While immense focus from arm-chair investigators is fixated on Moscow, Idaho, a violent death of an elderly woman in Clinton, Montana isn’t getting any attention at all, nor the investigating agency (Missoula County Sheriff’s Office) any criticism. Let’s fix that.
The death of 88 year old Delphine Farmer was labeled a homicide all the way back on September 28th, 2022, but so far no suspects have been identified or arrested. At least, not that the public has been told about. But that may have changed with the arrest of Charles Grabert after a violent incident at the Johnson Street shelter last week. From the link:
At 11 a.m. on Thursday, Missoula police responded to the Johnson Street shelter for calls reporting someone was threatening people with a gun at the facility. An employee told law enforcement the suspect was wearing a red bandanna and was pointing a handgun at residents while making threats, according to charging documents.
Another witness said the suspect threatened to kill him while the gun was pointed.
Later in the article it’s reported that Grabert got another charge for intimidation. Note the location (emphasis mine):
Officers located, arrested and identified Grabert. He said he wanted an attorney and was not questioned by police, charging documents stated. No weapon was found on Grabert’s person or outside of the car. Authorities applied for a search warrant to look through the car. Charging documents didn’t mention if the warrant returned a gun.
Grabert was also charged on Friday with felony intimidation stemming from an October incident in Clinton.
The extra charge, and the very high bond, is making me think that Grabert has been a very bad violent offender, but violent enough to end the life of an elderly woman?
While that investigation is presumably moving forward with NO THREAT TO THE PUBLIC (right, MCSO?), the Missoula County Attorney’s Office is preparing to prosecute a DIFFERENT Charles for brutally beating to death a well-known homeless man, Lee Nelson, in November of 2020. I knew Lee Nelson well from my time at the shelter, and I plan on attending the trial to provide coverage you won’t get anywhere else.
To help toward those efforts, please consider making a donation to my about page. Any little bit helps.
As the days of darkness move toward solstice, I’m making moves and thinking hard about 2023 opportunities. While books and debris are strewn all around me, I can see something emerging on the other side and I’m excited to share what I find out, even if it means deconstructing the idea of a “Gonzo” journalist.
Back in October the news about Amazon wasn’t ready to disclose to the public yet, but the Missoulian did its best to tell the public what was coming. Here is David Erickson on Twitter explaining how to read between the lines of his reporting:
I thought it was odd at the time local officials supposedly had no clue about what this immense warehouse was being built for. Here’s Emily Brock acknowledging her cluelessness:
Emily Brock, Missoula County’s director of economic and land development, said she didn’t know the purpose of the warehouse.
“Nothing in county planning or building records indicates anything substantive, just that it’s a HUGE warehouse,” she said in a text.
Now that Christmas is almost here, I think the reason for the secrecy is obvious: Governor Gianforte’s office wanted to be the ones to announce this VERY EXCITING development of AWESOME jobs being created by this lovely corporation. From the link (emphasis NOT mine):
Gianforte’s office provided this comment from Amazon through a press release from his office on Friday.
“This new delivery station in Montana will connect Amazon’s national fulfillment network to customers in Missoula and beyond, while also creating more than 100 new jobs within the community during the coming years,” said Amazon spokesperson Leigh Anne Gullett. “We look forward to bringing faster and more efficient package delivery to Montana residents, as well as to growing our partnerships with businesses and community organizations in the area.”
Now that the news about Amazon is out, the charitable money that went to a local non-profit last month is making more sense. This strategic donation of $2.5 million is a GREAT move, considering not everyone in Missoula is going to be excited about this Bezos behemoth coming to Zoom Town.
I wonder, what does Tracy McKee think about this development? I thought about Tracy last month as I was reading between the lines of the Amazon donation. You see, Tracy is VERY obsessed with Jeff Bezos, and her recent behavior is getting me a little worried.
I probably shouldn’t worry that I watched Tracy try to enter the ZACC last week, despite the door being locked. And I shouldn’t be concerned that Tracy was window-shopping for a hatchet, which I mentioned in this post about our Multi-Modal Mayor. Instead of worrying, I decided to make a song about it!
Amazon should know that Missoula is really great at dealing with mentally unstable people. We also have a workforce that understands what they deserve, and it’s NOT slinging ice-cream for Bryan Hickey at 10 bucks an hour! For more context on the plight of the ice cream scoop labor issue, here’s an interview a friend sent me worth watching:
Getting back to Amazon, here’s more from Governor Gianforte about this wonderful employer coming to Montana, and who is first at the money trough to benefit:
The Governor provided more specific information about the facility.
