Rig Workers Accused of Poaching

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

January 20, 2012 | 4:10 PM

More from the drilling-relate crime blotter: seven gas rig workers accused of poaching appeared in a Wyoming County courtroom yesterday.
The Times-Tribune has more:

On Nov. 27, the conservation officers staked out a property along Stang Road in Washington Twp., according to an affidavit, and witnessed an antlered white-tailed deer being loaded onto a 2008 Silverado. The truck drove off but was stopped by Officers Rosa and Pierce. Five men were arrested: Timothy A. Barnett Jr., 26, of Imboden, Ark.; Kenneth Preston Aden, 28, and Jonathon Ervin Aden, 23, both of Oakdale, La.; James Christopher Lowe, 32, of Pitkin, La.; and Weldon James Thibodeaux, 35, of Pineville, La.
According to the affidavit, witnesses led the officers to an Ellsworth Hill Road residence in Auburn Twp., Susquehanna County, where additional deer carcasses were recovered. There, two more men – Robert Shaun Sauls, 31, and Steve Larry Ware, 58, both of Oakdale, La. – were implicated, arrested and charged.
At the time of their arrest on Nov. 27, all of the men worked for Elite Energy Services LLC, a company that was under contract to lay pipeline for Chief Oil & Gas.