Zoom Chron Blog

Who is Mary Stranahan, what is the High Stakes Foundation, and how did I connect this Big Sky philanthropist to the Epstein network? Great questions! Let’s begin with Mary.

Let’s start with spark plugs. To put it simply, spark plugs are the small bolts of lightning that start your car. They work by creating an arc of electricity across a gap that ignites the mixture of fuel and air. This small explosion powers your pistons and makes the entire vehicle move. All of the ingredients: the gap, the mixture of fuels, the larger machine, all need the tiny spark plug to go– Now think of all the people, products, and industries that move everyday because of that small spark.

Perhaps it is appropriate that Mary Stranahan was born into the family that created and owned the largest spark plug company in the world. She herself finds the small gaps, with the right mixture of people and place, and adds the spark that makes an entire system move forward.

Mary’s grandpa, Frank Stranahan, helped build the Champion spark plug company with his brother, Robert, and now this successful company is a part of Apollo’s portfolio, and it’s through Apollo that Epstein’s influence enters the picture via Leon Black. Here’s a portion of the letter Apollo sent its investors after its connection to the Epstein network emerged:

To Our Partners,

In light of the variety of media and social traffic we feel compelled to again reach out. Despite the flurry of coverage and certain constituents pushing their own agendas, the facts remain the same. In 2020 Apollo initiated an independent, transparent, and thorough investigation in regard to any relationships with Jeffrey Epstein. The publicly released report can be found here.

The facts matter. From an Apollo perspective, there’s nothing new in these documents. Neither Marc Rowan nor anyone else at Apollo (excluding Leon Black) had either a business or personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Mr. Black, who left the firm in 2021, previously retained and compensated Mr. Epstein for personal tax advice. In select instances, Mr. Rowan and other Apollo employees provided information to Epstein in connection with his tax work for Mr. Black. While Mr. Epstein sought to do work with the Apollo co-founders other than Mr. Black, it was declined at every turn.

The money Mary Stranahan uses to influence things–like Montana media and non-profits, including the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative–got activated after Mary came out of the closet as a rich person and fully embraced her wealth. Before this moment of clarity, Mary was doing doctor stuff for poor Montana Indians on their Big Sky reservations. Very noble.

The community was about a 50/50 split of Native Americans and white people so she was keenly aware of the racism, both overt and subtle. She was a white doctor on Native land so she learned everything she could, including taking Native History classes at the Salish Kootenai College. She loved delivering babies, tolerated surgeries, and especially adored the way entire Native families would show up whenever someone was in the hospital. By living on the Reservation, she saw the enormous impact job creation had on decreasing domestic violence and substance abuse and improving lives, families, and entire communities. Mary became passionate about economic development. Both combating racism and supporting economic development became cornerstones of her ongoing work after retiring from healthcare.

Up until this point, Mary had been individually philanthropic with LGBTQ and environmental organizations, as well as through a family foundation started by her parents, The Needmor Fund, but also somewhat closeted as a wealth holder. In 2006 she attended a Play BIG conference in Canada. Play BIG was started by Carol Newell who had shifted from being an anonymous investor to a leader in impact investing. Play BIG supports individual wealth holders who want to activate their whole portfolio (investing, lending, and giving) to be in greater alignment with the values of environmental regeneration and social equity. After the push from Play BIG, in 2007 Mary went public as a resource and hired Dawn McGee as her CEO to help her focus and transform her wealth into impact in Western Montana. When asked what is the smartest thing she has ever done, the answer comes quickly, “Hire Dawn.”

After Mary “hired Dawn” the money started flowing to all kinds of organizations, like the Montana Free Press, The Pulp, the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative, and SO MUCH MORE!

If you don’t see this list of funding recipients and understand how money is used to control narratives, keeping local populations uninformed about how power REALLY functions, then let me return to a spot in Missoula that is now a HAZMAT situation just a few dozen feet from the Bitterroot river.

Missoula Works, a subsidiary of the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative, got paid to clean up this land near Buckhouse bridge, which is owned by IMEG and is being developed into more storage units, but, for some reason, this particular spot of heaped trash was left to CONTINUE POLLUTING (as I write this) the land AND water. After talking with someone from DNRC yesterday, I’m starting to realize this isn’t getting cleaned up because this plot of land is literally NO MAN’S LAND.

