From: Dennis Horion

To: Wendy Burnett <wburnett@GFC.STATE.GA.US>

Wed 9/14/2022 10:46 AM
The grants were given under a fire safety program by the State of Georgia.  You need to contact your Covington office and speak to Jody.  He was the staff member who refused to do the requested work.  Finance will have a record of payment receipts.  I am going to publish our correspondence on the linked areas.  I suggest you take the information provided and do the research.  If all else fails, have your investigators speak to the Johnson family.  

The last I heard lying to law enforcement is still a crime!

From: Wendy Burnett <wburnett@GFC.STATE.GA.US>
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2022 10:34:59 AM
To: Dennis Horion <dennis@adopt-a-horse.org>
Subject: Fw: GORA and Investigation Request Email Mr. Horion,
Thank you for contacting GFC. We have searched our files in both our forest protection and forest management departments, and we have found no grants in the amounts you indicated, and no grants that we have issued to the Johnson family.
Sincerely,

Wendy C. Burnett

Public Relations Director

478.365.6233

@gatrees 

To: Byrant Johnson  

 Property Manager   

From: Dennis Horion      

May, 2,2022

  You accepted our rent checks eight months ago. Our rent is paid until September of this year. I will be paying our rent again this year in accordance with the terms of our lease. You have accepted our rent for the last two years as prescribed in our lease. I have no intention of closing a rape crisis program offering equine assistance after seventeen years of a thirty-year lease. You are setting arbitrary deadlines to steal my Foundation’s property and harm our efforts to provide a permanent home for abused animals.      

  You think there will be no consequences for this arbitrary attempt to shut down our missionary efforts. I assure you that this overt effort to steal our rescue horses and shut down our operation will be met with vigorous opposition at every turn. You have taken my kindness for weakness. I have dealt with your behavior since your father's death with tolerance in the extreme. Your efforts to force me to renegotiate my lease after all these years of money and hard labor were disrespectful and morally repugnant.    

   My patience with this behavior is now at an end. Your father has had a front row seat to our advocacy efforts over the years. He understood our efforts on behalf of victims of child sex crimes was both informed and relentless. He threatened to cancel our lease on five separate occasions, but he reversed course after some careful reflection. I hope you reconsider your attempt to steal the work of myself and countless volunteers for no good reason. At this point, I want your written assurances that this continued harassment will end permanently.   

Horace Johnson Jr. Commitments     

   I met with your father and your brother James on May 30, 2020, for over three hours to discuss the status of our working relationship. A large list of issues both past and future were discussed in detail. Your father assured me that our lease was solid with no thought of our removal from the property. In a few short weeks, you spoke with me on the phone at length about our working relationship going forward. It is a normal course of business to record important conversations. Our conversation was recorded in case you were unable to effectively relay our discussion to all the parties to our agreement.    

  It was during this conversation that you discussed your grandmother’s decision to cancel our agreement and force me to sign a new contract. You wrote an agreement that clearly showed that you wanted to remove me from the property and hand my efforts over to John and Richard in return for unspecified additional work. You suggested that I was not helping you remove me from the property and stealing my arduous work. You gave me a one-sided demand and then refused to stop harassing me incessantly for months. We offered to pay the rent as early as May of 2020. You finally accepted our payment in October 2020.    

  Your acceptance of those funds came with the acceptance of the terms of our agreement outlined in 2004. No changes were made to the original agreement.   

2020 – 2021 Season    

  The first year of your property management role was a disappointment. You gave Richard and John permission to hunt without collecting on their outstanding cutting duties or collecting their rent. Richard lied to you about his presence on the property. You refused to have him remove hunting stands and his presence despite photographic evidence of his trespassing after we paid the rent. We told you he presented a clear security risk since he was making incredible claims of chasing poachers during his poaching time. We have photos showing no such incursion took place. His final presence on the property took place on November 28, 2020, under a hail of gunfire from across the street. Richard is an unstable fool and John was a liar and a thief. They proved my words of caution, and you did nothing to stop the madness.     

  We ended up paying the rent, cutting the pastures, repairing the fences, disabling the remaining hunting stands, and cleaning up our fire breaks. We spent over 600 hours cleaning up their filth with no compensation for our time and the use of our tools. We spent $325 in contract cutting services to clean up the front pastures. It was an expensive and time-consuming effort with no time our effort from anyone in your family. You paid no heed to our advice, and we paid the price. You put our personal safety at significant risk from a clearly unstable man angered over his forced removal from the property.   

