INDIANTOWN — For years, the owners of J&R Outfitters ran a hunting lodge featuring exotic game such as Asian water buffalo, Nilgai antelope and Pere David deer thinking they had all the required Martin County permits.

But several code violations were discovered at J&R Outfitters last fall after the opening of a shooting range that outraged nearby homeowners with incessant gunfire.

Now Bill Richey and Joe O’Bannon are aiming to keep their hunting lodge open by jumping through all the regulatory hoops that apply to their business at 7600 S.W. Fox Brown Road.

“We never dreamed that what we were doing was illegal and we never tried to get away with anything,” said Richey, a former state prosecutor. “We have been no secret in Martin County. We have been here for 20 years.” (more…)

Jeff and Kathleen Smith’s two sons were playing in the snow Sunday without a care in the world.
But things could have ended differently for the Smith family had fate not intervened before their flight to Canada last week.
“One of Paddon’s homework assignments was to complete a journal,” Jeff Smith said Sunday. “He drew a picture of a plane … and said ‘my plane crashed today. I wasn’t on it.’ ”
The Sewall’s Point couple and their sons Paddon, 7, and Tanner, 4, were supposed to be on Thursday’s doomed flight from Newark, N.J., to Buffalo, N.Y., but a series of events prevented the family from boarding the ill-fated plane.
The couple still have the family’s four boarding passes to Continental Flight 3407.
“It wasn’t something we did do, but rather, something that we didn’t do,” said Jeff Smith from his cottage in Canada’s Port Elgin, where the family was headed. (more…)