While my chat with DNRC didn’t illuminate the technical owners of this parcel, it did present the possibility that digging into deed information at the County might help point the figurative finger because deed info might show if any changes to the property line were made in the process of the previous owner selling the property to IMEG.

A few years ago I connected the previous owner, Spencer Properties LLC, to Blue Line Development, which built the Trinity Apartment complex by the jail and perpetrates the affordable housing subsidy scam at a regional level. I’ve literally had people in Colorado reach out to me because of my local reporting on Blue Line Development, and they reached out to ME because this kind of reporting simply doesn’t occur with the media recipients of Mary’s spark plug money, and now you know why.

One final example of how Mary is playing DEMOCRAT politics with her spark plug money, and that example goes by the name Pam Bucy, a former Lewis and Clark County Prosecutor and failed candidate for Montana’s Attorney General Office. Here’s a little more bio information from Ballotpedia:

Upon graduating from law school, Bucy was hired as a criminal prosecutor with the Lewis & Clark County Attorney’s office.[5] She went on to work as Executive Assistant Attorney General under former attorney general Mike McGrath, who would go on to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Montana. Her time as chief deputy attorney general provided Bucy with the opportunity to represent the state in front of the Supreme Court and establish her specialty as a prosecutor of sex-related crime; In addition to handling her combination civil and criminal caseload, she led the office to create and develop its system for registering sex and violent offenders.

Developing a system to register sex offenders, you say? And what’s Pam up to these days?

That’s right, she’s a board member for the “Prickly Pear Land Trust“, which got a nice $30,000 from the High Stakes Foundation. No wonder Pam can afford to crack a smile like that!

If you appreciate knowing shit about the corruption lurking beneath the pretty surface of this liberal mountain college town, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page because no foundation will ever touch the kind of work I’ve dedicated myself to doing after being an insider of the Homeless Industrial Complex for nearly a decade. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!

In 2024 Missoula’s Mayor, Andrea Davis, split the City Attorney’s Office in two, putting Ryan Sudbury in charge of civil services and Keithi Worthington in charge of criminal prosecutions. Here’s how the Missoula Current reported on this change at the time:

Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis on Wednesday detailed her plans to reorganize the City Attorney’s Office after appointing Ryan Sudbury as City Attorney for Civil Services and Keithi Worthington as City Attorney for Prosecution.

“This recognizes that in a modern city attorney’s office, there are too many substantive areas of law for one person to be an expert in both civil and criminal matters,” Davis said. “Separating them allows for more efficient and effective decision making focused on the needs of each department.”

Worthington, who graduated from the University of Montana School of Law, worked in private practice until 2006, when she began working with the city. In 2016, she was appointed Chief Prosecuting Attorney and will now serve as the City Attorney for Prosecution.

The position will oversee all prosecution services including DUI, criminal and misdemeanor crimes while also supporting the city’s crime victim services. The job will also advise the city on matters concerning criminal law and serve as a member of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council.

Since getting elected in 2021 as a package deal, there has apparently been “tension” between the three Municipal Court judges and Keithi Worthington, the Mayor’s pick to oversee prosecutions. After an investigation into Worthington’s conduct, the completed report is NOT being shared with the Municipal judges, so now the judges are using the tool they know best–the law–to compel disclosure:

There has been some long-standing tension between Missoula’s municipal court and the City of Missoula’s city attorney.

The tension largely stems from what three municipal court judges say is unprofessional conduct that has in turn impacted the court’s operations.

Missoula municipal court judges Jennifer Streano, Jacob Coolidge, Eli Parker and court administrator Kari Dady have now filed a legal complaint in Missoula’s District Court over the matter.

The complaint is seeking injunctive relief from Missoula District Court Judge Shane Vannatta to release a report that was performed by a Great Falls attorney over Keithi Worthington, Missoula’s city attorney.

The report was the result of an investigation into Worthington and her conduct between her office and the municipal court.

As a former city insider invited to be a member of the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission, I worked closely with Keithi Worthington and other “stakeholders” over a decade ago to address “chronic homelessness” in the downtown core. Last night I spent a few hours reading through old minutes to find examples of my previous work coordinating the Homeless Outreach Team for the Poverello Center. Here’s a great example:

How did I go from working with Keithi Worthington to being prosecuted by her office 14 years later? Maybe the answer is hiding somewhere in this screenshot from the Jail Diversion Master Plan Update (PDF):

While I’m admittedly biased from the “lived experience” of lawfare, I think it’s statistically relevant that “violation of protective order” entered this top 15 list in 2022. Previously, as you can see, it did NOT make the top 15 list of charges “at admission by volume” for the Missoula County Detention Facility.