2021-2022 Season    

  We received your enclosed correspondence attempting again to unilaterally cancel our lease.  We responded with a detailed history of the relationship with us.  We spoke about the takeover of our management responsibilities and the resulting loss of valuable time and effort to complete the State of Georgia mandated forestry plan. Your father conceded his failure to get the plan implemented correctly during our meeting with James.  Our access to large parts of the property was destroyed due to these shortcomings.     

  We cut the front pastures a second time and cleared the six-foot-high weeds along all the fence lines. We expanded our fences lines near our base of operations to open a second separate for more space for our ponies. We cleaned all the fire beaks we installed as prescribed in the plan. We performed extensive maintenance along all our fence lines allowing us to secure our horses and ponies without concern for their safety.     

  Once all this work was completed, you contracted a company to destroy the scenic nature of the property in search of every tree capable of making you money. Months of daily heavy equipment trashing the property kept us from bringing our horses to the wooded areas. The fire breaks were ruined with heavy track equipment and the nasty mess left behind was an affront to our arduous work. Your contractor destroyed and removed all the fences we had recently installed for our ponies. Your contractor put debris on large parts of our fences that we had to fix a second time in six months.

   Now that 90% of the work to correct the damage from your contract has been cleaned up, you want to steal our demanding work. Cleaning up behind your contract has cost us an additional 500 hours of intense manual labor.  Instead of offering to help us with the cleanup with labor or money, you want to take our work and sell it to the highest bidder.       

  As a part of your contractor’s work, they destroyed the tree being used to secure the entrance to the rear of the property near your grandmother's home. There are no keys to the rear of the property since the gate was removed. We are not going to give you keys to our fenced area given your inability to handle livestock.    

  Any attempt to take over our operation will be met with the kind of fervor afforded any other thief.  Anyone victimized by a concerted effort to put our horses' lives at risk will be met with the same resistance that a parent would have for the safety of their children. Your threat to show up and close our program to help rape victims will be met with a public airing of our grievances until our rights are restored. I will not walk away from God’s missionary work. You do not want to extend your slum lord tactics to our operation. Neither we nor the government will allow you to put our animals on the street like renters' belongings. Any talks with us must start with your agreement to stop your efforts to cancel our lease. 

Dennis Horion 

Tue 8/3/2021 10:51 PM 

  We went and got the balance of the money for the rent for 2021 & 2022 today.  I was going to send you this in the morning.  I can save myself some time and send it to you now.    You asked for a year to learn the project and manage it correctly. The year is over, it is now time to discuss the results of your efforts. You said you were going to visit the property once a month and learn the project with our help. You have been MIA for the entire year. The only time I have seen you here was approximately seven years ago for one hour and you were late for that meeting. I have not seen you on the property since that meeting.    

  You decided to try and cancel our thirty-year lease without cause. You have tried to impose a new lease during a pandemic since we were closed to the public. You have tried to force us to have a meeting on zoom with the whole family, including your elderly frail grandmother, to dictate the terms of your new lease proposal. James was prepared to protect us and keep us from being overwhelmed. You took our rent money and allowed Richard and John to hunt and not pay their hunting fees or cut the property.     

  You have harassed us with a deluge of emails, phone calls, action memos, and a certified letter. You have issued permission slips, demanded we pay your liability insurance, and give you unlimited access to areas with livestock and working dog/ dogs. You want keys to our working areas after you decided you had the right to cancel our lease and take over our improvements. In short, you have treated us like ignorant field hands with no lease or common sense.   

  Our lease is the only valid agreement between us. I am personally a party to the only lease that counts. All the improvements on the property were donated to Adopt-A-Horse, Inc. Every item of value has a vanity plate naming the donor of each item. Everything of value belongs to a Georgia Corporation in good standing. In the event the horses are removed from the property at my death, everything is going to go with the horses. There are no improvements, including water and electricity infrastructure, that will remain without the horses present.     

  Your agreement is with me. I personally own nothing of value. I have no reason to have liability insurance since there is nothing to take. The Foundation has no liability under Georgia law. The details were provided in our earlier emails. If you feel the need for liability insurance, you need to contact your insurance professional. We are maintaining your property, paying your taxes. and helping you stay in conservancy. We are not going to subsidize your lifestyle beyond our current obligations.    

