Broken down bus in Adams County held a menagerie, but for what?
Here's the broken down bus in Adams County that held a rolling barnyard in Adams County that some now worry was involved in bestiality. Adams County SPCA
Police believe this ramshackle trailer - discovered with four dogs, a pony and a bull in Adams County this weekend - may have been the scene of a travelling bestiality exhibition.
Police are still trying to unlock the mysteries behind the old yellow school bus and makeshift trailer they found marooned on a highway pull-off in Adams County last week, filled with a veritable barnyard of animals and their owner.
That man, Shawn Hirschbine, has been living in a gypsy-like existence from the bus recently.
He’d scrawled his phone number on the sides of the old yellow school bus, where it appeared he often lived with the animals, “24-hour tires and shows” to anyone interested or intrigued by that sort of thing.
That number is also linked to various adult-oriented Web sites, sometimes advertising male escort services, police said.
At the same time, Hirschbine and his travelling companion Deanna Huff seemed to have carefully picked their spots to control their exposure to everyone else - and vice versa.
That ended when the vehicle broke down near New Oxford, Adams County, last Saturday.
Hirschbine is being held in the Adams County Prison on an arrest warrant issued by police in Beckley, W. Va., this spring charging him with distributing obscene materials to a minor.
But it’s the obscene material itself — a video of a man engaged in an undescribed sexual act with a horse — that had police in Pennsylvania take the unusual step of engaging a veterinarian to examine some of Hirschbine’s menagerie for evidence of bestiality — legalese for humans performing sex acts on animals.
Abigail Avery, director of the Gettysburg-based Adams County SPCA, where the animals were moved for temporary care and shelter on Sunday, finds the situation “disturbing.”
“This guy’s been driving around the county and people are like: ‘Oh, that’s a weird-looking bus,’” she said. “You just don’t have any idea what goes on behind closed doors. You know what I mean?”
A passing motorist noticed Hirschbine, 50, and his traveling companion, Huff, broken down in Oxford Township, on a lot off Hanover and Red Hill Roads just before 8:30 p.m., and called police for a welfare check on Saturday, according to Eastern Adams Regional Police.
Responding officers found a bus filled with about 30 birds, and an attached trailer serving as a pen for four dogs, a horse and a bull. Food and bedding were piled on the seats. Everybody else was living in the cramped remaining space.
“There was feces all over. The smell was horrendous,” Eastern Adams Police Chief Francis Staab told Fox 43 News.
“This is not something we see every day and it’s not something we ever want to see again,” the SPCA said on Facebook, in a post that brought the incident to the public’s attention earlier this week.
As Avery connected with the police in West Virginia, disturbing details led the authorities here to their decision to run tests on the dogs, pony and bull, to see if there is any evidence of animal bestiality.
The biggest red flag was that warrant in West Virginia. The distribution charge is a felony that carries the potential of prison time.
Beckley Detective Nikki Pinardo, in reviewing texts that could help locate a 15-year-old runaway girl from Beckley this spring, said she came across a chat between the girl and a man she’s identified as Hirschbine that included eight videos and pictures of a man performing sex acts on a horse.
“None of the images or videos I have actually show his face,” Pinardo said. But “the stuff seen in the background is consistent with the wooden enclosed trailer that he had the horse and the bull in [in Adams County.]”
And then there was the content of some of the texts.
“It was him talking over TextNow to my juvenile victim, and he was stating that it was him [in the video] and things that he did, and he was kind of leading her into bestiality-type sexual conversations,” Pinardo said.
Pinardo said all the internet-based threads to Hirschbine she’s seen so far mostly refer to his work as a male escort; there is no mention of bestiality.
On the other hand, “he [Hirschbine] kept asking her [the 15-year-old girl] to share his photos and videos he was sending to her with her friends, and he said that way we can make money,” Pinardo said.
Having talked with Pinardo about what she had on Hirschbine and Huff this week, Avery, the SPCA director, said police here made the decision to essentially do something like a rape kit test on the animals, including checks for human DNA.
Avery said there’s some clearly troubling signs — psychological and physical - that some of the animals found here have been victimized.
The German Shepherd dogs, for example, have enlarged vulvas that suggest they have been exposed to more frequent sexual stimulation than the biological “heat cycles” that would be normal for female dogs of their age, she said.
“It’s a very unusual case, there’s no doubt about it,” Avery said. “I mean I’ve seen people living in worse conditions. I’ve seen animals in worse conditions... But never the sexual trauma to animals like this.”
In August 2022, Hirschbine and Huff were arrested in Orchard Park, New York, near Buffalo, after the same vehicles were found with a slightly different collection of animals. He’s made his home in western New York for much of his life, according to public records.
In that case, according to court records, Hirschbine was convicted of confining an animal in a vehicle, neglect of an impounded animal, and torturing or injuring animals by failure to provide sustenance. He got a suspended sentence and was ordered to pay $1,735 in fines and costs.
