A teenage competitor at a Las Vegas barrel race was arrested after police said three horses were stabbed multiple times during a weekend event at South Point Casino. The horses are expected to survive, but the attack knocked them out of the competition and sent police to the 9700 block of South Las Vegas Boulevard on Saturday.
That is the reason people are searching now: a live sporting event turned into a criminal case, and the suspect was not an outsider breaking in from the street. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police said the girl was one of the competitors at the 2026 National Barrel Horse Assn. Professional’s Choice Las Vegas Super Show, a weekend-long gathering that brought riders and horses to the casino complex for barrel racing, where horses run a path with sharp turns marked by barrels.
Detectives said they believed the teen, who had access to the barn, used a knife to stab the horses. Police later found her in a nearby hotel and took her into custody. She was booked on 12 counts of willful or malicious killing, maiming or torturing of an animal and three counts of felony malicious destruction of private property over $5,000. The case has the shape of a cruelty investigation, but also the feel of a breach inside a space that competitors thought was secure.
Two riders named the harm in starkly personal terms. Hailey Krahenbuhl wrote on Facebook that her horse, Sully, was one of the animals injured and said, “I have no words, he is stitched up and in recovery,” while Arielle Phillips said the teen had tried to talk to her the night before at the horse’s stall. Phillips also said someone later contacted her to say the horse was “quivering” and bleeding, then described the animal as an “innocent sweet horse” that had been “brutally tortured for no reason.”
The unanswered question is what drove a teenage competitor to the attack. What is clear is the reach of it: three horses were wounded, at least one rider’s weekend ended in stitches and recovery, and a competition built around speed and precision now carries a police case that could grow beyond the initial arrest.
