Man gouges out his neighbor’s eyes over loud rooster

It can certainly be annoying when you are suddenly woken from a deep slumber in the wee hours of the morning.

For many of us, it can then prove impossible to get back to sleep and we must face the demands of the day with less than our full complement of rest.

However, one crazed man in West Virginia appears to have taken the most horrific form of action against his early morning annoyance.

Richard Ellison is alleged to have gouged out the eyes of the elderly neighbor whose rooster was waking him up, before killing the man. Ellison is said to have killed the rooster first.

Benny Foutch, 72, and the rooster he lived with were killed Sunday in Lashmeet, West Virginia, MetroNews reported.

Ellison, 47, was charged with the murder and was being held on $200,000 bail in the Southern Regional Jail, the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office said.

“He went up there and killed the rooster first and then he killed the deceased. He gouged out his eyes,” Detective M.S. Horn said.

“He had a prosthetic leg and he had cancer but he had injuries to his eyes,” Horn added. “It looked like someone had gouged out his eyes. It was the only significant injuries we could observe.”

Emergency crews initially responded to a request for a mental evaluation, the criminal complaint said.

“When looking at the victim, the gouging out of his eyes appeared to be his cause of death,” the compliant said, but the body was being sent for autopsy.

Ellison’s girlfriend told investigators that “Richard had made some comments about the rooster belonging to Benny Foutch bothering him with the noises it made”, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported.

Ellison later told Detective Horn that “Lucifer” made him do it.

Lashmeet is a small community in western Mercer County, West Virginia, with a population of under 500. It lies along West Virginia Route 10 northwest of the city of Princeton.