“The construction project has been a collaborative effort among multiple Montana-based businesses including GroundSpeed Concepts, Dick Anderson Construction, True North Steel, Temp Right Service, INC, PETES Electric, and Hyalite Engineers,” he said.
I was interested in these “Montana-based” businesses that Gianforte mentions, so I looked up the first one, GroundSpeed Concepts, and I couldn’t find much online at all. Here’s what the Secretary of State has on this company:
The secrecy around this warehouse build is indicative of how our New Jersey-based Governor executes the duties of his office in Montana, so reporters and journalists in Montana are going to have to work EXTRA HARD to uncover who Montana is being sold out to.
As I write this post, a benefit concert for the Poverello Center is going on beneath me, which is perfect because the plight of the homeless is definitely on my mind. Earlier in the day I spotted Tracy M. at the hardware store. After ducking out of sight and purchasing my items, I spoke briefly with a guy who was clearly watching her. After explaining my previous work at the Poverello Center, he told me so far things were just fine. The hatchet she had picked up was no longer in her shopping cart. Hooray!
I can’t keep up with how much money is being shoveled at my former employer and the homeless industrial complex in general, but I’m trying! I’m also trying to put violence into context, like how it can strategically proceed gentrification. Just a week after writing that post, an incident at the Johnson Street Shelter occurred (the area I was writing about) and the incident reportedly involved a gun, which temporarily put a local school on lockdown. From the link (emphasis mine):
On December 15, 2022, shortly after 11:00 a.m., Missoula Police Department Officers responded to a violent offense at 1919 North Avenue West, which is the location of the Emergency Winter Shelter.
According to Police Public Information Officer Lydia Arnold, the suspects involved in the incident fled the scene and officers pursued them.
While the suspects were on the loose, Arnold said MPD advised some nearby schools to go into lockdown as a precaution.
“Due to the nature of the violent offense and threat to the public, both suspects were taken into custody,” Arnold said. “There will be a continued investigation into the reported offense.”
KGVO has learned that a gun was involved in this incident. We will provide more information about this incident when it becomes available.
While I’ve been keeping the scope of development coming to Midtown in mind, a fellow researcher who assists this blog behind the scenes (and who is actually FROM Missoula, meaning born here) has come across a fascinating “long range transportation plan” from 2008, with the title ENVISION MISSOULA (PDF).
Before getting to what she uncovered, I want to highlight some public commentary about the Beartracks Bridge lane reduction scheme. I know I just wrote about this scheme in yesterday’s post, but today’s Missoulian article has some additional context worth considering, specifically some interesting damage control. From the second link:
Weeks after opening the Beartracks Bridge to four-lane traffic at the conclusion of three years of construction work, Missoula city staff unveiled a new plan on Wednesday to reduce bridge travel down to two lanes.
Though the proposal appears to be “polarizing” Missoula residents, Infrastructure & Mobility Planning Manager Aaron Wilson stressed the changes are only in the early stages of contemplation.
“We’re really just working at a conceptual level here,” Wilson told the Missoula City Council.
When Wilson says they are just working at the “conceptual level” I think he’s being more than a little disingenuous. Full of shit is actually the phrase that comes to mind. Why? Because of the long-term ambitions of our MULTI-MODAL Mayor, who waddled into Zoom Town as a little political duckling at ASUM as a student, then Director of ASUM Transportation.
I’m not sure how big Mayor Hess will be smiling when he realizes the blowback against this “conceptual” plan is so wide-ranging, it even encompasses people like Geoff Badenoch, the former director of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency. Badenoch has gotten more vocal in recent years as the agency he once directed goes berserker with public money, so the criticism isn’t all that surprising, but it is SCATHING. From the article:
Wow. Next up, Bill Schwanke has ANOTHER scathing comment. Bill is also a well known Missoulian, not a conspiracy theorist, but his theory is this was probably the plan all along. Is he right? From the article:
Wow again. I’m beginning to understand why our City and County administrative-level staff want to move into a STURDY Federal building they’re hilariously calling “free” (more on that for another day).
