Here are some of the headlines from this past week in the Missoulian. To read the full stories, click the link on each headline:
Wade Peterson's childhood home sat in the footprint of what's now Rosauers grocery store on Reserve Street, when apple orchards spotted the thoroughfare instead of box stores, traffic and parking lots.
"Missoula's certainly grown up since then," said Peterson, a lifelong resident. "I guess a lot's changed, even for me."
After several months of struggling with housing, Peterson now lives at the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space, or TSOS, along West Broadway Street with his 6-year-old dog Loki.
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He said he's been looking for work, but faced a setback last month when he failed the skills test for a job at St. Patrick Hospital, one of the last steps for employment. He's looking to rebuild his life and retake the test.
Alongside Peterson, roughly 35 to 45 people reside now at the TSOS, which organizers and public officials said has been one of the most successful homelessness services offered in Missoula.
As the city's Urban Camping Working Group considers policy changes to curb urban camping and address the future of the Johnson Street Shelter, creating another TSOS has emerged as a top solution, the Missoulian previously reported.
— Griffen Smith, griffen.smith@missoulian.com
It looks like Donald Trump Jr., the eldest child of former U.S. President Donald Trump, will be in Missoula on April 28 for a fundraiser called "Protecting Freedom."
The event, sponsored by the Montana Association of Conservatives to raise money for its Political Action Committee, will be held at the University of Montana's UC Ballroom.
A website for the event shows that U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke and Governor Greg Gianforte will also be "special guests."
Trump will be joined by conservative political consultant Alex Bruesewitz.
— David Erickson, david.erickson@missoulian.com
A Missoula woman was sentenced to over two years in federal prison for stealing U.S. Forest Service pickup trucks, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced on Wednesday.
Kasey N. Hugs, 39, pleaded guilty in December 2023 to theft of government property, court filings show. U.S. District Judge Dana L. Christensen sentenced her to two years and two months of time behind bars, followed by three years of supervised release.
On Dec. 26, 2020, a white Dodge Ram pickup and two large government cellphones were stolen from the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated.
Five days later, Hugs stole a 2017 Ford crew cab, valued at over $28,000, from the same building. Hugs drove the car to several businesses around Missoula in the following weeks.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
The Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana officially opened its new food distribution warehouse in Great Falls and launched a program that will provide low-income members with fresh food.
The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations is a federal program that provides United States Department of Agriculture foods to income-eligible people. For the Little Shell, this program will be administered by the state health department and operated locally by the tribe. To receive a monthly food box, tribal members must first submit an application to determine eligibility.
Established in 2008, the federal program now serves 276 tribes nationwide. The Little Shell Tribe only became eligible to partner with the program when it officially gained federal recognition status in 2019.
“Most tribes have had these kinds of federal services for a long time, but we don’t,” explained Molly Wendland, director of operations for the Little Shell.
— Nora Mabie, nora.mabie@missoulian.com
Claire Hibbs-Cheff’s oldest child is a senior at Ronan High School. When the family envisioned what it would be like to send their firstborn off to college, the image they conjured didn’t include the anxiety and powerlessness that have characterized their experience.
Her daughter has applied to 13 colleges, a mixture of in-state and out-of-state institutions. So far, she’s been accepted to all of them. Some of the private schools on the list have an annual price tag as high as $80,000 once all the costs are tallied. Hibbs-Cheff is a school librarian and her husband owns a small business. Where her daughter attends college will be largely guided by the financial aid she receives.
“It makes us very anxious,” Hibbs-Cheff said. “We planned visits to three different colleges, but we still aren’t sure we can afford them.”
This family is one of the millions nationwide impacted by the protracted chaos of this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), administered through the U.S. Department of Education. Students fill out a single questionnaire and submit it to the government to determine their eligibility for a slew of federal grants, scholarships and other financial aid programs.
— Carly Graf, carly.graf@missoulian.com
Arlee residents near a proposed gravel pit and asphalt plant next to Garden of One Thousand Buddhas are hoping a Lake County judge will overturn the state of Montana's approval of the operation.
