A former equine surgeon is looking for justice after she claims her neighbor’s negligence led to the death of her favorite horse.

Gary Cuthbertson, 80, has been charged in Flathead County Justice Court with misdemeanor cruelty to animals; the case is set to go to trial July 24.

Serra Valentine said Cuthbertson agreed to watch her animals at her Bigfork home while she traveled to Hollywood, California, to visit her dying father.

She had just arrived in Los Angeles and was sleeping when Cuthbertson called her cellphone early Aug. 23, 2013.

“Serra, this is Gary Cuthbertson,” he said in the message. “You’ve got a horse that’s caught in the round pen and it’s not the big horse. He’s got his leg caught in there and he’s down on the ground, so you need to have somebody come and try to get him loose.

“I’m not going to be available, I’m ... going fishing today and I saw him when [I was] leaving in the morning. But I’m hoping there’s somebody you can call that knows what to do, but you need to do something because he’s on the ground. I hope you get this message, I’ll try once more too. Thank you, bye.”

The horse, a Palomino named Romeo, was Valentine’s favorite. She panicked when she finally received the message and called her son immediately.

It took her more than an hour to get two people out to her home to release the horse from the fence by detaching the panels of the pen from one another. By that point, more than a gallon of fluid had collected in Romeo’s lungs.

Romeo was transported to a veterinarian and later died because his body had shut down from lying on his side for so long. According to Valentine, who was an equine surgeon for 10 years, horses can survive such an injury if they are released and treated quickly enough.

“There were no broken bones, no colic. He died from hanging on the fence for too long,” she said.

Valentine said Romeo had been saved from a kill barn by a previous owner and that he had the personality of the horse Maximus from the Disney movie “Tangled.” She said the horse meant everything to her.

“Some horses are just once-in-a-lifetime horses, and he was a once-in-a-lifetime horse,” she said.

Montana law states that a person who has an animal in custody and fails to provide licensed veterinary or other appropriate medical care to that animal in cases of immediate, obvious, serious illness or injury is guilty of cruelty to animals.

The case hinges on whether the verbal agreement to watch Valentine’s animals legally placed them in Cuthbertson’s custody and whether his call to Valentine constituted him fulfilling his obligation to seek care for the horse.

Valentine said there were two witnesses when he agreed to watch her animals and noted that he had watched them for her in the past.

However, Cuthbertson and his attorney Sean Hinchey dispute that view of the agreement.

“Our position is he never did any such thing,” Hinchey said. “He said he would call her if he noticed anything as a courtesy as a neighbor. There was never any arrangement that he would watch the animals.”

Hinchey said he and Cuthbertson see it as a failure of Valentine taking responsibility for her own actions.

According to Valentine, Cuthbertson had been offered a plea deal including a $100 fine and a deferred six-month sentence but he declined and instead asked for a trial by jury.

If convicted, he faces up to one year in the Flathead County Detention Center and a fine of up to $1,000.

Reporter Jesse Davis may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at jdavis@dailyinterlake.com.