Montana, Washington poachers’ bragging on social media led to downfall

Bragging on social media was the downfall of six men who faced 34 charges in July for a variety of Musselshell County hunting violations documented by Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

“Social media definitely played a part in this one, a large part, and really broke it open,” Warden Jake Barzen told members of the Region 5 Citizens Advisory Committee at their Nov. 18 meeting in Billings. “But that’s also just kind of the era that we live in … and something that we benefit from.”

“People have to brag about the things that they kill, and that’s something that … narcotic investigators don’t always have, because people aren’t bragging about the drugs that they’re moving across the state, but they’re bragging about animals that they just have killed.”

Ringleader

Two of the six defendants were Montana residents, including Mitchell Ray Miller who lives in the Bull Mountains, southeast of Roundup.

“We had bit of the history with Mitch,” Barzen said.

“He was kind of the ringleader of this whole thing, and he would collect all these tags and kind of allocate them out and connect people with other tags,” he added.

According to a confidential informant, Miller and his friends would drink and drive while towing a flatbed trailer, shoot animals on private land and load them whole onto the trailer for gutting and processing back at his property to help avoid detection.

All of the activity took place in Hunting District 590, which extends south of the Musselshell River to the Crow Reservation and stretches between Lavina to the west and Custer to the east. Most of the poaching, Barzen said, occurred on one family’s ranch off the Melstone-Custer road.

Wildlife feeding

On the Facebook Messenger app, Barzen found more conversations between the main suspects talking about hunts and sharing pictures of the animals that were mounted by taxidermists, which he said was important for moving the case forward.

In one conversation, Miller even talked about hand-feeding a female deer. Feeding wildlife is illegal in Montana.

“He’d throw any leftover food – bread, bagels, donuts, muffins. Those deer were well-fed out there,” Barzen said.

Miller also sent a message talking about shutting a live deer in the shed behind his house, something Miller said he had done before.

Barzen’s investigation was also aided when he responded to a 911 call to Devon Hunter Rea’s residence in January. When he arrived, Miller was at the home. Body camera footage from that visit showed the numerous wildlife mounts in the house.

Rea was the other Montanan charged with wildlife crimes following the investigation, including killing a 6x6 bull elk for Miller, a spike bull and a 5x5 mule deer. The numbers refer to the amount of tines on each side of the animals’ antlers.

“Devon was also soliciting the purchase of resident licenses while he was still a nonresident,” Barzen said.

Coordinated crackdown

Following his initial investigations, Barzen began organizing logistics that included getting approval for an out-of-state trip to Washington’s Tri-Cities area. Search warrants were also coordinated with the neighboring state’s wildlife officials. Other work included writing affidavits for the use of all the confidential informants, developing the warrant teams, operational plans and contingency plans. One of the warrants was for Miller’s cellphone.

The result of all this planning was the creation of four warden teams, 10 law enforcement officers total, who struck simultaneously in Washington and Montana on May 17.

Three of the Washington men quickly confessed and also provided the name of the fourth man, Johnny Lopez, who up until then had eluded the investigation.

“Johnny was a guy who consistently came up in the Facebook information, but I could not figure out who this Johnny was,” Barzen said.

Charges filed

The rest of the spring was spent organizing all of the information the wardens had collected and extracting data from Miller’s cellphone, which the Billings Police Department helped with. The final case report was 81 pages long.

Eleven taxidermied animals were recovered, 34 charges were filed and almost $23,000 in fines were paid. All six men received at least a two-year revocation of their hunting, fishing and trapping privileges. They also all pleaded guilty in Roundup’s Justice Court to misdemeanor charges.

Brian Cebull, Region 5’s member of the Fish and Wildlife Commission, questioned why there were no felony charges filed against the men.

“There are pros and cons to charging felonies,” Barzen explained. “It puts it into a different court, from Justice Court to District Court. It also slows down the process.”

Another option would have been to pursue violations of federal law for interstate transportation of illegally killed game through the Lacey Act.

“However, the federal justice system is very, very busy, and so a case needs to be sexy enough, for lack of a better term, to really get the attention of the feds,” Barzen said.

In the end, he said it was a “strategic decision.”

Mounts will be sold

CAC member Doug Dreeszen, of Ballantine, said the punishment amounted to a hand slap for the men.

“They’ll be back,” he said. “You’ll be seeing those boys again.”

“We’ll be ready if they do,” Barzen said.

“The sad thing is, the hunters that are coming out in our area paying an outfitter 10,000 bucks a week,” said Bruce Holland, a Roundup CAC member. “We can go hunting for 2,000 bucks, pay the state and half the time we’ll get away with it.”

The taxidermy animal mounts will eventually be sold by FWP at an auction, along with other seized trophies collected by the agency in investigations across the state.