Photos courtesy of Metro News
An anonymous tip led to a major discovery recently for West Virginia’s Natural Resources Police. Officer Andrew Lyons got a call regarding hunters acting suspiciously in the Green Sulphur Springs area of Summers County, located in the southeast corner of the state. After surveying the area Lyons decided to call for two additional officers. What they found was incredible.
The state’s buck firearms season started Nov. 23. The following day Lyons surveyed the area with Officers Isiah Tuck and Josh Lambert. According to the Metro News, they saw undescribed illegal activities underway. They went into the camp Nov. 25.
“There was no one at the camp, all of the subjects were back out hunting again,” Captain Woodrow Brogan of the Natural Resources Police told Metro News. “As they were looking around the camp for the individuals they stumbled on 18 deer laying in a pile.”
There, thrown carelessly together like pieces of split wood, were deer of various sizes. Six were bucks, two of them eight-pointers with spreads of 15 to 16 inches.
When the five men returned and the authorities began questioning them, they claimed their father in Pennsylvania was fond of venison; they were just trying to bring him some meat.
West Virginia only allows three deer to be taken per hunter during the firearms and overlapping antlerless deer seasons: two bucks and one doe.
Officials found 18 illegally taken deer, including six bucks, at a hunting camp in West Virgnia.
The number of deer was the least of the hunters sins. Not only had they killed over their limits, they had failed to tag any of the deer and did not have valid hunting licenses for themselves.
Only one of the five did have a license. He had already shot four deer.
Officials discovered the men had also been road hunting, with several loaded firearms being found in the suspects’ vehicles. The men were shooting deer in fields along the road during the day, then spotlighting at night in a three-mile radius of camp.
The Summers County magistrate ordered the men to pay more than $10,000 in fines. The deer were given away to elderly and needy families in the area. At least six families benefitted from the illegal deer meat — the Pennsylvania father not one of them.
The buck firearms season ended in Summers County Dec. 5.
“In more than 20 years, this is the worst case I’ve seen as far as that number of individuals in such a short period of time violate game laws to that degree,” said Brogan. “These subjects were actively hunting and planning on staying until the end of the week. Luckily, Officer Lyons, Lambert, and Tuck put a stop to that.”