Well, in this day in age, I use my phone for navigation in the mountains, marking locations I want to get back to, etc. I also occasionally use it for weather stuff. More important than anything, for safety in case there is an emergency and I can call home and at the least, be locatable by emergency services. Saying people are addicted to cell phones because they take them with them and use them for hunting purposes or heaven forbid an emergency situation is a bit ignorant. If people had this technology 30 years ago, I guarantee it would be used then too. My point is that him leaving his phone, combined with all the other evidence made it pretty clear he was trying to hide something.
No guy in his 20's leaves his house for an all-day sit and doesn't bring his phone. The biggest question mark for me is his timeline of events and the corresponding photos of the animal. He claimed to have shot it on an evening hunt and returned the next morning to recover it. Why are all of the trophy photos at night? Am I to believe that a legally harvested potential state record animal was recovered in broad daylight, and there are no "in the field" photos of it? They took it out of the woods without any photos, then decided to come back after dark, drag the animal into the woods, and then take photos?
Yes, then the short video of him picking the head of the deer up, it was freshly killed and sure wasn't stiff like a deer that laid over night would be.
Hell I still get excited when a 100 inch buck is walking toward me! I don't need to poach to kill a "huge" buck.
This is the thing I don't get about guys like this. I don't mean to come off sounding like I"m encouraging poaching, but if you think you're going to get away with killing a world class buck like that illegally, and not have everyone in the whitetail world scrutinizing over every aspect of it to make sure its legit, you're sadly mistaken. If you're going to poach, shoot a smaller buck for gawds sakes... lol.
Knew it all along. Glad to see it was all brought to light. He'll plead those charges down unfortunately, maybe he'll get more than a slap on the wrist.