The proposed 157-acre mine and plant are just northeast of Arlee, about 4,100 feet north of the Jocko River and 2,000 feet southeast of the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas.
On Wednesday, attorneys for nonprofit Friends of the Jocko and resident Jim Coefield argued in court that the Department of Environmental Quality's environmental assessment during the permitting process of the project's possible impacts on groundwater, wildlife and human health was woefully inadequate and fell far short of the agency's requirements under the Montana Environmental Policy Act. Attorneys for DEQ and Riverside Contracting, the company that hopes to mine gravel and produce asphalt, argued that the agency's analysis met the standards of MEPA and the Opencut Mining Act, the latter of which were greatly reduced by the Legislature in 2021.
— Joshua Murdock, joshua.murdock@missoulian.com
“Sustenance” has many meanings to Stephanie Frostad, a Missoula painter.
Her first solo exhibition at Radius Gallery includes various types of work that all come together under the title theme, made starting in 2023 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I became more interested in our sustenance both in terms of food and what we do to keep the abundance available and healthy for us, but also the things that sustain us spiritually, and among those things are our human relationships, a sense of belonging, reveling in the beauty of the place and nature, and our literature,” she said.
The show includes paintings of rural scenes and labor in the Western landscape, two series that depict women holding tools (in a wide sense of the word), and drawings that show how the sketches inform her paintings.
— Cory Walsh, cory.walsh@missoulian.com
A Missoula committee has started the process of changing how sidewalk repairs and replacements are paid for, ultimately voting to ask for a new policy during this summer's budget season that could alleviate the cost to homeowners.
Currently, most city-contracted sidewalk projects for existing neighborhoods are partially paid for by both the city and landowners.
Three councilors proposed a resolution Wednesday that would have the city pay for all new sidewalk projects, but questions remain over how the city could afford the bill.
"We do need to find a better way to pay for sidewalks, because my ward is not a wealthy ward and it is lacking in infrastructure," Ward 6 Councilor Kristen Jordan said. "We have lower socio-economic wards that can't walk through their neighborhoods."
— Griffen Smith, griffen.smith@missoulian.com
There's a large tourism conference happening in Missoula and the Summit Career Center is offering tuition-free classes.
— David Erickson, david.erickson@missoulian.com
Missoula's Northside pedestrian bridge could come back online by the end of July, city staff told council on Wednesday, but the project needs more money and a two-week extension to finish repairs.
The city Climate, Conservation and Parks Committee gave initial approval for an additional $183,474.60 for the project, which increased the total cost of construction to $2.9 million.
The total cost with engineering and other expenses is $3.5 million, Associate Director of Park Systems & Services David Selvage said. The council previously increased the construction budget by more than $289,000 in 2023.
The pedestrian bridge has been closed since October 2022 after engineers reported the towers had deteriorated and become structurally unstable. The structure, a rare pedestrian crossing for the Northside, was built in 1999.
— Griffen Smith, griffen.smith@missoulian.com
A Libby woman admitted on Tuesday to stealing items in packages while working as a mail carrier for the U.S. Post Office, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Haley R. Hickman, 24, pleaded guilty to theft of mail, a news release stated. The charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.
Hickman was working as a subcontractor for the post office out of Troy. In August of 2023, prosecutors allege the Troy postmaster got several complaints of packages arriving to customers with missing contents. Some of the missing items included Veteran Affairs medication, collector's coins and children's clothing, the news release stated.
Hickman was reportedly responsible for delivering each box, according to the release.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
America is at war with itself in the new film by Alex Garland (Ex Machina). "How to Have Sex," which follows three friends to Europe, has collected awards at films festivals.
— Charlotte Macorn, for the Missoulian
West Coast soul music at Monk's, Indigenous comedy night at the Zootown Arts Community Center, and a bluegrass musical drama at University of Montana are all on tap this week in the Garden City.
— Cory Walsh, cory.walsh@missoulian.com
In the wake of the pandemic, new theater and dance collectives emerged all around Missoula, performing shows at venues that didn’t really exist or were underused before COVID struck.
More are still showing up, with yet another making a public debut this weekend.
