
Illustration by TPWD
GAME WARDEN NOTES
Warden’s Not Buying That Story
It’s an unwise man who tries to put one over on a Texas game warden. Earlier this year, a game warden investigated a possible trespassing and deer poaching case in Leon County. The landowner reported hearing several shots near his property line and seeing a kid with a .22 rifle on his side of the fence. The landowner said he fired three shots into the air with his 9mm handgun to scare the trespasser off his property, and then watched the kid drive away on an ATV from a freshly killed white-tailed deer.
The warden searched the area and became suspicious when he could not locate fresh footprints, ATV tire tracks or spent rifle cartridges, nor any spent pistol cartridges from the 9mm. The warden found the white-tailed deer and determined that the direction the deer was lying did not match up with the landowner’s stories. Soon, the landowner admitted that he had made it all up and confessed to firing three shots from his riding lawn mower at the white-tailed deer, killing it. Charges and civil restitution against the landowner for taking deer out of season are pending.
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