The bunker building, if fully acquired and actually occupied one day, will be a nice headquarters to watch the flickering flames of torches and the glint of hand-crafted pitchforks made with locally-sourced steel. To fuel the flames of the figurative torches, here is the perspective from FOURTEEN YEARS AGO! While reading think of local headlines, like pedestrian crashes and Ellen Buchanan midtown light rail transit excitation, then recall how Aaron Wilson is claiming they are only at the EARLY STAGES of contemplation.
From the PDF version of the 2008 plan, ENVISION MISSOULA:
I think it is well understood that the scope of this particular VISION for Missoula, if fully articulated to the public, would be strenuously resisted by those who understand what the COST would be, and we’re not just talking about dollars.
So how does this vision ultimately get sold to the public if the public isn’t buying? Maybe just increase the cost of NOT giving these people what they want, and, again, we’re not just talking about dollars here. A lot is at stake in this valley, and the many places our revitalized train tracks and transit lines will lead to.
I’ll leave it there for now, this is already a hefty post for a Friday as Christmas closes in. If your advent calendar calls for supporting independent journalism, you can make a donation at my about page.
Local policies can be confusing when you don’t understand what the goal is. Take the recent public invitation to comment on Missoula’s Higgins Corridor Plan. On the surface the idea of reducing lanes of traffic in a town that’s ZOOMING with growth seems insane, but maybe there’s a plan behind the plan the public should consider.
First, here’s what the public is being told via KPAX about the pretend choice being offered. From the link (emphasis mine):
The City of Missoula has been working with community partners for more than a year, thinking about how they can improve the traffic situation along Higgins Avenue.
The Higgins Corridor Plan — which was released last week — stretches from Brooks to Broadway. Higgins is four lanes and whenever someone wants to turn left, the cars behind them get stuck or cause an accident.
City officials hope that the plan — which calls for reducing the lanes to one each way, with a turning lane in the middle — will make everyone safer. A bonus of this is that they’ll have the room to add raised bike lanes on either side of the road.
Yes, after MORE than a year, and with the help of “community partners”, THIS is the big idea they are rolling out to the public. Will travel time increase because of this “improvement”? Here’s the hilarious answer (emphasis mine):
When MTN News first brought you this plan last week, we saw a lot of comments on our social media pages from people worried that this plan will exacerbate rush hour traffic jams.
Planners say the maximum delay from Brooks all the way to Broadway would be about 50 to 140 seconds longer. We talked with planner Aaron Wilson back in the Spring, who said this plan is the best way to encourage sustainable transportation and reduce accidents.
Are you satisfied, public? Or are you scratching your public head trying to figure out if this is serious or some kind of joke. Because I don’t think it’s a joke, I think it’s part of a plan behind the plan, which you can get a peek of in the jubilation expressed that 11 cities are joining the CAR-FREE REVOLUTION! You have to scroll through a bunch of European cities before seeing what’s going on in Tempe, Arizona:
If you want to live in a new development called Culdesac—built by a company that calls itself the world’s first post-car real estate developer—you’ll have to agree not to own a car. The new neighborhood, which is scheduled to open this fall, includes some basic amenities onsite, such as a grocery store, restaurants, and a gym. It’s also near a light rail station that takes commuters to downtown Tempe. The development doesn’t block off cars completely, and visitors have a place to park. But allowing for fewer cars means that neighborhood now has more room for green space, bike lanes, and even a dog park.
Does bad weather ever happen in these imaginary utopias? Of course not. That’s why they’re utopias. I do like the child staring at the kite, that’s a nice touch.
Now, to wrap this post up, I have a special song about bridges to share. I hope you enjoy it, and please consider making a donation at my about page if you appreciate this content.
I’m writing this post at 4am this morning because the tech-platform I use to bring Zoom Chron to you (WordPress) wouldn’t let me start a new post last night, which is kinda ironic considering the topic today is a critical look at a technology platform that emerged as one of many alternatives to the censorship of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
Before I get going on this, I’d like to note my criticism of Rokfin is not meant to be criticism of the content creators (unless they deserve it) who are using and benefiting from this online media product. While I was a paying subscriber at $9.99 a month, I benefitted from the information I got from the creators I respected, and I hope they can continue to benefit from the illusion of a censorship-free platform just like I hope my little girl will one day benefit from seeing a real unicorn.