A new nonprofit, ZDK Arts, is producing Jason Robert Brown’s unconventional musical, “Songs for a New World,” on Friday and Saturday. Its homebase is the Show Tyme Performing Arts Center, located off West Broadway, in the former Sirius Construction and Development building.
“This is our first full-blown production in the space, and it's kind of our inaugural theatrical season,” said Alex Kowalchik, ZDK’s executive director.
He and his wife Christine own Show Tyme, a dance studio that’s around 10 years old. In 2021, they bought the building, with room for a stage, leading to the creation of ZDK, which will produce its own programs and work with other groups. For instance, MissCast Productions, an independent theater troupe that started in 2020, is staging a show there later this year by longtime local playwright Shaun Gant.
Kowalchik studied theater in college and worked on tours with the Missoula Children’s Theatre internationally and nationally as an actor-director, and met Christine here while working on a play.
This particular show spoke to him when they were purchasing the building, having their first child and starting a new company.
— Cory Walsh, cory.walsh@missoulian.com
BROWNING — With paper towels in one hand and a bottle of Windex in the other, Rhonda Grant-Connelly brought new attitude and purpose to the old Heritage Museum building on the main street in Browning.
Those who work with Grant-Connelly describe her as “fly.” Her voluminous brown hair cascades past her shoulders, bouncing as she walks. Clipped to her rhinestone purse is a small bottle of hand sanitizer — also covered in rhinestones. She wears purple-rimmed glasses and her long nails are painted bright pink.
The old Heritage Museum building, which was abandoned during the coronavirus pandemic, is the new home for the Grant-Connelly’s nonprofit, Blackfeet MMIP, an organization dedicated to combating the pervasive Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) crisis.
— Nora Mabie, nora.mabie@missoulian.com
William Walks Along, Northern Cheyenne tribal leader and fierce advocate for his people, has died. He was 64 years old.
Walks Along was a direct descendant of individuals who suffered at the Sand Creek Massacre and dedicated much of his life to preserving the historic site. On a November morning in 1864, U.S. soldiers opened fire on the lodges of 750 Arapaho and Cheyenne tribal members who were camped near Big Sandy Creek (in present day Colorado). It’s estimated that 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho citizens were killed.
In 1996, Walks Along testified before Congress, advocating for the Sand Creek Massacre Study Act. The act, which directed the Interior Secretary, National Park Service and tribes to determine the location of the massacre and evaluate whether the site could be properly managed, became law in 1998. In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a law establishing the Sand Creek Massacre national historic site; Walks Along attended the ceremony. For years, Walks Along participated in and supported the 173-mile Sand Creek Massacre healing run, which begins at the historic site and ends at the Colorado state capitol building — the same path the soldiers followed after the attack.
In a tribute to Walks Along, the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation released a statement saying Walks Along’s “influence will be woven into the legacy of the Sand Creek Massacre site long into the future.”
— Nora Mabie, nora.mabie@missoulian.com
Campus officials were alerted to a sexual assault this week, according to a University of Montana alert sent out on Tuesday.
A campus security authority reported the assault to the Clery Compliance Office, which triggered Tuesday’s alert. The incident occurred on Friday evening at a campus-owned residence.
There’s no current investigation, UM Director of Strategic Communication Dave Kuntz explained, which would only happen if the survivor chose to formally move forward with one with campus police or the UM Title IX office.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
The University of Montana settled with the Montana U.S. Attorney’s Office over an investigation into the Adams Center’s disability seating compliance, federal officials announced on Monday.
Terms of the settlement require UM to bolster wheelchair space in the Dahlberg Arena and reconfigure its seating to make it more accessible for people with disabilities, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The agreement comes after a 2019 complaint was made to federal authorities, which triggered an investigation from the Department of Justice.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
Gov. Greg Gianforte is seeking public comment on applicants to fill a judicial vacancy in Lake and Sanders counties after a long-serving judge resigned last month.
