Missoula Crime Report: Lots of Violent Crimes and Meth Cases This Week
Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 15 new felony complaints this week, which is three more than last week and right around the weekly average. According to County Attorney Matt Jennings, two were endangerment crimes.
“Both of those involved driving activity,” Jennings said. “I mentioned this periodically, but we get a lot of drivers just completely driving the wrong way down highways. This week it was down Highway 93 N coming from Lake County. They went about 14 miles completely in the wrong lane. We had lots of callers, and it was really scary, but luckily, nobody got hurt.”
Read More: Wrong-Way Driver Arrested On US 93N In Montana
Jennings said there were nine violent crimes this week, which is more than normal.
“Four of those were family violence or strangulation,” Jennings said. “Sadly, most violent crime that we see is related to people who know each other and are often in the same household. We did have four instances of non-family violence, and some of these were really disappointing. We had a road rage incident resulting in someone pulling a gun on somebody. People certainly have a right to defend themselves if they're being attacked, but you do not have a right to point a gun in someone's face just because you're annoyed by their driving behavior. We get a surprising number of those.”
Read More: Missoula Road Rage: Impaired Driver Threatens Couple With a Gun
Jennings also mentioned that a lot of the violent crimes that they deal with are related to substance abuse.
“I think pretty much everybody this week was under the influence of something,” Jennings said. “It does seem like we've seen a trend of a lot more meth back in our community. We understand people struggle with addiction issues, and that there are a lot of ways to deal with that. We give them sympathy and focus on rehabilitation when they're not hurting someone else. But if we start watching that dangerous behavior cross the line and impact the community, we're going to deal with it in different ways.”
Jennings said there was a rape case this week that was very violent. He said they don’t see those cases a lot, but when they do, they take them extremely seriously and put all of their resources towards it.
The Missoula County Attorney’s Office provides a weekly crime report every Friday morning at 9:00 on Talk Back.