Former Indiana Commission Employee Blows The Whistle On What He Says Was Lax Enforcement

"What we do when a horse dies is we ask for three months of vet records,” said Linkmeyer. “We want to see, was there anything leading up to the horse's death that could have caused it to die? Or if there has been a couple of deaths, is there anything that could link them?"

Linkmeyer said he thought the case of Mitch McGuire N, who he said died from a broken hind leg, was unusual from the start.

"Standardbreds just don't break their back legs,” he said. “Neither do Thoroughbreds, really. Very, very seldom."

One of the documents Linkmeyer got was a record from veterinarian Dr. Joe Baliga.

Baliga saw his license to practice on racetrack grounds summarily suspended in 2016. According to court records, he was authorized to give furosemide to a horse at Hoosier Park on Sept. 30, 2016, while accompanied by a security officer. Then (as now) Indiana regulations permit private veterinarians to give race-day furosemide if they do so under the supervision of an association employee, who must observe the veterinarian drawing the substance into the syringe. In 2016, the security officer assigned to Baliga that day later reported he had seen Baliga draw an additional substance into the syringe before injecting a horse – this, according to court documents in an eventual civil case – an accusation which Baliga denies. (The substance was never identified and subsequent tests on the horse showed no banned substances.) Baliga was handed a five-year suspension, a permanent ban from giving furosemide on racetrack property, and a $20,000 fine.

The administrative complaint against Baliga for the alleged issue with a race-day injection was withdrawn in June 2020, four years after the incident allegedly took place. A few months later, Baliga applied for a new commission license. According to court documents, he received no response on the application and reapplied in 2021. This time, Baliga’s legal team said, Indiana Horse Racing Commission executive director Deena Pitman approved his application but didn’t inform him of her approval, and it’s unclear when (if ever) he would have been back on commission-sanctioned grounds in 2021. Baliga took the commission and individual staff members to civil court, claiming (among other charges) they were denying his ability to make a living and were holding a grudge. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana found in the commission’s favor, as did the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued an opinion on the case in February 2024.

The dispute only impacted Baliga’s license to practice on horses at racing commission-sanctioned grounds; his state-issued license to practice veterinary medicine generally remains active.

According to the records on Mitch Maguire N, Baliga had been treating the 8-year-old gelding with some regularity, although the location of the horse isn’t listed on the treatment records. The records provided to Paulick Report by Linkmeyer show Mitch Maguire N had had both front feet blocked on Sept. 9, 2021, the day before he won a $20,000 claiming race at Hoosier Park. On Sept. 23, the record shows him receiving “Estrone Prep” via an intramuscular injection and “Normosol R and Vitamins” via intravenous injection – the same day he would compete in another race at Hoosier.

Normosol is a type of sterile electrolyte solution commonly given as an IV. Estrone is a form of estrogen which, according to Wedgewood Pharmacy, is commonly given as a preventative for exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage (EIPH), the theory being that it may accelerate clot formulation (though there is no known scientific evidence to back up that idea). Wedgewood’s consumer education-facing site also indicates that estrone can have “mild anabolic” properties.

The veterinary records don’t indicate what substance was used for the diagnostic block of Mitch Maguire N’s front feet, but it’s common for short-acting local anesthetics to be used by veterinarians as they try to isolate the location of a lameness. If a practitioner isn’t sure which limb or structure is causing discomfort, they can numb targeted areas until they see a change in the horse’s movement. Indiana medication regulations for harness racing give threshold levels by therapeutic substance, and without a notation about which drug was used for the block, it’s hard to say whether the medication itself may have run afoul of commission regulations. The exact timing of the block in relation to the next day’s post time however, could have been cause for regulatory concern.

Indiana administrative code prohibits injection of a horse with any substance other than furosemide within 24 hours of scheduled post time. 71 IAC 8-1 specifies that “the prohibitions in this section include, but are not limited to, injection or jugging of vitamins, electrolyte solutions and amino acid solutions.” The code also prohibits practicing veterinarians and their assistants from having any contact with entered horses within 24 hours of race time, other than for a furosemide administration.

Linkmeyer says the irregularities on Mitch Maguire N’s veterinary records prompted him to request more records from Baliga on other Dillon trainees. He sent The Paulick Report records of three other horses – Past Due, Parklane Terror, and Straight Up Cool – whose records also show injected race-day treatments provided by Baliga between Aug. 15 and Oct. 15, 2021.

According to the treatment records provided by Linkmeyer, Past Due had Normosol and vitamins given intravenously on Sept. 4, the same date he raced at Hoosier Park; Parklane Terror is shown as having received Estrone Prep intramuscularly on Sept. 23, a date that he also raced; and Straight Up Cool has a line item for “inject coffin joints HA” on Oct. 1, the same day he was third in a race at Hoosier Park. HA is a common abbreviation for hyaluronic acid, a substance naturally found in joints that keeps them lubricated and moving freely. It’s often given to horses as an oral supplement but may also be injected into joints.