John A. Mercer, Polson attorney, is the only person to submit an application for an opening in the 20th Judicial District, according to a Tuesday news release from the governor’s office. The position opened up after former county judge Deborah Kim Christopher resigned in March.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
LOST TRAIL PASS — Here at the slopes of Lost Trail Pass south of Darby, about 50 costumed revelers on skis and snowboards took part in the yearly tradition of pond skimming to mark the final weekend of the in-bounds season.
The annual Skiesta party at Lost Trail Powder Mountain took place on Saturday, April 6, for the ski area's final weekend of the 2023-'24 season. The theme this year was "hippies and cowboys" and people showed up in everything from bell bottoms to cow costumes.
The weather wasn't as bad as the blizzard-like conditions last year and a crowd of several hundred gathered to dance and watch the competitors try to make it across the water without a spectacular crash. A solid 50% of pond skimmers were able to reach the far end, but the rest had to get helped out by Lost Trail ski patrollers with specially designed cross-shaped human retrieval tools. Almost everyone came out of the water with a huge grin after they got over the shock of the cold.
— David Erickson, david.erickson@missoulian.com
The word was “semaphore,” and sixth grader Cheyenne Wang had spent dozens of hours preparing for this moment, poring over pages of words to memorize and learning to identify patterns in spelling construction. But standing in front of the microphone at the 2024 Treasure State Spelling Bee in Bozeman, Cheyenne said it was like she had never seen the word before, much less learned how to spell it.
“I went with my gut,” she said.
Her gut was right. It helped Cheyenne, 12, endure over a dozen rounds of competition to beat 51 fourth through eighth graders from 39 counties across Montana. She ultimately won when she correctly spelled “furuncle,” securing her berth at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Maryland in May.
Competing in the national spelling bee is the culmination of years of preparation and investment from her family and teachers at St. Joseph Elementary and Middle School in Missoula.
“I am really happy that my hard work paid off,” Cheyenne said. “I’m super excited to be able to represent our school, Missoula and Montana at nationals.”
— Carly Graf, carly.graf@missoulian.com
The Lolo Street Bridge in the Rattlesnake received funding for a complete bridge replacement, Sen. Jon Tester's office announced on Monday.
The bridge has been slated for replacement since 2022, according to Missoula County's website.
Tester's office said in a press release that almost $3 million in funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law will go to the bridge replacement. The money was allocated through the P.R.O.T.E.C.T. Discretionary Grant Program.
Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier said in the release that federal funding has been essential to supplement the county's bridge replacements, many of which are reaching a century in age.
Public works director Shane Stack said the city of Missoula will still have to pay roughly $735,000. He said the project still needs to get environmental approvals and the design finished the design before construction starts.
— Griffen Smith, griffen.smith@missoulian.com
MAKANDA, IL — It came toward this small southern Illinois town at more than 1,000 mph, a sweeping curtain of darkness that brought the hush of night as the sun disappeared from the sky.
But while the natural world died down as earth’s nearest star slipped fully behind the moon, the crowd came alive. Hundreds of eclipse viewers gasped, cheered and clapped as they pulled solar-viewing glasses off and stared with their bare eyes at the otherworldly corona of plasma whipping outward from the sun — a sight only visible during total solar eclipses.
“It was just awe-inspiring,” said a 45-year-old from Tulsa, Oklahoma who said his name was Bojangles. He rode more than 500 miles to Makanda on a bicycle, his dog Black Jack along for the ride in a trailer. “It’s just something you’ve got to see for yourself.”
He said he witnessed the 2017 cross-country total solar eclipse from a 16-foot canoe on the Ohio River that he shared with his bike, dog trailer and previous dog Bear. The experience was transformative, he said, and he vowed to see the next eclipse. Although he doesn’t always have a place to stay or a vehicle, he made sure to pedal himself and Black Jack to Makanda for this eclipse.
Makanda’s 500 or so residents, many of whom are hippies, artists and free spirits who began moving to the valley-bound village in the 1960s, had the privilege of staying put not just for this eclipse, but for the 2017 event, too. The town is in the rarefied patch of the U.S. that is the intersection of both eclipse paths. The west-to-east 2017 eclipse path was marked on the pavement near the town’s one business block in orange paint. At a nearly 90-degree angle, this eclipse path was shown in yellow eclipse stencils.
