A teenager is facing a felony charge in Georgia for killing a turkey that was strutting on his family’s property this spring — a bird that his former high-school history teacher claims was her pet. The incident and ensuing legal action have sparked intense controversy and divisiveness in the small-town community of Waverly Hall. It has upended the life of the 17-year-old, whose first turkey, almost certainly a domestic bird, has been deemed physical evidence by the county.
The high-school senior, who was 16 when he shot the turkey, was suspended from his public high school, and he is now living with relatives out of state while awaiting trial in juvenile court, according to his parents, who spoke on the record with Outdoor Life. Because their son is a minor, Outdoor Life is keeping his name confidential.
“For a teenager like him, this whole thing has been devastating,” says Ryan Layman, who now worries if his son will ever want to hunt again. “We told him he was responsible for helping pay for this lawyer … and now he feels like his life revolves around work, instead of being outdoors and enjoying the next season. I know he was really looking forward to dove season last year, but he won’t be doing that 1757463606, just because of this whole situation.”
Crystal Hardy, the teacher who allegedly owned the turkey in question, has pressed charges along with her husband. Her husband told OL by phone that they would not comment on the case. The district attorney’s office has also refused to comment, along with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which says that all public records will remain sealed as they involve a minor. Georgia law permits a minor’s parents to release those records, however. The primary documents and other evidence the Laymans have provided to OL provide a factual — if patchy — account of what has transpired.
This includes official reports from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, along with text threads, social media posts, and several videos. Two of the video clips seem to provide the basis for the teacher’s overarching complaint: that the teen knowingly killed the turkey she claimed was her pet, then bragged about it online and at school. The parents shared these videos anyway, they say, in an effort to remain transparent. They don’t dispute that their son killed a turkey on their property. But, they say, he didn’t know it belonged to the Hardys when he shot it.
How the Hunt Played Out
The Laymans live on 11 acres in rural western Georgia. Their property is located two tracts from where the Hardys live, and a roughly 70-acre horse farm separates the two parcels.
This is Eastern wild turkey country, and the Layman family hunts a few days every spring. In 2025 they noticed hens on their property, and in past seasons, they’ve typically heard wild turkeys gobbling on the far side of a creek. But Ryan says they’ve always struggled to call those birds across their property line, and they’d never seen a tom there during hunting season — until one Sunday in late April.
The family had just returned home from church on April 28, and saw a gobbler through their living room window. A video recorded by one of Ryan’s other sons shows the turkey strutting in their backyard. The bird was 100 to 150 yards away from the house, according to Ryan, who says he was surprised and excited to see a fanning tom on their property.
Their oldest son had never hunted wild turkeys by himself or killed one before, and he was eager to grab his shotgun and get after the gobbler. His middle brother, 14, joined him. Their dad wished them both luck, but he remembers thinking, “That thing’s gonna be gone before they get anywhere close to it.” A couple minutes later, however, he heard a gunshot. When his eldest son carried the bird up to the house, he got his first close look at the turkey.
Ryan says the tom did not look like a typical Eastern. He says that, to him, it looked like a non-native turkey species. His first thoughts were that it had escaped from a game farm in the area. It had shorter spurs for a bird of its size, and white coloration on its body feathers and wing tips. Ryan says he didn’t want to disappoint his sons by sharing his suspicion that the bird may not be what they thought it to be. When his son told him he wanted to take his first turkey to a taxidermist, Ryan had reservations because of the bird’s unusual characteristics. His son, who was old enough to drive himself, went anyway.
Accusations, and a Felony Charge
Soon after the eldest son’s trip to the taxidermist, Ryan’s middle son posted hunt photos to social media. The post caught the attention of a few people at school — including one of Hardy’s students.
Hardy told school administrators during a June 4 tribunal hearing that on April 28, the day after the teen killed the tom in his backyard, one of her students showed her the now-deleted Instagram post. The post included photos of the Layman brothers smiling beside the dead turkey.
Hardy also said during that hearing that her pet turkey, a Narrangset named Gavin, had gone missing that previous afternoon, on the day the eldest Layman brother killed a turkey. A couple days after she saw the post, she confronted Ryan Layman in the family’s driveway.
Hardy accused Ryan’s eldest son, who wasn’t home at the time, of knowingly shooting her pet bird and bragging about it at school. A video recorded by one of the younger brothers from inside the Layman house shows the two adults talking in the driveway. At one point in the video, one of the boys says, “She just pulled up in our driveway ‘cause her turkey escaped, and we shot it.” According to Ryan, the two boys, aged 11 and 14, were referring to the rumors they’d heard at school.
On April 30, Corporal Calvin Gibson with the Georgia DNR knocked on the Laymans’ front door. Gibson had gotten a complaint from the Hardys that morning, and he asked to search the Laymans’ property. They allowed him to do so, and he found one shotgun shell and feathers where the bird had been shot. It was on the family’s property, where Gibson found no bait or any other evidence of wildlife violations. And given Hardy’s complaint, which referenced a domestic turkey and not a wild one, the DNR concluded it would not file any charges.
“I explained that the turkey was not protected and I did not have any illegal hunting charges to make. I told [the family] that other charges could be brought through the Harris County Sheriff’s office criminally or civilly,” Gibson wrote in an incident report dated April 30. “I contacted [the teacher] after I left the [family’s] property and informed her of the outcome. [The teacher] said she was going to file a report with the Sheriff’s office and animal control.”
