WESTFIELD – Two newspaper delivery drivers have admitted responsibility for severed rabbit heads found in two mailboxes on Monday but their confessions suggest that there are three additional rabbit heads hitherto undiscovered – or at least unreported – in the city.
City police reported on Monday that a letter carrier had advised a Pinehurst Street resident that he had found the head of a rabbit in her mailbox and also said that he found a second rabbit head in the mailbox at a Willis Street address which was found to be the home of the first victim.
Det. Brian Freeman was assigned to investigate and reported yesterday afternoon that the connection between the two victims appears to be entirely coincidental.
Freeman said that he was able to identify the suspects after he got a tip resulting from widespread publicity about the bizarre find – initially in The Westfield News but subsequently picked up by most of the area media outlets and by newspapers as far away as the New York Post.
He said that he was able to focus on two men he identified as a 24-year-old Springfield resident and a 26-year-old Chicopee man.
The two young men are, he said, delivery drivers for a newspaper, “the one in Springfield”, who deliver a route in Granville and Southwick on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
On one of those nights, Freeman said, while they were in Granville, “they found five dead rabbits, at different spots, like roadkill” and they collected the rabbits “because they thought it would be funny to cut their heads off and leave them for people on Easter morning.”
The rabbits were not domesticated pets.
He said that the Springfield man took the rabbits to his home where he “chopped their heads off and put them in zip lock bags.” He told Freeman he brought them out early Easter morning when they came to the city to deliver their Sunday newspapers in Westfield.
“The geniuses didn’t realize that people weren’t going to open their mailboxes on Easter morning” to find the rabbits, Freeman said.
The men told Freeman that they randomly picked the mailboxes where the left the rabbit heads.
He said that a woman called about a rabbit from an address on Mockingbird Lane but did not make a report. He also said that there may be another rabbit head “on Collins Street somewhere but we haven’t heard anything from anyone up there yet.”
None of the rabbit heads were left at any of their subscribers’ addresses.
Freeman said “they both came in and confessed to what they did.”
He reports they said that they left the rabbit heads because “we thought it was going to be funny” and said that he asked them when they stopped thinking it was funny.
“When we got your phone call,” was their answer.
Freeman said that charges are pending but said that probably they will be charged only with disorderly conduct.
H e said that although he plans to inform a postal inspector that he has worked with about the rabbit heads he does not expect postal inspectors to involve themselves in the case.
“I’m glad that rabbits weren’t killed for this,” he said. “I told them they might want to stay out of Westfield for a little while.”
