Witness tells of troubling scene at Stanislaus County egg farm

An investigator on Tuesday told of entering a Carpenter Road egg farm and finding many of the hens dead and others standing in filth.

A preliminary hearing began for Andy Yi Keunh Cheung and Lien Tuong Diep, who are accused of allowing about 50,000 hens to go without feed in February 2012.

“I saw piles of white carcasses that weren’t moving or breathing,” said Timothy Wester, who was an officer at the time with the Stanislaus Animal Services Agency, during the hearing in Stanislaus Superior Court.

Judge Thomas Zeff will decide whether Cheung, 42, and Diep, 37, should stand trial on felony charges of animal abuse. The hearing, which resumes at 10 a.m. Wednesday, was scheduled for two days.

The farm, A&L Poultry, was a small part of the egg industry in and near Stanislaus County. The defense has suggested that the lack of feed happened inadvertently as the company was trying to arrange for an animal sanctuary to take the hens.

Wester, now a county jail deputy, was among the people who responded to the farm, about half a mile south of Fulkerth Road. Under questioning by Deputy District Attorney Sandra Bishop, he said surviving hens in the two barns appeared to lack muscle. He also said he rapped on a feed silo and, judging from the sound, believed it was empty.

Wester said the barns had a layout typical of the egg industry, with hen cages on an upper level and a collection system for the droppings on the ground floor. Some of the birds were out of their cages and standing in 4 to 6 inches of waste, he said.

“The barns were closed,” Wester said. “They didn’t have any way to get out of the barns, and they were covered in feces and urine.”

Wester testified that the barns had a strong ammonia smell and were humid because of a lack of ventilation. He also said some of the dead hens appeared to have been cannibalized by others.

Cheung and Diep were charged about a year after the farm was discovered. The preliminary hearing has been delayed a few times, and the prosecution and defense tried without success to reach plea deals.

Authorities said most of the hens died of starvation or were euthanized after the discovery. Close to 4,500 survivors were turned over to three animal sanctuaries in Northern California, which sued Cheung and Diep to recover their feed, shelter and other costs.

In a settlement last year, the defendants each agreed to pay $5,000 to the plaintiffs. Cheung also agreed not to work with animals in the future, and Diep agreed to limit her work to briefly transporting laying hens for slaughter.

This story was originally published May 26, 2015 at 5:37 PM with the headline "Witness tells of troubling scene at Stanislaus County egg farm."