Being on the receiving end of Keithi Worthington’s criminal charging decisions is obviously not fun, but I take some solace in knowing I’m not the only one being targeted by this “liberal” city. Veteran and drone whistleblower, Brandon Bryant, is ALSO being targeted (and prosecuted) by the same interests, and for similar reasons. Combined we represent pushing back against narrative control in two key areas of authoritarian sensitivity: housing/homelessness for me, and technology/surveillance for Mr. Bryant, who looked like this after cops had their way with him last summer:

Going back to my previous life with the Downtown Advisory Commission, it was there, in the Jack Reidy conference room, where a former Sheriff with his own Mayoral ambitions was making his pitch to use the kind of technology I now have around my ankle to violate me and send me back to jail if I enter any of the four Travis Exclusion Zones (TEZ), like this protective bubble around the Capitol building, in Helena:

To wrap this post up with the kind of context that has earned me my targeted status, there’s another sad I TOLD YOU SO regarding the person who once ran the Transitional Safe Outdoor Space, which the Union Gospel Mission just announced they’re pulling out of.

For those unaware of Missoula’s inadequate patchwork of homeless service bandaids, like TSOS and the failed Authorized Camping Site near gang territory on Mullan road, then you might not know that they sprang up, in part, to address the sprawling encampments under and around the Reserve Street bridge, an area I was doing good, collaborative work before leaving my position at the Poverello Center in 2016, which the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission acknowledged.

A few years later, someone who supposedly possessed a comparable skillset to do the kind of work I was doing arrived on the Mayor’s commission to help inform what was happening at Reserve Street.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say this group of influential people ultimately FAILED to accomplish, with public dollars, what an unpaid group of citizen volunteers ended up doing themselves, for years, until the COUNTY stepped up with the heavy equipment needed to address the problem.

Maybe some of that failure occurred because of the caliber of people who informed the policy makers and influencers about the problem.

Long time readers of this blog might remember the year Joey Thompson went missing after a night of teenage partying in the woods and, like so many others, he “accidentally” ended up dead in the river.

Since this death seemed to intersect with the kind of Christians more interested in searching for Jermain Charlo than they were for Rebekah Barsotti, I did what I could to look into this “accidental” death and what I found was the suspicious involvement of April Seat’s son, Dylan.

Despite my obvious frustration, clearly and not always constructively articulated, about what local media does NOT do, I’m encouraged to see some unusual interest in where political money is flowing, and how local prosecutorial power is being used, or abused, by those more worried about what their actions LOOK LIKE than the people being harmed, as evidenced by this gem about the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission’s “No Sell” effort to stop transient alcoholics from getting shit-faced on Steel Reserve before noon:

If you appreciate context like this, which I’m pretty sure you won’t find compiled in this manner ANYWHERE else, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Five generous donations have already come in, taking me 13% of the way to my modest goal of $2,200 dollars, so THANK YOU, and stay tuned. I’ll be updating this story and others as more information becomes available.

Thanks for reading!

Alani Bankhead’s campaign is pretty simple: Seth Bodnar and Kurt Alme are men, and men are bad.

One candidate, the campaign claims, implied a woman was fat and failed to protect a female student on Missoula’s campus, while the other candidate is soft on sex offenders. Let’s take a look at the evil men who Alani Bankhead is pretending she can beat by running a sexist campaign against them.

One thing I’ve learned about Democrats running political campaigns is how much they love dragging their children into the fray. That’s exactly what Bill Foley did this month by using his daughter’s experience in Missoula to suggest Seth Bodnar’s administration failed to keep his daughter safe from her roommate.

It should be noted that Bill Foley ran a failed campaign to become Mayor of Butte before entering the world of content creation, where he made claims against Bodnar that go something like this:

Perhaps my best decision as a father was to take my daughter to Rocky Mountain Martial Arts when she was in the second grade.

There, Delaney got to study under the late, great Master Jim Miller. He taught his students to never be a bully. He also taught them to never put up with a bully.

Master Miller taught his students self-defense, but more importantly, he instilled in them a sense of self-worth. He taught them to stand up for themselves and for others.

He taught them to never be the kind of people who look the other way when the going gets tough.

My daughter clearly took Master Miller’s teachings to heart. She has a keen sense of social justice, and she has never shied away from standing up for herself or for others.

