Deer hunt horror movie
Incident with neighbor leads girl to new ‘family’
For Jessikah Franks of Bismarck, the second day of the 2017 youth deer hunting season was like being in a horror movie.
Hunting with her mother Stacey Strother on 50 acres of leased land, Franks, then 14, shot her first deer in the last hour of daylight on Nov. 4, 2017. Unable to find the doe, they planned to resume their search at first light the following day.
On Nov. 5, in the dark, Franks and Strother encountered a mutilated deer carcass in front of their hunting blind. The entrails and organs were in a pile, but the meat had been removed.
“At first I thought coyotes did it,” Strother said. “I was afraid they might still be around, so I told Jessikah to hurry up and get in the stand.”
Franks entered the blind alone. In her chair was a five-page, handwritten note. It said, “Thanx for the meat, you non-hunting sissy’s !!!!!!! I called AG+FC. They said “ROAD KILL” Let me know when you shoot a buck. There was more.
“Do you have (male genitalia) ?????? Or are you just stupid? I know how to track a wounded deer……do you ???? Call me anytime !!!!!!!! ”
The letter was signed by a neighbor and included a telephone number.
“I was really just in shock. I didn’t know what to think,” Franks said. “I just thought it was a bad person. It broke my heart.”
“My husband wanted to take it into his own hands,” Strother said. She convinced him to let the authorities handle it, but not before she submitted it to the court of public opinion. Strother posted the entire note on her Facebook page, where it went viral.
A great many people from all over the United States called that number. So many, in fact, that the phone number was soon deactivated.
According to the Game and Fish Commission’s incident report, the neighbor got permission from the Game and Fish Commission to keep the deer as a road kill.
Kevin Webb, an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission wildlife officer in Hot Spring County, cited the neighbor for littering, to which he pleaded guilty in Malvern District Court. He received six violation points against his hunting and fishing privileges.
Chuck Gray and his son Joshua Gray, of Walnut Ridge, run a popular Facebook site called “Grays Arkansas Hunting and Outdoors.” They take pride in its family ethic, which they strictly enforce.
“We wanted to create a page for adult hunters and youth hunters and for the ladies that hunt,” Chuck Gray said. “There are a lot of people that are Christians. We have a zero tolerance policy against profanity. We do not tolerate anyone bashing other people or bashing [the] Game and Fish [Commission].”
The Franks incident did not sit well with the Grays. They posted the note on their Facebook page minus the name and phone number. Chuck Gray said that the antagonist responded to posts on the site and complained that he was being bullied.
“That was a grown man
that did that,” Chuck Gray said. “It scarred that child. My granddaughter is 14. She loves to hunt, but she’s always had great experiences. This left a bad mark on that child.”
The Grays decided to turn the affair into something positive for Franks and to demonstrate that the Arkansas hunting and fishing community is better than Franks’ antagonist.
“One of our members got ahold of me and said, ‘What if we took her [Franks] on a deer hunt?’ ” Joshua Gray said.
Gray, who was disabled by injuries he suffered in the Iraq War, is a member of American Veteran Outdoors, which was co-founded by David Cagle of Cabot. They and other AVO members treated Franks to a deer hunt near near Heber Springs, where she officially killed and tagged her first deer.
Then, AVO took Franks deer hunting in Tennessee, where she bagged three more does.
Before those hunts, AVO members took Franks on a shopping spree to get a new hunting wardrobe.
Brainstorming, Gray asked, “What if we take it a step further? What if we go up a step and do an elk hunt?’”
Gray established a GoFundMe account to pay for an elk hunt at Elk Hollow Ranch near Pocahontas. The account raised nearly $3,000. It paid for the hunt and also a new Mossberg .243-caliber bolt-action rifle. Lynn Haskins, owner of H2 Graphics, put a custom camouflage pattern on the rifle that included Franks’ name.
“That’s over $200 for a [camo] dip like that,” Joshua Gray said.
Chris Henson of Clinton drove to the Strother’s home to give Jessikah his prized Damascus steel hunting knife and a $100 Walmart gift card to buy gas for her deer hunts, Strother said. He also gave her a game camera and some mineral blocks.
“We had to make people stop giving money,” Chuck Gray said. “We reached our goal, and we didn’t need to
raise any more money.”
The elk hunt took place in January. Franks killed a young bull with a 3x4 point rack. It weighed 550 pounds.
“When she took that elk, everybody cheered and gave her pats on the back,” Joshua Gray said. “It was amazing.”
Processing fees were not included in the hunt price, so the Grays briefly reactivated the GoFundMe account and raised that amount, too.
Afterwards, Justin Nottingham of Bono, owner of Nottingham Taxidermy, mounted Franks’ elk for free. The value of the mount, Nottingham said, was about $1,000.
Since then, AVO has added Franks to its pro staff. In that capacity, she can take disabled veterans on deer hunts.
Franks’ hunts spawned
another new idea, Joshua Gray said. In 2019, he said, he wants to treat one youth and one veteran member of the Grays Arkansas Hunting and Outdoors page to a deer hunt.
“I really want to help people,” Joshua Gray said. “I got blown out of a Humvee in 2008. I can still walk, and I can still get in and out of a blind and shoot, but a lot of veterans don’t have that.”
As for Jessikah Franks, what started out as a horror movie has a happy ending. Not only did she get some new gear and some hunts, she also gained a new family.
“For a split moment she thought hunters were bad, but within 30 minutes people were contacting us,” Strother said. “They’re all family to us now. She has 20,000 brothers.”