Prize-winning cow brutally slain

Gerard Cambra said he doesn’t know who killed his prize-winning cow last week, but he suspects it is someone who lives in the Upcountry Maui area.

Another one of Cambra’s cows was killed about a year and a half ago in a sugar cane field in Pulehu. The culprit was never found.

"It’s pretty sad," he said Monday.

Cambra, a part-time rancher who also works as a supervisor at Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., said ranchers have been talking with police about incidents of stolen livestock, including goats in Upcountry.

In the most recent incident, Cambra said, his cow was in a pasture near Hookipa Beach Park and appears to have been shot with a shotgun before its legs were cut from its body. The rest of the cow was left in the field.

The legs were de-boned, and the bones found about 10 miles away along Kealaloa Avenue near Haleakala Ranch’s headquarters in Makawao, he said.

Cambra said the cow, a Limousin heifer that was six months pregnant, had won a blue ribbon at the Maui County Fair in 2011.

Cambra said the cow was worth about $600 but meant more to his family, who had raised it.

"It hurts a lot," he said.

Cambra said he thinks the cow was killed Wednesday night by someone familiar with the area. He said he suspects the killer dumped the bones along Kealaloa Avenue while en route home to the Upcountry region.

He said he last saw the cow in the pasture at about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and received a call from police about its slaughter at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday.

Police traced the dead cow to him by looking up the tax map key of where the cow was found and calling landowner Alexander & Baldwin Inc. A&B told police Cambra leased the land.