When she was in eighth grade, Delaney punched out a boy who thought he could get away with calling her horrific names every day in class.

During her second year at the University of Montana, she punched a bully who had been threatening her and her roommates for several months. When the university would not protect her, she protected herself.

And Seth Bodnar punished her for that.

While Bill assumed that teaching his daughter to use violence as a way to solve her problems was the right thing to do, perhaps he should have considered first explaining to his daughter that the political party they are BOTH supporting cannot see women as being aggressive perpetrators of crimes, so maybe THAT is why a new roommate who aggressively masturbates in public while engaging in other disturbing behavior wasn’t treated as a potentially dangerous person committing crimes.

In January of 2024, my daughter and two roommates got a new roommate at their apartment in the dormitory Pantzer Hall. From the start, her words and actions were troubling, to say the least.

She treated the women like they were her property. If they went to a basketball game without her, she would threaten them like she was a jealous husband.

Immediately, she made threats of violence against these young women. Some were not-so-veiled threats. Others were not veiled at all. She made it known to them that she was possessed by a demon and was very capable of killing them.

…

By the time April rolled around, this roommate was known widely by UM students as the “Pantzer Hall Masturbator.” That is because she set up in one of the study lounges and masturbated so everyone walking by could clearly see her and what she was doing.

When my daughter and some of the other young women who were exposed to this scene went to the University of Montana campus police, they were quickly dismissed. Officer Mark Horner yelled at them for wasting his time, telling them it was not a crime.

I’m confused, isn’t this what progressive Democrats WANT a woke administration to do with a female student like this?

Sure, if it was a young MAN masturbating in public, it would obviously be easier to identify said masturbation as a criminal act–since men are inherently violent, abusive creatures who must be destroyed for the crime of making a woman feel even the slightest bit of discomfort–but when a WOMAN is the one doing it, well, maybe it’s just the result of patriarchal repression manifesting in a pathology of not wanting, but needing to be seen flicking her bean and moaning like a bitch in heat?

Before we get to the part of the story where Delaney Foley assaults the compulsive masturbator, let’s check the temperature of the broader political dynamics informing this young women’s entry into the “real” world of mean-ass politics:

Losing friends is one thing, but losing your FREEDOM because you think violence is the answer is quite another. For Bill Foley, I suggest that instead of inquiring about losing friends, he should be helping his daughter more maturely deal with the kind of mentally ill women we ALL have to artfully deal with in the real world.

That April 11, my daughter was on her way to class when the roommate quickly approached her in an angry-and-aggressive manor. When she lunged at my daughter, Delaney hit her with a one-two punch. It might have been a one-two-three combination.

The roommate cried and ran away, and my daughter immediately reported the incident to her resident assistant. It was a clear case of self-defense, and the aggressor was not seriously injured. Delaney only punched enough to defuse her assailant.

After temporarily punching away her problem, Delaney Foley did the most threatening thing a person can do in a town like this, and that’s threaten (with Daddy’s help) to turn her private conflict into a public MEDIA SHIT-STORM by going to the University newspaper.

This came as I was reaching out for even more help for my daughter and the other young women. The school still made it clear to us that it was not going to anything about the repeated threats and sexual exposer.

So, my daughter and I indicated that she might talk to the school newspaper about the experiences her, her roommates and other women of the dorm experienced that semester. We suggested that, perhaps, the school did not learn its lesson from Jon Krakauer’s book “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” that followed the weak response to cases involving sexual assault by the University of Montana and the justice system.

That finally got the attention of the Bodnar administration, and suddenly my daughter faced disciplinary action for defending herself from the attack. Instead of helping her, they figured they would intimidate her into silence.

Bill Foley’s entitled daughter might want to step back from politics in order to appreciate that she didn’t get arrested and charged with assault when she used violence to allegedly defend herself because, if she had been arrested for punching a crazy woman, I would feel as bad for her as I feel for Scott Wiener.

Ok, let’s move on to the Bankhead campaign’s attack on Kurt Alme for being soft on sex offenders.

Alme oversaw the case of Mychal Thomas Damon, who was indicted in June 2019 by a grand jury on one count of abusive sexual contact with an individual under 12, which carries a maximum punishment of a lifetime in prison, a $250,000 fine and no less than five years to a lifetime of supervised release. The average sentence for this crime is less severe, but still significant: 62 months in prison, no fine and 143 months of supervised release, based on an analysis of 2025 data provided by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Damon, 28, had admitted he touched the 6-year-old’s genitals. But in February 2020, Alme’s office filed a plea deal in his case that reduced his charge to felony child abuse.

