CLINTON » Police are searching for a suspect in an attack that crippled a 2-year-old quarter horse filly in Clinton just months before it was begin to racing.

The injury was so severe that Nightmare Illusion will never compete, said her owner, Giovanni Ortiz. The horse was scheduled to begin racing in May, the Davis High School senior said.

The attack occurred between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at a stable that he and his father rent for 12 of their horses, Ortiz said. "She was standing right here, shaking, and she couldn't walk," the 17-year-old Ortiz said as he pointed to the stall where the attack occurred.

Police said the motive is unclear, but whoever assaulted the horse deliberately injured the horse's right front leg so she could not run again. The attack left the horse with a swollen knee and torn tendons in her right hoof.

"This is the most most egregious cruelty case I've seen with a horse," Tracy Gross, Davis County sheriff's animal cruelty investigator, told Ogden's Standard-Examiner. "This was deliberate and intentional. They didn't want her to run again."

Police confiscated a 4-foot-long garden tool that had a hook missing; the remaining hook on it was bloody. It has been sent to a crime lab for analysis. "The mystery is why her, and also the time of day," Clinton police Detective Matt Fawbush said.

It seems someone knew when people would be at the stable, he added. "We do have persons of interest but no suspects," Fawbush said.

Ortiz said his father paid $3,000 for the quarter horse when she was 6 months old. Nightmare Illusion had been at the stable for only a week and was being prepared for a racing career.

The animal was fine when two men hired by the Ortizes came to feed the animals around 8:30 a.m.

"She's really gentle and calm," Ortiz said. "Some horses, you walk in their stall and they try to bite you. She's not like that at all ... I just want to find who did this."

Once her leg is healed, she will become a broodmare, he added.

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Information from: Standard-Examiner, http://www.standard.net