The Indiana Division of Pure Sources marked a somewhat unlucky milestone on Thursday, Nov. 10 when the Warren County Court docket issued 25-year-old turkey poacher and longtime scofflaw Hanson Pusey with the state’s first ever lifetime looking ban. Along with the lifetime ban, he was additionally delivered a house detention sentence, probation, and was charged alternative charges for the price of the investigation, in keeping with a press launch from IDNR. As you’ll be able to think about, the checklist of infractions the West Lafayette man dedicated to obtain this punishment is intensive.
Pusey’s looking privileges have been first suspended in March 2019 after racking up a number of fees for trespass, unlawful take of wildlife, and waterfowl looking violations in a November 2018 case. He stored chasing turkeys in Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania after the suspension. When the Indiana DNR acquired a tip in 2020 that Pusey was nonetheless poaching within the space, they surveilled his exercise and finally searched his house.
IDNR officers discovered 83 spent shells with the dates and areas of the turkeys Pusey had killed, relationship again to 2012. Fourteen of the shells have been dated inside three months of when Pusey acquired his first suspension in 2019, 4 of them in Indiana. Whereas proof of this magnitude is uncommon in a poaching investigation, it seemingly helped expedite the method for Pusey’s fees in Indiana and different states.
The punishments in every state are as follows:
In Pennsylvania, $4,125 in fines and an eight-year suspension of all looking licenses; in Connecticut, $324 in fines and an indefinite suspension of all looking licenses; in Massachusetts, $700 in fines and a full license suspension throughout probation; in Georgia, $2,335 in fines; in North Carolina, $278 in fines; and in Tennessee, $525 in fines.
Pusey was charged as soon as once more in February 2022 for persevering with to hunt with out permission and for stealing a path digicam SD card, triggering the lifetime ban. In line with state court docket information, Pusey has a historical past of felony mischief. He pled responsible to misdemeanor battery in 2015 after being charged with felony strangulation.