The changes in the plea deal raised the alleged age of the victim from below 12 to below 14, stripped out the language of sexual intent and moved the offense out of the federal sex crime framework, meaning Damon would no longer be required to register as a sex offender. It jointly recommended Damon be sentenced to the time he’d already served of 324 days, and required only a sex offender evaluation. Alme’s name appears on the bottom of the document, along with a signature by his assistant U.S. attorney, Cassady Adams.

Let’s strategically ignore the name “Cassady Adams” because SHE isn’t running for office. Let’s also strategically ignore the fact that the ONLY reason anyone is pretending to care about this young victim of sexual abuse right now is because of the political campaigns being run.

If the Huffington Post, or Alani Bankhead, truly cared about victims of sexual abuse, they wouldn’t be using graphic details–like how the abuser digitally penetrated a young girl’s vagina–to score political points.

In June, Alme filed a sentencing memorandum that described Damon’s conduct, which included details of him touching the child’s vagina with skin-to-skin contact, and the adverse effect it had on her mental health. Local reporting at the time said the victim had told a therapist “Mychal touched me” and hurt her by putting his fingers in her “hoo hoo.”

Ten days later, Alme announced Damon was being sentenced to time served of 324 days and two years of supervised release. As of June 2026, Damon is not listed in the national sex offender registry or in Montana’s Sexual or Violent Offender Registry.

To contrast this case with the sex offender I’ve been tracking for years, here’s a local article that references Todd Spence’s incest conviction when he was arrested for meth in 2023:

According to court documents, Spence has two prior felony convictions including incest with a history of revocations, and a felony theft along with a partner family member assault conviction and numerous other misdemeanors.

Spence has a currently pending charge of threats or improper influence in official matters, two pending trespass charges in Missoula County Justice Court, two charges for disorderly conduct, two charges for obstructing, and intoxicated pedestrian pending in Missoula Municipal Court.

If anyone NOT running a political campaign can explain to me why the Missoula Criminal Justice System has been going easy on this piece of shit for YEARS, reach out to me and let me know.

In a sane world, those who harm children, or compulsively masturbate in public, would be dealt with in a non-partisan manner that addresses underlying social factors with the ultimate goal of keeping the public safe, but this is FAR from being a sane world. Using details of an abused 6 year old’s “hoo-hoo” is just the most recent example of how disgusting modern politics has become.

If you appreciate a truly non-partisan, journalistic take on this Big Sky dumpster fire, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps as I continue to defend myself against the lawfare effort (using public resources) to shut me up.

Thanks for reading!

Members of City Council don’t work their political jobs full time because City Council is not considered a full time job, a fact specifically referenced by Stacie Anderson in this article about attendance rates for Council members:

According to minutes kept for each meeting and recorded by city staff, Anderson has missed roughly 15 meetings between the dates examined, placing her attendance at roughly 75% since the start of the year.

Like most council members, she works a full-time job on top of her work as a Ward 5 representative. Her job requires her to travel at times.

“Because it pays relatively little, most of the rest of us have other jobs. Unfortunately, there will be times where that conflicts. But I try to let the mayor and the council president know when I’ll be gone,” Anderson said.

This quote is from 2023, and the “full time job” Anderson referenced wasn’t specified. Now, three years later, we’re getting some context about what Stacie Anderson does for money when she’s not calling point-of-orders and hanging up on virtual public commenters, like she’s done to ME several times.

Thanks to Griffin Smith’s reporting, I now have a much better idea about how Stacie Anderson is scheming to push HER political vision on Missoula through her full time “job” running A Better Big Sky. From the link:

Following the money in politics rarely leads to a sitting elected official.

A Missoula city councilor helms a political nonprofit that’s grown to a multimillion dollar operation over eight years. In 2024, that nonprofit — A Better Big Sky — distributed millions through other groups that spent on mailers, TV ads and canvassers to help influence elections across Montana.

Tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service show the nonprofit raised roughly $100,000 in revenue in 2018. By 2024, the group’s annual revenue spiked to $7.7 million, and roughly $2 million went directly toward political action committees.

Wow, Stacie! That’s A LOT of money!

