It seems incredibly ignorant of the San Diego shelter to think anything more moral than this was going on. I have to wonder what sort of shelter other than a brand new one with a lot of funding is able to take in that amount of animals. I have to wonder why it's only feeder types of animals, how many rodent-only shelters exist? It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it more than 5 seconds. I imagine at 160% capacity in a no-kill shelter, they are pretty desperate for help and probably didn't want to look at the situation critically. But then why look into it further later? If the Arizona shelter that was given the shipment originally was a kill shelter, even being of less than good intentions, why didn't they just say the animals had been euthanized? It's probably quite paranoid, but in the back of my mind is the thought that something like this was intentional to stir up controversy about reptiles.
I think what bothers me the most about this story is that it sounds like the person that killed the animals was selling them to people at a reptile show, based on the messages about freezing them before the show. That adds a whole new layer of evil to it in my eyes. It disgusts me so much that people would turn such a sad situation into a deceitful money making scheme.