When the Virginia attorney general’s office initiated a police raid of the Natural Bridge Zoo in December 2023 as part of an animal abuse investigation, authorities expected to seize the zoo’s elephant.
They were surprised to find that the elephant wasn’t there. Asha had been shipped to a Florida zoo five days before.
The elephant had long been the center of campaigns by animal rights groups that targeted the Rockbridge County zoo; she was living alone, when elephants are herd animals. Asha’s shipment to Florida, just days before the raid, has fueled speculation that Natural Bridge Zoo had been tipped off to the impending raid and wanted to put one of its prime attractions out of reach of state authorities.
That raid resulted in the state seizing most of the zoo’s animals, and the investigation eventually produced indictments of five people. Three members of the Mogensen family that has run the zoo, the zoo’s veterinarian and Asha’s handler are scheduled to go on trial in three separate trials in February and March.
Here’s what hasn’t been reported until now: The office of then-Attorney General Jason Miyares (whose animal law unit led the investigation) requested search warrants in Florida related to Asha’s shipment, but a Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission report says a Florida prosecutor found them “insufficient” and would not honor them.
A Florida-based animal rights group, Free All Captive Elephants, recently obtained these documents through a Freedom of Information Act request and turned them over to Cardinal News. The brief mention of the search warrant request comes in a report that a Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission investigator filed in October 2024, about 10 months after Asha first arrived at the Two Tails Ranch in Williston, Florida.
Free All Captive Elephants had filed a complaint that one of Asha’s tusks had fallen off. Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission investigator Kenneth Holmes questioned Patricia Zerbini, who operates the privately owned zoo. According to the report Holmes filed, Zerbini said that Asha had likely broken the tusk “while playing with an enrichment item.” The zoo’s veterinarian, Mark Wilson, told Holmes that the elephant was in no distress, that tusks often break, and that he suspected “a possible congenital problem or more likely a calcium deficiency issue when it was an infant causing a weakened or more brittle tusk.”
The investigator consulted with a University of Florida veterinarian who corroborated that account. Accordingly, “I determined there [are] no welfare concerns about Asha at this time,” Holmes wrote. “She appears healthy and well groomed.”
However, in a summary of Asha’s case to that point, Holmes wrote something that wasn’t in previous reports: At some point — it’s unclear when— the Virginia attorney general had contacted the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission to request search warrants on the phones of Zerbini and Wilson, as well as Wilson’s veterinary records connected with Asha, “due to Asha being transferred shortly before a search warrant was executed on Natural Bridge Zoo.”
This request required the Virginia search warrants be “domesticated” to apply in Florida.
“I presented the probable cause information VAGO [Virginia attorney general’s office] provided to me to the appropriate State attorney’s office and was told there was not enough evidence for the search warrants,” Holmes wrote.
This single sentence gives a hint as to the breadth of the Virginia investigation and raises questions as to why the Virginia warrants weren’t recognized in Florida.
This is a mystery that may not be solved. The Florida state’s attorney — the equivalent of our commonwealth’s attorney — for the county where Asha went is Brian Kramer. A spokesperson for Kramer told Cardinal his office had no record of any such request. That doesn’t rule out some informal request that wasn’t logged.
A spokesperson for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission also did not offer any comment and said the agency would let the report stand as it is.
In Virginia, Roanoke Commonwealth’s Attorney John McNeil, who is not involved in the case, said “it’s highly unusual” for one state not to recognize another’s search warrants.
A Florida attorney who specializes in animal law but isn’t involved in the case also found the refusal unusual. “States generally have a recognized duty to cooperate with one another in law enforcement matters,” Ralph DeMeo said by email. “However, declining a warrant is not unprecedented, as it is ultimately the state attorney who will decide whether to act or not.”
He went on to say: “An out-of-state search warrant has no legal force in Florida on its own; it must be ‘domesticated,’ meaning a Florida judge must independently find probable cause and issue a new warrant under Florida law. The local state attorney serves as a gatekeeper in that process, and if the state attorney concludes the evidence is insufficient to meet Florida’s probable cause standard, they may decline to bring the matter before a judge.”
A statement by the group Free All Captive Elephants said: “FACE does not know the circumstance behind the State Attorney’s decision. However, we can say that we were not surprised as Florida authorities historically, turn a blind eye to exotic animal abuse and neglect. They leave these matters to the FWC whose investigators are woefully under-educated on the needs of animals like elephants or they just don’t care or both.”
Miyares, whose office sought the search warrant, said he could not comment even though he’s out of office because the matter is still under investigation. His successor, Jones, is now subject to a gag order that a Rockbridge County judge has imposed on all parties in the Natural Bridge Zoo case and can’t comment.
That means we don’t know whether Virginia authorities were ever able to search the phone records of Zerbini and Wilson — or whether they were able to obtain the veterinary records on Asha.
Asha is no longer in Florida. In July, she was transferred to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. It’s unclear what prompted that move, which was hailed by animal rights groups. The Elephant Sanctuary and multiple state and federal agencies have declined comment, citing an ongoing investigation.
Coming Tuesday: When Natural Bridge Zoo moved its elephant to Florida, officials there said the transfer violated state law but charged no one.