When I left a consistent paycheck in the spring of 2020 it’s because cancel culture had already come for me in 2018 when I wrote a poem about sidewalks. Actually, that’s not accurate. I was cancelled from the first blog I contributed to–the progressive 4&20 Blackbirds–so I guess you could say I was cancelled before cancelling became an official thing.
For a more objective idea about what we’re talking about, Wikipedia actually has a page on Cancel Culture that describes the phenomenon like this:
Cancel culture or call-out culture is a phrase contemporary to the late 2010s and early 2020s used to refer to a form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been “cancelled”. The expression “cancel culture” has mostly negative connotations and is used in debates on free speech and censorship.
Instead of continuing to take shit from our local cabal in order to keep a paycheck, I decided to tell the occupied territory known as the “non-profit sector” to go fuck itself (figuratively speaking) in order to start something of my own. What started happening in March of 2020 only further convinced me of the critical importance of information and how it’s disseminated.
I applied to be a content creator on Rokfin near the end of 2020, after taking the terrifying leap of leaving what I’ve known for a decade, but my application wasn’t accepted. Fair enough, I thought at the time. This new platform is just being careful to cultivate its stable of creators, and I was an unknown newbie in an already over-saturated podcast market.
No one needs a digital platform to create things. They need platforms if they want OTHER PEOPLE to see and experience what they’ve created beyond conventional methods, like publishing physical books, or playing live music. Before Trump’s election psychologically broke the minds of half the county, cancel culture hadn’t metastasized to what it is today. When the unthinkable happened, the ends of stopping orange man justified all the means, as the Twitter Files so clearly demonstrates (for those who needed the proof).
I forged ahead creating things, as my archive clearly shows. Not only did I facilitate the creation of a lengthy and VERY informative documentary about Tax Increment Financing, called Engen’s Missoula, I also doubled my views by consistently publishing daily content at 7am Monday through Friday, with usually one post for the weekend.
On the podcast front I thought I was making some good connections, having made appearances on popular podcasts like Tin Foil Hat with Sam Tripoli, but then I ran afoul of his booking dude, Mark Steeves, because my theory that we never leave high school needed to be reaffirmed.
Why did I want to get on a Sam Tripoli show? Well, I wanted to provide context to a picture I was getting prepared to disclose, a picture I had thought of disseminating with a clue about its significance, the clue being a caption which would read SELMA PICTURED WITH GOD.
I’m going to share that picture now. Here it is:
I won’t say anything else about this image yet. Instead I’ll remind our placeholder Mayor about my brief chat with him before he got selected in a dark alley, a chat about the organization he’s a board member of and the things that haven’t been done to start making things right for the family of the man pictured above.
Did you hear me, Mayor, or do I need to provide my own amplification?
The stories getting amplified these days, even when ostensibly amplified to right the wrong of historic oppression, are only creating the ILLUSION of inclusivity, just like Rokfin is banking on you believing their brand is free of censorship.
One great example of this illusion is an exclusive Spotify podcast called STOLEN, created by Connie Walker. I follow Walker on Twitter and saw how the most recent iteration of this series is doing, and it seems to be doing pretty damn well!
Before Walker used her own family history for podcast material to benefit her platform enablers at Spotify, she used the Jermain Charlo family, and it was quite the popular podcast as well. So popular it was being used as EDUCATIONAL material in my kids school, and I had a problem with that. Thankfully the argument I made against the use of this podcast was heard, and I found out last week that it will NO LONGER BE USED in the classroom (I’ll have more on this in a later post).
I’d like to share victories like these with larger audiences because I think Missoula is a fascinating microcosm of the larger forces we are all struggling with, but the barriers to breaking narrative control are significant, so I’ll need all the help I can get if I’m going to make my journalistic presence felt in Helena during the legislative session next year.
I was a guest on a local podcast earlier this week and it was great to record a long conversation about the work I’m doing in Zoom Town. There are definitely people who understand what’s at stake, and what needs to happen, but we need more people stepping up and finding what they can contribute to make an impact in their own backyards, where it counts.
If a monetary donation is something you think YOU can contribute, my about page is the place to do it. I just got a wonderful donation in a very specific dollar amount that made me smile (thanks RR!).
So stay tuned, because the solution to censorship isn’t going to be handed to you through a screen, it’s something you have to actively make happen, and then MAINTAIN, by caring MORE about the truth than views, status and monetary compensation.