One of the efforts that Stacie Anderson is directing a serious flow of money to is the bullshit effort to “keep the courts non-partisan”, a scam I’ve done my part to expose. Unfortunately I’m a broke blogger in the crosshairs of a serious lawfare assault, so I really can’t compete with someone tossing around a half million dollars like it’s nothing.

Data from 2025 has yet to be released by the IRS, but state finance reports showed A Better Big Sky has recently continued advocacy work.

The group paid $500,000 to the Montanans For Nonpartisan Courts ballot initiative in March 2026, which has spent more than $1 million on paid signature-gathers, Lee Montana reported.

Ward 5 Missoula City Councilor Stacie Anderson has served as a councilor since 2017, and in 2018 launched A Better Big Sky as its executive director.

The group has been successful in securing donors to fund other state and regional political nonprofits, such as Forward Montana, Montana Conservation Voters and Western Native Vote.

While Anderson has stood by her work as an advocacy effort, political analysts point to an unusual quandary where an elected official is atop a major player in Montana politics that, in effect, picks winners and losers in state-level elections.

If the hundreds of thousands of dollars that represent Stacie Anderson’s political speech are successful, the total farce of “non-partisan” courts will continue unchallenged, like what’s happening to me with the judge and county prosecutors who attempted to put Brandon Bryant in prison for ten years.

In 2020, Brandon Bryant landed in jail shortly after he brought a wooden Japanese training sword to a council meeting and criticized the use of special property tax money.

Prosecutors used that and an edited video of Bryant to charge him with a felony.

This week, three council members, Bryan von Lossberg, Gwen Jones and Julie Merritt all told the jury Bryant scared them.

But four council members and the mayor testified they did not fear him.

When Bryant was arrested, Judge Shane Vannatta set his bail at $100,000. He spent 30 days in jail before posting it.

While I’m not going to get into a lot of the specifics about my case, I think it’s relevant to explain that the civil process of asking a judge for a restraining order can entail making claims about the defendent that require zero proof in order for those claims to be considered by the judge.

This means you can say–as the petitioner asking for the restraining order–that something happened in a coffee shop that made you fearful and, if that fear is deemed to be the kind of fear a reasonable person would experience, then the “non-partisan” judge can decide whether or not a 1,500 ft circumference of protection around that coffee shop is necessary.

In my case, and without ANY evidence (like a police report or affidavit from the witness the petitioner claimed saw this coffee shop incident), this is what judge Vannatta decided to implement, along with three other TEZs (Travis Exclusion Zones):

I want this image to really sink in because it represents most of the downtown core, meaning I’m not allowed to legally step foot into the courthouse, city council chambers, the public defender’s office, the bus transfer station, or other places where I have products for sale. If Vannatta’s decision stands, this zone, along with three others, will be my reality for the next TEN YEARS.

The prosecutor in my criminal case–a criminal case enabled by the civil one ordered by the judge who called not mirandizing a citizen a NOTHING BURGER in regards to the fired Sheriff of Mineral County, Ryan Funke–carried some curious legal water for Kirsten Pabst six years ago by telling those who were paying attention why TWO alleged killers were let out of jail without criminal charges. One of those alleged killers, Johnny Lee Perry, was later shot dead by deputies with the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office.

ABC FOX Montana is following up on two different investigations in Missoula — a fatal stabbing on New Years night, and an altercation at the Poverello Center that left one man dead.

In both cases, the suspect was not kept in custody during the investigation.

ABC FOX Montana reached out to the Missoula county attorney’s office to find out why. It turns out, there is no simple answer.

In both of these cases, the suspects claimed they killed the other in self-defense, but self defense alone is not a reason to keep a person out of jail.

Mac Bloom with the Missoula County Attorney’s office said he can’t comment on any current investigations, but he did explain to us that after a person is taken into custody, they can only be held for two days, unless charges are filed.

In many cases, the investigation takes longer than that, so sometimes the suspect must be released before charges are filed.

The suspect in the fight at the poverello is 29-year-old johnny lee perry.

He currently not in custody while police investigate his claims of self defense.

Did the police do a quality investigation into the dead homeless man (Sean Stevenson) who Johnny Lee Perry claimed he was defending himself against when the violence occurred inside the Poverello Center, where I used to work? No, because if they HAD, well, the last six years of my life would look VERY different.

I’ll leave it there, for now.

If you’d like to help out an actual, local citizen journalist who doesn’t have the YouTube following of a Reckless Ben, or the budget of a Nick Shirley, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!