Fishing Tournament Cheater Faces New Charges Of Poaching Deer

A fisherman convicted of cheating in a fishing tournament is now accused of illegally hunting deer in Pennsylvania.

Earlier this year, Chase Cominsky, 36, of Hermitage, Pennsylvania was pressed with felony charges of cheating and a misdemeanor count of illegal animal ownership after he was caught cheating in a tournament. The fisherman pleaded guilty in March to both charges and was sentenced to ten days in jail, fined, and had his fishing license suspended.

Cominsky and his fishing partner, Jacob Runyan, made headlines after they were found to have used weights to make their catches appear heavier during a September 2022 Walleye fishing tournament. The two men were frontrunners in the competition, making their way to “team of the year,” and stood to win more than $28,000.

“I just wanna apologize to everyone,” Cominsky said. “It’s a bad situation and it’s something I wish I could say it didn’t happen.”

 

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Read more about the fishing scandal.

New Charges

This past Monday, a Pennsylvania Game Warden assigned to Mercer County filed eight charges against Cominsky alleging that between 2013 and 2021 he harvested several white-tailed deer out of season and without a valid license.

After being tipped off that Cominsky had several mounted deer on the walls of his home that were believed to be illegally harvested out of the hunting season, authorities searched his home in April on account of the criminal complaint. They found three mounted trophy-class antlered deer heads labeled with his wife’s “kill tags,” to which his wife admitted she had never killed a deer and it was her husband who took the animals down.

Authorities later found out that Comonsky’s hunting license had previously been suspended from 2008 to 2021 for multiple game violations.

In the hunting case, Cominsky is charged with two counts of unlawful killing or taking of big game; three counts of unlawful taking or possession of game or wildlife; two counts of unlawful acts concerning licenses and one count of violation in tagging and reporting big game kills. He is scheduled to appear before a district magistrate on November 14 to answer these charges.