An email and a voice message to Baliga to inquire about the location and dates of the treatments shown on the records were not returned.

When reached by the Paulick Report, Dillon cast doubt on the validity of the records.

“By order of the Indiana racing commission in 2021, every horse I had racing at Hoosier Park had to be on the grounds by 8 p.m. the night before,” said Dillon, who also claimed Baliga wasn’t permitted on Hoosier grounds at that time.

“It’s physically impossible for him to have given the horses injections on race day … so whatever you have there is false.”

A letter sent by the Ohio State Racing Commission to Dillon in 2021 acknowledges that she had conditions on her licensure in Indiana in 2019 and 2020, but does not outline what those conditions were.A question to the Indiana Horse Racing Commission asking what, if any, conditions Dillon had on her license in 2021 went unanswered at press time.

But regardless of any such requirements by the Indiana commission, it seems that in at least one case, one of Dillon’s horses arrived at Hoosier just a few hours before post time. Linkmeyer also produced a copy of a horse sign-in sheet from Hoosier Park dated Sept. 23, 2021, which shows a check-in for Mitch Maguire N at 2:23 p.m. that day – the same day he won a $20,000 claimer, and the same day, according to documents, he’s listed as receiving injections from Baliga.

Linkmeyer said he brought these veterinary records to the attention of Deena Pitman, executive director of the Indiana Horse Racing Commission, on multiple occasions, asking when the body would issue a complaint against Dillon. He said she told him she would think about it.

"When we received those reports, I took them to Director Pitman," he said. "Her thing was 'I want to noodle on it.' That's her famous saying. So I went back to her again a month later. She still didn't want to do anything with it. I went back to her a couple months later and she still didn't want to do anything with it."

Linkmeyer claims that in cases that may result in suspensions, Pitman would require stewards to share with her their plans on suspension lengths, and instruct them on what she thought was appropriate. He also says that in cases like this, where a commission employee and not a steward uncovered a potential violation, all parties needed Pitman's permission for the stewards to begin disciplinary proceedings.

According to Indiana rules, commission stewards may not suspend a licensee if 180 days have passed since the date of the violation, so Linkmeyer says at some point, the stewards' hands were tied. He says the commission isn't bound by those limits and can issue an administrative complaint at any time.

"I brought it to her inside of the 180 days and tried to find out, what do you want me to do, do you want me to have the investigators write this up and give it to the judges?" he said.

At the time of his departure in January of this year, no complaint had been filed against Dillon related to these records.

Pitman and the legal team for the Indiana Horse Racing Commission did not respond to multiple email and phone requests for comment on the medical records.

Ultimately, Dillon was sanctioned by the commission for race-day drug administration, but that charge stemmed from a different situation entirely. In April 2022, she was summarily suspended after the commission said she failed to supervise a groom who performed race day administration of a substance to horses she trained at Hoosier on Dec. 2, 2021. In October 2022, Dillon made a deal with the commission to release the commission and its staff from legal liability in exchange for a 60-day suspension, which was judged to be already served.

It wasn’t the first run-in she’d had with a commission. Only when he began digging into the Mitch Maguire N case did Linkmeyer realize Dillon had voluntarily surrendered her owner and trainer licenses in Pennsylvania in June 2018 after she’d been charged the previous year with refusal to produce records in a commission investigation the previous year. When she applied for an owner/trainer license in Ohio in 2021, the Ohio State Racing Commission denied her, pointing out that while she’d admitted to the charge in 2017 and had her license status restored after complying with the commission’s subpoena, she neglected to mention that she’d surrendered her license the following summer.

Many states – including Indiana – create reciprocity for license denials by stating an applicant is ineligible for a license if they’ve been rejected elsewhere.

And, Linkmeyer said, there was something else about the veterinary records that troubled him. On three of them – the records for Past Due, Parklane Terror, and Straight Up Cool – the name Dean Eckley appears at the top.

Eckley is Dillon’s husband, and is currently licensed as a trainer in Pennsylvania. He is not racing in Indiana or Ohio, the latter of which rejected a license application from him in 2021 due to a 2010 charge against him in New York for abusing a racehorse. Eckley took the Ohio commission to civil court over the rejection but a county court sided with the commission, and an Ohio appeals court affirmed the decision in 2023.

None of the three horses have Eckley listed as their owner in USTA records during the dates listed on the veterinary records. False reporting of ownership, like false representation of training, is also a violation of Indiana’s rules.

For an investigator like Linkmeyer, himself a former police officer, the records were a gold mine of problems. And it still bothers him that he couldn’t act on what he thinks he uncovered.

"I even brought it up to [Pitman] in December [2023] that I thought we should still be going after Britney Dillon on those violations,” he said. “Logically, I just can't comprehend that."