— Joshua Murdock, joshua.murdock@missoulian.com
Tava Smathers, an adjunct instructor at the University of Montana, teaches future school librarians via an online platform. For her job, high-speed, reliable internet service is crucial.
So she was ecstatic on Monday morning to be the first customer of TDS Telecom in Missoula. The company will be installing fiber-optic internet in Missoula and Lolo, and they also provide phone and digital TV options.
“The first time we heard about it, we signed up because we’re geeks,” Smathers said. “I was living with dial-up internet in the Bitterroot. So this is fantastic.”
The company has been busy building its physical network across Missoula, and they have a goal of wiring about 1,700 customers here in the first year.
— David Erickson, david.erickson@missoulian.com
New polling in Montana’s closely watched U.S. Senate race shows what’s shaping up to be a razor-thin contest between incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester and Republican political newcomer Tim Sheehy.
The poll from J.L. Partners, provided exclusively to the Montana State News Bureau, shows Sheehy leading Tester within the margin of error, by 48% to 45%, with 7% of those polled undecided. The poll’s margin of error is 4.3%.
— Holly Michels, holly.michels@helenair.com
Missoula County Commissioners mulled a potential gravel pit expansion in the Carlton area, considering both the expansion's merits and the zoning history, which a lawyer for neighbors said has been misused for decades.
The commissioners heard from the gravel pit development team, lawyers and nearby residents during a two-hour meeting on Thursday, but did not make a final decision on the matter.
Western Materials, the owner of the 70-acre gravel pit, hopes to expand the site using undeveloped land to the west along McClain Creek Road and Old Highway 93.
The company needs a variance approved for the expansion, which would grant them a unique zoning exception to surrounding land.
Aside from meeting the needs of a variance, which has a lengthy application and approval process, there is a larger question around whether the land the mine occupies should have had a gravel pit in the first place.
Neighbors have been questioning the validity of the original approval of the mine for years, their attorneys said Thursday.
— Griffen Smith, griffen.smith@missoulian.com
The roughly 650 nurses who work at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula have reached an agreement with Providence on a new labor contract. The union members voted to ratify the agreement late last week.
The Local 17 union, represented by the Montana Nurses Association, had been in negotiations for the past few months. After reaching an impasse earlier this spring, a mediator was brought in to help the two sides come together.
"MNA, along with MNA Local 17 nurses, believe collective bargaining is the strongest advocacy tool to improve nurse retention and will continue to prioritize safe staffing, workplace violence, and retention to keep Missoula nurses local," the union said in a statement signed by Montana Nurses Association CEO Vicky Byrd. "These priorities protect quality patient care and workplace safety by giving nurses a collective voice to advocate on behalf of their patients and community."
— David Erickson, david.erickson@missoulian.com
“Good afternoon, Bobcats. It is so good every time Montana State can come to Missoula to celebrate!”
Those were the playful opening words of Waded Cruzado, president of Montana State University, at last week’s celebration of breaking ground on the multimillion-dollar nursing school facility in Missoula.
The 20,000-square-foot campus will be located off Fort Missoula Road on land donated by Community Medical Center. Once complete, the building will enable more students to enroll at the Missoula campus, house state-of-the art simulation labs for baccalaureate and advanced nursing degree studies and allow for the program’s departure from the far smaller space it’s been leasing at University of Montana since 1974.
“This building marks the start of a new era for our university, and I believe, strongly, for health care in this community and in our beloved state,” Cruzado said. “As we consider the bright future that awaits us, I’m filled with immense gratitude today.”
— Carly Graf, carly.graf@missoulian.com
The FBI on April 3 captured fugitive Alejandro Romero in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico.
Romero was wanted in connection with an investigation involving overdoses of a juvenile male and adult female in Missoula, according to a news release. The two overdose victims survived.
— Missoulian staff
For those lucky enough to be in the path of totality during Monday’s total solar eclipse across the U.S., the much anticipated solar show will last only a couple minutes.
Photos can preserve the moment, but only if they turn out.
