Bear hunting guide brought down after failing to rein in reckless ‘client’
By Katie Reeder • SMN Intern
When Chad Arnold pulled into War Paint Kennels during fall bear season in 2011, Jerry Parker pegged him as just another flat-lander willing to fork out big dough to bag a bear.
The bait battle: paw-lickin’ good
The hunting community and wildlife officers have been engaged in an ongoing tug-of-war over the practice of baiting bears to make them easier to hunt.
Going rogue: Undercover bear poaching sting uses dubious tactics to trap hunters
By Katie Reeder • SMN Intern
All Chad Crisp took with him was his Bible as he headed into Elkton Federal Correctional Institute in Ohio last week. For a rural mountain boy who’d never left home, 20 months of federal prison would be a long, hard road.
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• Cast of characters
“I felt that my heart would burst as I hugged him and told him I loved him and everything would be all right and that we would be back soon,” Linda Crisp, his mother, said. “For a mother, her son – no matter how old he is – is still in some ways a child in her eyes, and she wants to always protect him.”
Cast of characters
Davey Webb (alias Davey Williams): an agent with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who first started hunting with the Crisps in the fall of 2010.
Franklin officers return to work after deadly shooting
Two officers with the Franklin Police Department are back on duty while the N.C. State Bureau of Investigations continues to look into a deadly shooting involving the officers.
Four arrested for illegal fishing
Four men from Buncombe and Henderson counties are facing a slew of Class 3 misdemeanor charges after officers with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission caught them fishing Lake Waterville using gill nets.
Out of the headlines, but not out of the woods
The rioting in Baltimore has settled down and we haven’t heard much out of Ferguson, Missouri, recently. The uproar and incessant debate over what is happening in our inner cities — racism, poverty, violence, drugs, police brutality — has, for the moment, quieted down. But problems don’t go away just because they are left unspoken.
The festering wounds in those towns were on my mind as we settled down Sunday night to watch the award-winning movie “Selma.” The film is about a few weeks in Martin Luther King’s life as he organized and marched in Selma, Alabama. The marchers were specifically calling for an end to laws that kept blacks from voting, and despite the mortal dangers they faced — there were deaths in those few weeks among whites and blacks who supported the marchers — it worked. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act that same month.
When worlds collide: Vexed by loitering homeless, Frog Level merchants beg for help combatting soup kitchen’s overflow
Teri Siewert picked up a pink Hello Kitty alarm clock by the cord and dragged it out from under the bushes behind her classy art gallery on the outskirts of downtown Waynesville.
“You wouldn’t believe the stuff we find,” she said. “You’ll see wine bottles, you’ll see beer bottles, you’ll see discarded clothing.”
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• The soul of a soup kitchen
• Adding to the problem
Bust takes down gambling houses in east Haywood
A months-long undercover investigation led to a raid of three underground gambling parlors in Haywood County last week.
The private gambling houses were outfitted with video poker and keno machines. Officers seized 35 illegal gambling machines and $8,000 in cash during the raids, carried out simultaneously last Thursday.
Swain sheriff alarmed over false alarms
The Swain County Sheriff’s Office responds to its share of security alarms. Between January and the middle of November, the department has responded to 1,019 such calls — and rarely is there an actual need for its services.
“We may have one call like this, thinking back, where someone is actually in the house,” Swain Sheriff Curtis Cochran informed the Swain County Board of Commissioners recently.