On May 2, Sergeant Zach Hartley with the HCSO contacted Ryan Layman to request a visit with his eldest son the following Monday. Ryan was open to this at first, he says, but by Monday, when he learned that his son would likely be charged, he told the HCSO they wouldn’t be interviewed without a lawyer present.
Then, on May 6, Ryan received a follow-up call from Harris County Sheriff Mike Jolley. According to Ryan, the sheriff said he was sending deputies to the Harris County High School to arrest the teen unless his father brought him in voluntarily. Ryan picked up his son and after they arrived at the Sheriff’s Office, the boy was taken to the Harris County Jail for processing. He was charged with one felony count of aggravated cruelty to animals. (This is a step up from the misdemeanor charge, cruelty to animals. According to Georgia law, the difference is whether the individual acted with malice.)
An investigative supplemental report filed by Sgt. Hartley on May 5, after completing the Sheriff’s Office’s multi-day investigation, says that “based on the evidence in this case, a juvenile form 90 [an official document initiating the legal case] has been completed.” The supplemental report does not include any information about the evidence that prompted the felony charge.
The Day Before the Hunt
Harris County High School celebrated prom on Saturday, April 27, the day before the turkey was shot. The eldest Layman son had a date to the dance that evening — but first, he wanted to do some fishing. So, he texted his former teacher and neighbor, Crystal Hardy, to ask permission to fish her pond. Past texts between the two show that this wasn’t unusual, and that Hardy had given her former student permission to fish on occasion since at least 2024. (Ryan says he knew about this arrangement.) When the teen texted Hardy at 10:29 a.m. on prom day, asking if he and a buddy could drive over to fish, she replied “That’s fine with me” and gave him directions on where to park.
Video footage from the Hardy’s doorbell camera that afternoon shows the two friends parking a red pickup in the driveway that afternoon. As the two step out of the vehicle, a distant turkey is just visible at the right of the frame, and it can be heard gobbling.
The turkey keeps sounding off. In between gobbles, you can also hear hen yelps that seem to be coming from a mouth call. Close examination of the grainy footage shows the eldest Layman son raising one hand to his mouth. As the two boys walk off and out of the frame toward the pond, they walk right past the gobbling turkey. The bird doesn’t run or even shy away from them.
According to Ryan, Hardy has pointed to this clip as proof that his son knew the bird was there, and that he clearly knew it wasn’t a wild turkey. Hardy explained during her in-school testimony that, at that time, she’d owned the domesticated turkey for around three months. There were no identifying markers on the bird, such as a band on its leg, to indicate that it was a pet, according to her testimony.
These and the other aforementioned statements made by Hardy were given during a June 4 tribunal hearing at the high school, where administrators determined that the student’s ongoing presence there was disrupting the school environment. He had already been suspended, due to the school’s policy around felony charges. After the tribunal, administrators enrolled him in a home-school program pending his trial in juvenile court.
A Pending Trial
In the four months since the kid killed the turkey, his trial date has been pushed back multiple times — first from June 3 to July 29, then from July 29 to Sept. 23. The Laymans’ defense attorney told them Thursday that the September date is set to be rescheduled yet again.
At some point between the first trial delay and the second, Ryan explains, the Laymans received a plea deal from the district attorney. Ryan claims that DA Don Kelly offered to drop the case if their son would admit to knowingly killing his former teacher’s turkey, and pay her $150 as reimbursement for the bird. The parents, who were adamant about their son’s innocence, say they didn’t feel comfortable taking the deal. Instead, over the July 4 weekend, the Laymans made a Facebook post on Mrs. Layman’s account, calling attention to the felony charge brought against their son.
This post was picked up by the Sportsmen’s Party Facebook page, which called for justice for the young hunter, and the post quickly caught fire. By July 9, the Laymans were notified through an advising attorney that both the HCSO and the DA’s office wanted the posts taken down, and that the DA was taking the plea deal off the table. The Laymans say they haven’t felt comfortable in their own county since.
“We have a community here, and we’ve never had any kinds of problems with the law. But now, all of a sudden, we can’t let our kids go to the church, where the sheriff and his investigator have connections, without concerns,” Ryan says. “I think that because we went public with this story, they feel like we’re a threat to their regime.”
Ryan explains that the final straw for them was on Aug. 13, when another Georgia game warden, Corporal Eric Isom, knocked at their door. According to the DNR report, the HCSO tipped off the agency that the eldest Layman boy had also been in illegal possession of a whitetail fawn in June. Isom showed Mrs. Layman a series of videos that showed a fawn being held by a young white male. She could tell right away that it was not her eldest son in the video.
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“As I was talking with her, her son walked out … with the brief contact I had with [him], I could believe that the male in the video was not him, and [there was] enough doubt in my mind to believe the mother’s statement,” Isom wrote in his report.
On Aug. 17, the Laymans sent their son to North Carolina to live with his aunt in what they say is an effort to protect him from the ongoing controversy with county officials. Whether or not he could fully re-enroll at his old school in Georgia, according to statements in the June 4 tribunal hearing, largely depends on the outcome of his case. The high-school senior is currently enrolled in a North Carolina school, where his family says he will remain until they feel it’s safe for him to return home.
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