 You said we spoke for three hours on the phone, and it meant nothing to you. We spoke for an hour and seventeen minutes. I recorded our conversation in case you misrepresented our discussion. I have written numerous answers to your endless questions which you ignore immediately. You wrote a lease agreement that was an exact outline of your intent to breach our contract, personally profit from our efforts, try to make us subservient to the hunters wishes, and take over our improvements unless we allowed you to treat us like slaves to your whims and wishes.

Ignoring your lack of manners has only emboldened your disrespectful behavior. Your contract illustrated the essential elements of the crime of theft. You detailed the motive, method, and opportunity of your intended theft from a rape crisis program. Since our check was made out to your aunt and your father’s estate, you brought everyone into your efforts to help child molesters escape justice and make our horses homeless.     

  You obviously made commitments to Richard and John about your forcing me to sign a new lease. Your efforts proved to be relentless and a waste of time. Your father would have demanded the trails, fire breaks, and the pastures be cut before discussing a new hunting contract. He would have never given the permission to hunt for free while trying to coerce me to sign anything. He would have forced them off the property if they were unable to work out a deal in August. You decided to let them avoid 90% of the cutting, allowed them to hunt for free, let them leave their hunting stands in place to this day, and you let them endanger us without recourse. You got snippy with me when I asked you to get them gone saying “you weren’t my secretary.”    

   Richard borrowed equipment and he refused to let us know where he had hidden it. He took expensive equipment home and refused to return it. He went over the door of our gold horse trailer and took tools and never returned them. He left with a lawn mower he said he had given us. It was a piece of junk we refused to pour money into. He hoped we had fixed it for him to take on his last day on the property. He saved us the time and effort of hauling it off to the recycling center for disposal. 

    Richard is the primary suspect in an incident of acts of abuse against two of our horses. I filed a police report and named Richard as the key suspect. I was told anyone having keys to our horse pastures has an implied consent to do anything they want. We and the porta potty driver are the only ones with keys to the pasture area. No one else needs access to our horses. Anyone found in the pastures is guilty of trespassing. Property owners do not have the right to enter rented property unless there is a maintenance issue that needs to be addressed. Your family can see everything from the road. Your family did not contribute to any improvements, and you are not going to fix anything that breaks. The neighbors have been asked to call the Sheriff if anyone is inside our wires.  

   Richard came to me with his arms crossed in 2019 yelling at me and prepared to fight me due to his anger over our disagreement over our stance on his many issues. He thought he could intimidate me with his behavior. I stood my ground, and he came back later and apologized for his behavior. We told you Richard was mentally unstable and hunting without permission. 

    We have taken photographs to prove his allegations of chasing off someone on a four-wheeler were nonsense. The day before he said he chased a poacher off the property it rained. We took pictures showing there were no vehicle tracks but Richard's truck. In addition, there were trees down that would have been needed to be removed for a four-wheeler to come on the property. We have pictures showing none of the downed trees had been removed. On his last day on the property, he told you he was receiving incoming fire from across the street. Obviously, that was made up completely. No evidence is available to corroborate that wild story. 

   The only person we have seen poaching on the property was a guest of John’s and he had a key to our gates. John gave his guest permission to shoot our dogs if they bothered him. Both these guys are dangerous to us and our guests. You refused to do your duty and protect us from them. 

    You refused to have them remove their hunting stands. They lied to you about the number of stands in place. Richard removed two stands on 11/28/2021 after saying he had only one there. They have left at least three of their stands and a renovated stand that are still in place today. It appears you are still wanting them to come back this year for another season after making orders to us about you wants and needs. My patience with this is over. I will not let you have Richard and John come back for hunting after we pay our rent like last year. You took our rent under false pretenses   

     Since you were incapable of getting them gone, I was fully prepared to remove them from the property if they stayed beyond your final deadline in December. Our efforts started out with a permanent placement on our child molester web site (https://zorrow.org/equine-justice-warriors  Login - Zorrow Zorrow IS An Advocate for Victims of Child Sex Crimes. Zorrow / Justice Warrior; Official Support For Rape; Boy Scouts Hide Mass Rape zorrow.org ). Their efforts to undermine our organization, has made them a direct threat to our rape crisis program. We were prepared to send out 300 invitations/ fliers announcing their new status on our creeper web site. We would have sent out the mailers even if you had gone against our lease and taken their hunting money. We have multiple recordings of your father. In one recording he admitted that signing a hunting agreement with Richard and John without my signature was in violation of our agreement. He said, “I am going to sign an agreement with them because I am being selfish.” 

