Broward School District Investigates Teacher Dubbed ‘Top Dog Fighter’

Close to a year after federal agents raided the home of “one of the top dogfighters in South Florida” and found dozens of wounded pit bulls locked in cages in his backyard, the Broward County man has been sentenced to two years of probation.

On Tuesday, months after 54-year-old Alexander Benefield pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing, training, and receiving dogs for use in an animal fighting venture as part of a plea deal with prosecutors, he appeared before a judge for sentencing and was ultimately spared prison time. As part of his probation, he is barred from owning dogs.

However, despite the gruesome allegations and criminal charges against Benefield, he remains employed as a teacher by the local school district.

Benefield, who was first hired by the Broward County School District in 2017, is currently an automotive service technology teacher at Boyd H. Anderson High School in Lauderdale Lakes, a school district spokesperson tells New Times.

Benefield was a teacher assistant from 2017 until becoming a teacher in May 2024. During that time, he also served as the school’s head football coach and led a youth football league in Deerfield Beach known as the Deerfield Packer Rattlers.

In an emailed statement, a school district spokesperson said Benefield’s employment status is “under review.”

“Mr. Benefield is valued at the school as an automotive instructor, and he is devoted to inspiring his students to succeed,” Benefield’s attorney, Richard Francis Della Frella, tells New Times.

Prosecutors say that while Benefield worked as a teacher at Boyd H. Anderson High School, he simultaneously rose to the top of Broward’s dogfighting scene, where he was known as “one of the top dog fighting trainers and dog fighters in South Florida.”

Back in 2023, an FBI source and former dog fighter began secretly recording conversations with Benefield — including one in which Benefield revealed a video of one of his dogs killing and eating another one in his backyard.

“That’s the fifth one he killed,” Benefield told the source. “He done killed five.”

As Benefield recently awaited his sentencing, prosecutors filed a complaint requesting that he officially forfeit all of the dogs to the U.S. government.

In January, FBI agents raided Benefield’s Deerfield Beach home and found 36 pit bulls locked in cages in his backyard, many of them scarred and injured. The dogs have been in the care of the U.S. Marshals Service since then. A month after the raid, while still in U.S. Marshal custody, a pregnant dog gave birth to 12 puppies.

The application of civil forfeiture of animals is rare. While dogs seized in fighting-operation raids were once euthanized because they couldn’t be adopted until a criminal case wrapped, the U.S. government in the past decade has begun using civil forfeiture laws to take ownership of the animals with the goal of getting them adopted instead.