Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky declared winners before the deception was discovered. DR
Two Americans, at the heart of a scandal in the world of competitive fishing for having weighted their catches, pleaded guilty in court. They risk between three and six months in prison.
The small world of competition fishing in Ohio and more specifically around the Cuyahoga, a river located south of Cleveland, was in turmoil this week. Jacob Runyan and his teammate Chase Cominsky, who caused the scandal last October, faced state court charges last Monday.
Caught red-handed, these two competitive anglers pleaded guilty to cheating and illegal possession of wild animals during a tournament, the Lake Erie Walleye Trail. The prosecutor has recommended six months probation, but the Cuyahoga County judge could sentence the pair to up to a year in prison. The defendants could lose the right to fish for three years in addition to the confiscation of their boat worth 100,000 dollars.
At the end of October 2022, Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky thought they had won the tournament they had entered with magnificent catches. At the end of the day, a reward of nearly 29,000 dollars. But the weighing, suspicious, led to the discovery of cheating. Jason Fischer, tournament director, was initially surprised by the announced weight of the walleye, large perch native to North America and a relative of the European zander. At a glance, the specimens taken out of the water must have weighed about four pounds (or about 1.8 kg) except that these displayed almost twice as much on the scale.
At the weigh-in the trickery revealed
«I thought it was impossible and I also heard the spectators grumbling. They said something was wrong “, commented to CNN Jason Fischer who detected the trickery fairly quickly. “I physically touched the fish and could feel hard objects inside.Indeed, before going to the weigh-in, the two cheaters had managed to slip lead balls, each the size of a ping-pong ball, inside the fish. Noting the fraud, the spectators immediately cried foul and insulted the two scammers who escaped the lynching of an angry mob but not the prosecution of the local justice which will deliver its verdict in May.
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