    Your father and I respected each other’s dissimilar roles in the community. We agreed to help our community differently. We had boundaries that allowed us to perform our roles without rancor or disrespect. He was clear to James and me in our last meeting that he had no intention of removing us from the property. He had a front row seat to the effect of our advocacy efforts. He always appreciated our agreement to not take any disagreements public. We always worked it out privately. We may not have always agreed but we had never disrespected each other. I was never his field hand and he never acted like a slum lord to me. 

    Your father was routinely told of the quality of our horse program. Numerous victims of abuse and their families told them of their trust and respect for our advocacy efforts on their behalf. Local politicians that were shamed because of our efforts changed policies and provided more resources to victims of child sex crimes. 

    Your father took over management of the property the last day I saw you on the property years ago. I called the DNR central office to complain about the local DNR crew’s trashing of the fire breaks we installed. The DNR crew refused to do the work of installing the correct fire breaks. They refused to do any more real work since your father told them to ignore me. He signed off on the $2,000 grant after the local DNR crew said they would owe him the work. They had the audacity to pressure your father to write a check for the work before he was paid by the State of Georgia. They never came back, and they did none of the work promised. 

    DNR sent your father a grant offer of $4,800 a few years later. Your father asked me to meet with him, John, and Richard to help him make a proposal for the grant money. We made proposals about the work that was needed to complete the conservancy plan. We agreed on the priority of work to be performed. Your father walked away with his notes from that meeting and wrote the grant request. 

     Once the grant was received, your father had a conference call to discuss the implementation of the contracted work. Your father told us that he was worried about the contract financial issues. He told us that the local DNR people demanded that he pay the bill for the work done and wait for the State to reimburse him for the work. In short, he may need to fund the $4,800 until the State of Georgia reimbursed him for the work. John offered to pay the State of Georgia and he would wait for his money until the check arrived from the State of Georgia. Your father then agreed to give John’s construction business the work instead of contracting directly with the local DNR office. 

    Richard was at the property with the heavy equipment operators. His work did not conform to any of the items discussed at our meetings. He was running paths to nowhere and wasting an enormous amount of money. I convinced your father to meet with me and tour the problems immediately while the necessary adjustments could be made. At the end of our tour on a horse cart the evening of the first day of work, he told me he had no real interest in the issues at hand. He told me that “It is all just turning dirt.”

     I tried having the DNR ranger come out and view the work. I was told that he needed a letter from your father before he would respond to my request. Your father was told of my conversation with DNR, and he refused to send the letter. It was at this juncture that I refused to be involved in the conservation project anymore. I refused to be involved in a shady deal with severe legal consequences. I wrote my concerns to your father. I have that email and all other correspondence between your father and myself over this whole nasty episode. After years of arduous work, we were sidelined again for the last time. 

     Instead of finishing the fire breaks a section at a time and doing a controlled burn, nothing was finished, and no controlled burns were accomplished. Our next-door neighbor completed all 900 acres of his area of responsibility while your father did not even ask for an inspection of the work. He did not even ask for a burn permit to be issued before submitting an invoice claiming the work was done. The work done by John and Richard did not conform to the written grant request your father submitted. Not only was the grant work not completed as written but your father diverted equipment to do personal work outside the scope of the grant. Once he colluded with these two men to go outside the contract as written, he felt obliged to keep both these men happy for the sake of his reputation.

     Our neighbor just completed another controlled burn of his entire 900 acres this spring in 2021. Your property has not been maintained and you let John and Richard off the hook for opening and maintaining the fire breaks before their departure. You missed another deadline for a controlled burn. The clock is ticking on this issue, and you are oblivious to the problem. As the property manager, you are responsible for the timely management of the fire safety issues involved. 

