Jake B. Richesin, 50, a White/Caucasian male game warden with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, was fatally shot on November 3, 1945, near Omaha, Arkansas, while patrolling the rugged border country with Missouri to enforce hunting laws. Deer season in Arkansas was still ten days away, and he had taken up a watch for out-of-state hunters who might cross down from Missouri ahead of the legal opening. As he worked the area, a rifle round tore through both of his legs. Neighbors and fellow officers rushed him toward a hospital in Harrison, but he died on the way.
Investigators concluded the shooting occurred during illegal hunting activity and was a tragic hunting accident rather than a targeted attack. Contemporary and retrospective records do not name any offender, and no arrests were reported in connection with the gunfire that struck him. Memorial listings that document his death likewise identify no suspect, and subsequent local retrospectives preserve the same account of an accidental shooting in the line of duty.
Richesin’s death left behind a family and a small Ozarks community that remembered a warden who died doing the unglamorous work of watching fence lines and timber at dusk, checking for the flash of a rifle and the sound of a shot before the season opened. Public memorial pages, created long after 1945, reaffirm the date and place—Omaha, Arkansas, November 3—and keep his story within the roll of officers killed by gunfire while enforcing wildlife laws along the state line.
