother is shot, the cubs are orphaned, and the family group is lost.”
Surviving yearling cubs, raising themselves without a mother, are those mostly likely to come into conflict with humans in seeking food, and be shot for that.
Hunters tend to have no trouble with this, so long as they get to do the shooting.
Shooting bears over garbage
Colorado Amendment 10, Pacelle continued, also “prohibited shooting bears over garbage piles in a baited kill. And it forbids chasing bears with packs of dogs to set up the shooting of a bear from a tree trunk or a tree limb.
“Amendment 83 is designed to nullify Amendment 10.
“Amendment 83’s language that hunting and trapping are the ‘preferred’ means of managing wildlife,” Pacelle noted further, “creates a setup for a courtroom challenge to the law to restrict cruel and indiscriminate traps.
“For example, if a citizen expresses concern that there is a bobcat in a neighborhood, or a beaver has built a dam and created an unwelcome pond, proponents could demand trapping as the ‘preferred method’ and kill the animals, even though non-lethal methods would be the smart move.
Superseding rights of voters & Colorado Parks & Wildlife
“A single judge could be in a position to overturn a law passed by millions of Colorado voters.
“Two years ago,” Pacelle remembered, “during the [failed] Proposition 127 campaign to stop unsporting and inhumane trophy hunting and trapping practices for mountain lions and bobcats, Gates argued that Coloradans should trust Colorado Parks & Wildlife and not allow voters to decide matters through democratic decision-making.
(See 2024 U.S. national election: racism, sexism, & speciesism all won big.)
“Now Gates is working to create a constitutional right to hunt and trap, including by ‘traditional methods,’ that would not only supersede the rights of voters but also Colorado Parks & Wildlife.
Legal questions
“Any future proposal involving hunting or trapping,” Pacelle warned, such as “halting killing bobcats for their fur, or halting the use of highly toxic lead ammunition that kills more than 100 species of wild animals, could potentially raise these questions: Does this restriction impermissibly burden the constitutional right to hunt?
“Does it interfere with a ‘traditional method’?
“Can the state demonstrate that the restriction satisfies Amendment 83’s requirements?
“That could affect debates over trapping methods, predator killing, hunting seasons, methods of take, wildlife killing contests, and any sort of other reform that citizens advance,” Pacelle finished.
Beth & Merritt Clifton among friends. (Beth Clifton collage)
Twenty-four states altogether now protect hunter entitlement, including Vermont, whose right-to-hunt provision dates to 1777, and reflects the alleged poaching history, under British rule, of many of the Green Mountain Boys militia.