    While you were in negotiations last year, we asked you to get the work done before talking to them about another year of hunting. After writing to you, Richard only cut the areas that could be seen from Johnson Terrace. You continued harassing us to sign a new lease while letting them walk away and leave three years' worth of maintenance undone. The weeds are now over eight feet high. Everyone knew you were not going to put your field gear on and inspect the work involved. The conversation dragged on because you failed to inspect the property you claimed to manage. 

    You will be required to have all your fire breaks opened with heavy equipment prior to any controlled burn. You saw during your only visit that our fire breaks were clean, but DNR still ran their heavy equipment over the fire breaks anyway. You are not going to get another controlled burn accomplished without spending a lot of money to harrow your fire breaks after they are completed. Neither Richard nor John owns the equipment to do that work. John just wanted to get his subcontractors some work since his construction business was slow at the time. 

    The reason all this is important is because of the property tax consequences of failing to stay in conservancy. The last time I checked fifteen years ago, the 68 acres and your grandmother's house would have an annual tax obligation of $42,000 without the conservancy designation. The DNR inspections can revoke this designation and they can make your tax bill retroactive for ten years. In short, they can take your property unless you pay them the value of the property with penalty and interest added to the bill. Your father felt immune from these issues due to his position as a judge. You will be fighting to hold onto his good name if this issue is not addressed. 

    In addition to the tax consequences, you are in grave danger of facing criminal liability in the event of a fire on your property. I suggest you take a lesson from the collapse of the condominium complex in Florida. Everything was all right until the building came down. Once the building fell, a grand jury was impaneled to assess if any criminal conduct was involved in the death of those people. If a fire starts on your property from any source, you will be held responsible for the loss of life or property whether it is your family or others adversely effected. Your insurance carrier can refuse to pay all claims if there was gross negligence involved in the maintenance the property. John and Richard wanted you to shoot the messenger instead of you hearing the message. 

    I told you and your brother that your grandmother’s house is in grave danger. The high pines in the front and the deep woods in the rear of the house represent a deadly fire hazard to the house in the middle. The house does not have fire resistant tiles and it is going to go up very quickly. There is no source of water for firefighting since the pool has no water in it. There are no fire hydrants on Johnson Terrace to provide fire suppression in the quantity needed to save the house or the people inside.  Fire fighters will only enter a burning structure to save lives. 

     If a structure fire has no known occupants, they are going to stand by while the fire destroys the house. The DNR put in a firebreak behind your grandmother's house seven years ago. Richard placed a different fire break behind her house in the wrong place. The controlled burn was never done after the fire breaks were installed. The house is a disaster looking for a place to happen. You will be held accountable as the property manager if a catastrophe occurs. I have told both you, your brother, and your cousin about the danger you are imposing on your grandmother. In the event of a fire, she will be easy blinded by the smoke and parish due to your neglect.

      We have told everyone we were willing to keep the fire breaks clean from overhanging branches if the ground was safe for our horses. Richard and John wanted us to maintain the fire breaks and stay off them for four months a year. In the time when we are restricted from our lease, they wanted to keep us from taking in enough outside riders to feed our horses and dogs. I assured them that that we would not keep the fire breaks ready for their occasional hunting trips. Richard told me that they purposely put the fire breaks to nowhere until your father agreed to restrict us from the new fire breaks. I put this conversation in writing and sent it to your father. You put this same request to us just last year. We have the only real lease. Their demands were both unnecessary and ridiculous.    

 In my lease, we are only required to maintain the areas where we planted something. We have never planted anything. We are not required to cut anything anywhere. Our lease stated that we would spray chemicals to maintain the areas where we planted. We decided to clean and spray the pastures and areas where our horses graze and along Johnson Terrace. We are planning to clean up the areas in the rear in a timely fashion. We are only going to clean the areas that that are safe for the horses. We cut the pastures at our expense since Richard and John refused to do the cutting while they hunted for free. We will only spray the pastures and trails with a combination of three chemical concentrations purchased at Tractor Supply for this work. We take pride in the area where our horses eat, and our clients and rape victims visit us. We know you had no plans to do anything to keep the place from deteriorating. 

    I ask you to read this in earnest. We are not going to respond to your abusive behavior. We are the only ones doing any work. We have lost considerable time and money compensating for your failure to heed my advice. We are placing this year's rent in the mailbox in front of your grandmother’s house by 10am. I am not going to engage in a lengthy discussion with you about this topic. I suggest you take our hard-earned money and work on the issues that need your attention.