A federal judge ordered Austin Elrod to pay $60,000, serve a year of probation and surrender his hunting license for five years after he guided illegal deer hunts in Fayette County without the required license. The 30-year-old Somerville man was sentenced on Oct. 21, 2026.
The punishment puts a hard number on a case that moved through two hunting seasons and ended with seven deer illegally harvested. Prosecutors said the hunts were advertised on Facebook, and the penalties now attach to an operation that crossed state lines and drew federal attention because the deer were taken from a regulated area.
Thomas Boswell, a 39-year-old from Barnesville, Georgia, was one of Elrod’s out-of-state clients and handled five of the seven deer. He hunted without a Tennessee hunting license, was sentenced in July 2026 and was ordered to pay $15,000 in fines and $11,000 in restitution, with his hunting privileges suspended for 18 months. That makes his punishment smaller than Elrod’s, even though Boswell was responsible for most of the illegal harvest.
Both men were charged with violating the Lacey Act, and three agencies investigated the case. Fayette County is a Chronic Wasting Disease Zone under the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, which limits what deer carcass parts can be moved out of the CWD Management Zone. In this case, the deer were transported back to Georgia, which placed the hunts squarely inside the restrictions that were meant to keep the disease from spreading.
Elrod’s sentence closes the federal case against the guide, but it also leaves a larger question hanging over the Facebook-advertised hunts: how they went on across two seasons and still ended only after seven deer had already been taken.
