Beau Arndt
A polite young man who loved to hunt and made friends everywhere he went.
It shouldn’t be so easy to sum up 18 years of life in a few simple words, but talk to enough people who knew Beau Arndt, and that’s the picture you’ll get. What’s harder for those who love him is realizing it’s time to sum up just 18 short years of life.
Arndt, who would have turned 19 today, was killed Saturday morning doing what he loved most, his family said — hunting with friends.
“No one in our family is interested in hunting,” said Chris Arndt, Beau’s mother. “He had to get it on his own.”
Arndt was 8 years old when he got a BB gun and camouflage clothing for his birthday.
“All the papers he wrote in college mentioned that birthday,” his mother said.
Arndt started hunting around his own property west of Americus. Originally, he started with a slingshot, his mother recalled. A bluejay was his first successful shot. Chris remembers her husband, Bob, telling her about it.
“I asked, ‘Was he upset?’” Chris recalled. “Bob said he got this grief-stricken look on his face when it fell to the ground. But when Annabelle, Seth and I told him what a great shot that was, he changed his mind.’”
Chris also recalled her eldest son’s first squirrel. He’d shot it on their property, then used a book to show him how to skin it and dress it.
From there, Beau Arndt reached out to other hunters in the tight-knit community of Americus.
“He could just strike up a conversation with anybody,” Chris Arndt said.
They taught him how to hunt, and he returned the favor as he got older, teaching his friends and other youth how to hunt.
And he tried to get his family to hunt. One year, Chris Arndt recalled, everyone in the family was going to help Beau get a turkey.
“He had me dressed up in camouflage,” she recalled, and they tromped across a field. Chris was making too much noise.
“He said, ‘Quiet, Mother, quiet.’”
This year, the teen took his first deer with a bow. He’d killed deer with a rifle, but had never tried bowhunting. He donated the deer meat to charity.
But hunting waterfowl was Beau Arndt’s favorite sport.
“Duck hunting and goose hunting were his very favorite,” his mother remembered, “which doesn’t make sense to me because it’s a whole lot of work.
“They haul decoys, 100 to 150 of them, set them up in the field, set up the blind and use calls. He loved that. He’d call in 100, 200, 300 in a flock of geese.”
And Chris Arndt knows about those decoys. When Beau was in high school, he broke his leg. The next day, he wanted to go hunting, crutches and all.
“He said, ‘Can you drive me out?’” Chris said. “So I did. That’s when I helped him get the decoys out.”
On Saturday morning, Beau Arndt was back in the field hunting geese. He’d moved back home Friday when the dorms closed at Emporia State University, where he’d completed his first semester. He hadn’t declared a major yet, but everything he did was planned to push him closer to his goal.
“He wanted to move to Canada and be a hunting guide,” Bob Arndt, Beau’s father said.
On Saturday, Beau Arndt was supposed to unpack. Everything he’d brought home from the dorm was piled on the family’s back porch.
“As soon as he got home, he was going to put all that stuff away,” his mother said.
But hunting came first. And he was headed out with two friends, Derek Jackson and Tom Glass, one of the hunting mentors in Beau’s life. Chris wasn’t worried, because safety had always been such a large part of hunting for her son.
He’d taken his first hunter safety class as an elementary student. His parents insisted he repeat the course later when he was older. And Chris Arndt laid down her own rules.
“I used to not allow him to hunt with other people because of safety,” she said.
Eventually, she said, when Beau was 16, she let him hunt with one other person with a shared gun.
“They’d tease me,” she said. “They’d say, ‘There are three of us and we only have one gun.’ I said, ‘You’re safe like that.’”
To those who know and understand safe hunting, Beau Arndt’s death seems even more senseless. He was hunting with two friends in a farm field. They’d put out their decoys and Arndt and Jackson got ready to call in the geese. Glass was a little ways away following prairie chickens.
That’s when a pickup truck drove by and slowed down. A rifle shot rang out. It hit Beau Arndt in the chest.
“Beau screamed,” Chris said. “Derek jumped up and ran to him. Tom jumped up and ran to him.”
Beau Arndt, just three days shy of his 19th birthday, was dead.
His hunting friends want it made clear that he wasn’t killed in a hunting accident.
It’s illegal to shoot at game from a vehicle; it’s illegal to shoot into land without the landowner’s permission; and it’s illegal to shoot at gamebirds with rifles. That spells poaching, not hunting, Randy Smith, an Americus hunter and friend of Beau’s, wrote on The Gazette’s Web site.
Beau’s family hopes the shooter is found. His father, Bob, hopes it doesn’t turn out to be a young kid whose life could be ruined. Chris said she carries no hate.
“There’s no way he can pay a price,” she said. “No time spent behind bars is the same because my son is gone.”
Today, Beau Arndt’s family is living what his mother calls her “worst nightmare.” His younger brother, Seth, and sister, Annabelle, have put together posters of Beau’s life for the funeral service. His parents have met with funeral directors and florists.
Through it all, they said, they’ve been bolstered by those whose lives Beau Arndt touched.
“I can’t tell you how much that means,” Chris said. “Between 10 and 30 people have been in the house; it’s been a continuous revolving door.”
And they’ve started walking that long series of “last times.”
Chris Arndt on Monday remembered her son as the kind of man who lit up a room with his infectious mood.
“When he’s happy,” she said, then stopped.
“When he was happy, the whole room was happy.”
He was polite, she said, something she heard time after time from other parents.
And he was particular.
“I always ironed his T-shirts and clothes for school.”
She paused.
“I did that for the last time,” she said, with tears in her voice, as she remembered picking out Beau’s clothes for his funeral.
And her son will get a final birthday present. On the morning he left for his last hunting trip, he’d bundled up to spend a day laying in a snowy field. He’d borrowed long underwear from his mother because his was still packed. And he tried to wheedle the new hunting boots he knew his parents had bought for his birthday.
“I said, ‘No, those are your birthday boots.’ I made him wait.”
Beau Arndt’s funeral is at 11 a.m. Thursday.
“He’s going to get to wear his new boots,” his mother said softly.
To all my loyal fans here is some more of what I promised you......More about me and my family.......Well so far this hunting season has been very slow, no ducks, no deer, no turkeys, there is still a month left so no fear, I just may come out on top yet. All I do is work and hunt, work and hunt, and work and hunt, I am very thankful for my understanding wife and kids......They all know they can join me at any time, but as of now most of them are unwilling.
For now we have decided to stay in our house in Eureka, we did not want to trade a big house with a small payment for a small house with big payment. I have always enjoyed living in and working on old houses and I think it is starting to rub off an Sharea. It may get messy sometimes and I may lose my enthusiasm for it right in the middle of a project, but we just might get this one finished before we move. So far we have finished one bathroom and two and a half bedrooms.......The upstairs is almost finished and then we will work our way down the stairs. It's always some kind of project with us.