Experienced eclipse photographers say that high-end specialty equipment isn’t necessary to get solid photos. It’s a boon for dedicated solar- and astrophotographers who have a masterful command of motorized star-tracking camera mounts and automatic exposure bracketing functions on digital cameras.
But for most people, trying to wrangle complex equipment during the few precious minutes of totality — the last in the U.S. for the next 20 years — risks missing photos and the eclipse itself. All you really need is a digital camera with a fairly long lens and a tripod. A certified solar filter (like viewing glasses for your camera) is necessary except during totality, when the glasses and filter come off.
“Know exactly what you need to do and not panic,” said professional photographer Tristan Savatier. “Be cool.”
— Joshua Murdock, joshua.murdock@missoulian.com
Looking up at the sky makes people more down to earth.
That is, of course, if they’re looking up to see the rare spectacle of the moon completely blotting out earth’s life-giving star, the sun. Tens of millions of people are predicted to turn their gaze skyward this Monday as a total solar eclipse cuts a path across the continental U.S. for the first time since 2017. It won’t happen again for 20 years.
According to scientists, the mere sight of the celestial coincidence could make people healthier, more humble, kinder and more empathetic.
Paul Piff is a social scientist at University of California, Irvine, who studies the phenomenon of awe and how it affects humans. In Western culture, he said, awe is generally brought about through encounters with powerful natural phenomenon.
Awe, he said, is “an experience of such perceptual vastness, one has to reconfigure their mental models of the world to accommodate it.”
Most people just call it “mind blowing.”
— Joshua Murdock, joshua.murdock@missoulian.com
Demand for mental health crisis training is high in Missoula, and 33 more local first responders will start next week as certified in crisis intervention training.
Staff from the Missoula Rural Fire District, Veterans Affairs police, Mineral County Sheriff’s Office, Mobile Support Team and other Missoula agencies spent their Friday morning running through six scenarios dealing with mental health crisis calls.
“Our agency has seen an increase in crisis-type calls,” John Muir, an MRFD firefighter, said.
The scenarios are the culmination of a weeklong academy hosted by Missoula’s Crisis Intervention Team (CIT). The annual academy trains law enforcement, detention staff, Mobile Support Team medics, clinicians and others on how to de-escalate situations involving public disturbances, family crises and suicide intervention.
Each scenario is different, but based on real-life situations.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
One hundred years ago, a death notice was published in the Missoulian for Mrs. Bertha White Elk, a resident of the city. At first glance the notice appears unremarkable and rather perfunctory; Mrs. White Elk was a nurse, part Native American, and had lived in Missoula for more than a year. But in its two brief paragraphs there are several tantalizing allusions to a bigger story, one far stranger and infinitely sadder than is initially apparent: the extraordinary tale of the woman once known and lauded as Princess White Elk.
"Princess White Elk" was born in 1886 in Northern California. Documentation of her early years is scarce, the earliest verifiable record being the 1900 U.S. Census, which lists her as Bertha Thompson, the 14-year-old adopted daughter of Milton J. Thompson, a lumberman from Alabama who had settled in Humboldt County, California, and his wife Lucy Thompson — a.k.a. Che-na-wah Weitch-ah-wah — of the Klamath tribe. Lucy Thompson was the author of "To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman," which was published in 1916, and is today considered one of the definitive histories of the Klamath.
As a young woman Bertha Thompson trained as a Red Cross nurse in San Francisco, but like her mother she was also an aspiring writer and activist.
— Colin Hanson, for the Missoulian
Think “western Montana sculptures” and you might call to mind bronze animals, ceramic figures or chainsaw creations.
Two finishing Master of Fine Art candidates at the University of Montana School of Fine Art have thesis exhibitions on view right now that couldn’t be further from those in style, subject matter and materials.
The shows, on view now in adjacent spaces in the Gallery of Visual Arts, include massive fabric sculptures of neoclassical columns in ruins, constructed from the unexpected material of shredded, bleached denim; and person-sized sculptures of microbial material an artist harvested from her body.
— Cory Walsh, cory.walsh@missoulian.com