MDWFP
It was a cold night in January of 2025 when Mississippi conservation officers noticed that the dark fields of Madison County held a light that simply did not belong.
Rather than the pale sweep of a truck turning around on a gravel road well after dark, what officers spotted that night was the hard, deliberate beam of a man who had already decided the rules no longer applied. When Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks officers and Madison County deputies finally closed in, they found 24-year-old William Langston Jr. of Brandon in the act of headlighting deer.
What they recovered that night — and what the months of investigation that followed would uncover — painted a portrait of something colder than simple lawbreaking.
As officers dug into the young man’s set up, they found that Langston was running serious equipment that included a pair of .300 Blackout rifles, one of them fitted with a thermal scope and suppressor, along with a suppressed .22. It quickly became obvious that this was not the impulsive work of a boy with a spotlight and a borrowed gun. This instead was the methodical harvest of a man who preferred the cover of darkness and the certainty of technology over the older, slower covenant between hunter and quarry.
The subsequent investigation stretched across Madison and Rankin counties and produced a grim ledger that included 21 counts of headlighting deer, 19 counts of hunting from a public roadway, unlawful possession of illegally taken white-tailed deer, exceeding the annual bag limit, and then, almost as an afterthought in the charging documents, one felony under the Mississippi Pet Protection Act.
One of the illegal kills that was not a cat | MDWFP
According to reports, in the middle of his illegal night work, Langston also set his sights on a domesticated cat that belonged to a nearby neighbor. Another odd detail in a case, that if nothing else, makes you tilt your head and wonder what else is broken in a man who will shine a light on a deer at midnight and then put a round through a neighbor’s animal just because it was there.
Thankfully, Langston found himself in court earlier this month where he pleaded guilty to the wildlife charges in both Madison and Rankin County. On the felony cat charge he was placed in a pretrial diversion program, while the two courts hammered him for a combined $77,244 in fines. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks also managed to strip him of his hunting, fishing, and trapping privileges for three years, although it’s anybody’s guess as to how well that is going to work out.
"Our officers are committed to protecting Mississippi's wildlife resources and holding violators accountable," said Lt. Colonel Chris Reed. “Poaching has no place in Mississippi, as it steals from every law-abiding sportsman in our state. We take these violations seriously and will continue to investigate and prosecute those who choose to break the law."
