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Friday's Final Word
A traveling horse veterinarian was arrested Wednesday in Florida and charged with sexual battery of a teenage girl.
Gregory Ford, 52, has also been charged with a federal count of threatening communications after he allegedly told the girl’s mother he was hiring a hitman to kill her if she persisted in the sexual battery investigation against him, WAFF reported.
The federal complaint was filed on Wednesday in Alabamap, a day after the threat was made.
According to the complaint, the girl’s mother found sexually explicit messages on her daughter’s phone late last month and contacted police. The messages including Ford and the girl “discussing plans for having sexual intercourse,” according to Law&Crime. After she reported the message to police, Lauderdale County sheriff’s deputies and an FBI agent spoke with the girl.
The girl reportedly said she and Ford had sex “three or four times and had sent nude images to each other.”
Ford’s primary residence is in Texas, but he travels around the country providing services at farms, horse shows, and races. The teen traveled with him as an assistant, and the relationship apparently had lasted for about two years. He was arrested on Wednesday in Marion County, Florida, where he apparently has another home, after deputies there were alerted that the two had sex there in May, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said.
But a day before his arrest, Ford sent messages to the girl’s mother warning her to back off the investigation. According to the federal complaint, Ford told her that he had “already paid a dear friend from the CIA to long rifle a bullet in your chest,” Law&Crime said.
He further blamed the mother for making “a mess of things,” saying she “absolutely humiliated, broken, and shamed the most perfect of God’s creations,” referring to the girl. He claimed he and the girl were “in Love” and were going to “run off together” when she turned 18, then said, “LISTEN TO YOUR DAUGHTER AND OUR LOVE STORY! SHE IS MY SOULMATE.”
The same day, he left two voicemails on the girl’s phone, apparently blaming her for the end of the relationship and saying “she’ll understand one day.”
Ford is being held in Florida without bond, the sheriff’s office there said.
The US Attorney for Northern Alabama, Prim Escalona, told WAFF that more federal charges would “probably” be filed, and the Lauderdale County Sheriff’s Office said that charges from their end were pending.
