Stafford To Settle Over Burial Buses

For a while now, I’ve had my eye on a particularly odd lawsuit filed against the Town of Stafford, and have been waiting for it to come to a conclusion. On Wednesday, April 8, 2025, the Board of Selectmen spoke about the case in an executive session and then, on the advice of the town lawyer, voted to let First Selectmen Bill Morrison negotiate a settlement with David Bacchiochi, owner of a property at 25 West Stafford Road. The amount is not to exceed $17,500.

None of that is the interesting part. 

From here on out, this story is going to get gross, weird, and upsetting for dog lovers.

According to court documents, Bacchiochi acquired this property in September of 2022. The lawsuit alleges that the Town of Stafford buried five school buses on the property on or before February 1981 and used them to bury dead dogs and other animal carcasses. It sounds to me like the kind of thing you'd see Alaskans do on TV shows to try and preserve moose meat or root vegetables, but I guess it beats digging separate holes.

This all came to light in 1981 when the Connecticut Humane Society began looking into the town's practice of shooting injured dogs believed to be beyond help (among others). For more details, you can read the Hartford Courant article entered into evidence in the case. My favorite part is when the then-selectman says that the town did not own a tranquilizer gun because if you were to miss and hit a person, it could kill them (apparently, real bullets did not warrant the same concern).

The complaint against the town also says it built a pound on the leased property known as “The Guerra Poultry Farm” in 1965. That, of course, is now 25 West Stafford Road. Records show that Bacchiochi bought the property for $170,000 in 2022 from Richard and Lucille Guerra. According to the complaint, the buses are rusting and filled with carcasses and “have not been removed by the Town, despite demand.”

In comparison to the complaint, the town's responses are dull legalese, saying things like "the defendant has insufficient knowledge with which to form a belief and therefore leaves the plaintiff to his proof" and "The Plaintiff's alleged losses and damages were caused by the conduct and/or negligence of third parties."

In August of 2024, Bacchiochi’s lawyers filed an “Offer of Compromise” which asked for $50,000. 

There are a lot of questions a casual observer might have. I'm fixated on why the buses were necessary. I used to volunteer to walk dogs at the Newtown Pound, which happened to be near the town's landfill. So, I walked dogs around the landfill, and near the end of the loop, off to one side was what I referred to as "the carcass hole." It was an open pit where town workers dumped roadkill. I'd usually turn around before I got there and go back the way I came because 1) It smelled and 2) Coyotes (Or was it a Mountain Lion? That's a story for another day) were in the habit of pulling carcasses back out of the hole and leaving them in the middle of the road. You haven't lived until you've tried to convince a Jack Russell Terrier with a bite history not to eat the half-frozen raccoon that blended seamlessly into the gray, dirty snow on the road. While this solution had some kinks that needed to be worked out, it seems much easier than burying whole buses.

One might also wonder how you can buy a property with such a big and obvious problem and then go back after an entity that never owned it for damages. I'm no legal scholar, but deciding who is responsible for the property contamination seems like a bit of a sticky wicket. So, don't get your hopes up if you have a bone to pick with the former owner (or tenant) of that house you just bought.

Still, I have some constructive advice: If you’re driving down West Stafford Road in the near future and see some rusty old buses being unearthed, I wouldn’t look too close if I were you.