How long could I handle the Juneteenth festivities at Fort Missoula today? That was one of the questions I sought to answer on this 19th day of June. The other question I posed to the Missoula Organization of Realtors, but you’re gonna have to wait until tomorrow to find out if having gay sex improves one’s chances of getting into subsidized housing.
The answer to the first question turned out to be less than 10 minutes. Why? Because first this race-shaming twat attempted a polite hello, then I saw our placeholder Mayor. Maybe it was the vigorous biking and lack of food, but seeing these two white men had me suddenly feeling nauseous.
I had two conversations at this POLITICAL event for our placeholder Mayor. One was with a young woman who looked like a reporter, but was actually doing some marketing work for the University of Montana. The other was with Martin Charlo and some white dude who I’m sure is important.
Here’s an image of Martin Charlo I screen-shot for this post about Dave Strohmaier’s train obsession:
I asked Martin Charlo and the white guy if they had ever heard the name Sean Stevenson or Johnny Lee Perry. They had not, so I gave them a quick education about those two dead black men, in addition to mentioning the mysterious deaths of Joey Thompson and Rebekah Barsotti.
That was all I could handle, so I left the event to give Sean’s sister an update on the maddening antics of Missoula’s politically opportunistic virtue signalers, then I biked to the Big Dipper, where our Mayor announced his candidacy to get elected FOR REAL, for some ice cream.
This delicious espresso ice cream milkshake was just what I needed to give me the fortitude for my gay sex inquiry at MOR, but not before I educated the ice-cream slingers about dead black men in Missoula on this PROUD Juneteenth day celebrating FREEDOM!
My day of productive inquiries was done by 2pm, so I had time to put toward working on my own personal housing challenges AND the fun fact TWO cars decided to stop working for me now! It’s a good thing I’m such an adept user of multi-modal transportation!
If you would like to help keep me from joining the urban camping hordes, please consider supporting Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or making a donation at my about page. Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for tomorrow’s very colorful post about rainbows.
I wasn’t planning on walking a good length of the river where Joey Thompson’s body was supposedly found by a private property owner between the Tarkio boat launch site and the Forrest Grove boat launch, but since my attempt to make public comment at the MINERAL County Commissioner meeting wasn’t successful (they start at 10am now, not 11), I wanted to salvage SOMETHING from my trip to Superior, Montana.
The area I’ve been wanting to check out is difficult to access, so I parked near this interstate bridge that spans the Clark Fork river and started walking upstream. What I found creeped me out.
Footage of my exploration can be found further down. But first, here are the other posts I’ve written so far that reference this case:
This image shows some structures on the north side of I-90 where the cattle raised on this land are tended to. Since my upbringing was of the suburban-brat variety, I’m not sure what it takes to raise cattle, or to test sick animals for diseases, like chronic wasting.
Would a rancher, for example, cut a hole in the head of a young calf to test its brain for Chronic Wasting Disease? Or would a hunter do the same for a deer? And, after getting a brain sample, would they just leave the head behind?
I’m asking these specific questions because I found the skull of an animal with a hole clearly cut into it, a hole that appears sawed by human hands. Here’s a picture:
See the hole? You can’t miss it, and it looks like whoever made it knew what they were doing. I’m trying really hard not to jump to ANIMAL SACRIFICE because I think there are probably more plausible explanations.
In an attempt to find a less nefarious reason for the hole in the skull, I did a brief search and found a little context from a Wisconsin government website on how hunters can take samples from their kills in order to test for Chronic Wasting Disease. It does, indeed, have something to do with the head. From the link (emphasis mine):
While I investigate cases of people who have died in Western Montana under mysterious circumstances (notice the lack of racial/social qualifiers), our local media and criminal justice pretenders, like Jesse Laslovich, are making themselves appear important and competent by discussing HATE CRIMES.
From the link (emphasis mine):
Anti-LGBTQ+ laws swept the nation during the last round of state legislative sessions, but hate against LGBTQ+ individuals in Montana is documented locally, too.
“We haven’t just had national and international incidents grounded in hate,” Montana U.S. Attorney Jesse Laslovich said at the panel, hosted at the University of Montana’s Alexander Blewett III Law School. “We’ve experienced them right here, in Montana, as there’s been an increase in hateful rhetoric against historically marginalized groups, such as our LGBTQ+ community members.
“With the recently concluded Montana legislative session, new laws have targeted transgender youth and the drag communities.”
Missoula Rep. Zooey Zephyr, one of Montana’s first transgender lawmakers, was censured in the recent legislative session, and homophobic neo-Nazis showed up to Missoula’s Trans Day of Visibility in March.
I have to be VERY careful with my frustration here because there are personal implications with what I know about an investigation at the state level on the back-burner with personal ties to our U.S. Attorney. That’s why I won’t detail ALL the calls I made last Thursday, I’ll just mention that Travis Spinder (Montana Crime Lab) and Kyler Nerison (Montana AG Office) both received voicemails from me about what is NOT happening in the Joey Thompson case.
Before wrapping this post up with my video report from the banks of the Clark Fork River, I’ll include one more quote from the HATE CRIME article, because it includes the detective I spoke to recently about what I think this graffiti means:
Here’s the quote (emphasis mine):
Missoula Police Detective Ethan Smith serves at the department’s LGBTQ+ Community Liaison.
Smith said he monitors social media posts and decides what to focus resources on.
“My biggest concern, of course, is if there’s going to be something dynamic, it’s going to happen at an event like this,” Smith said of Missoula’s Pride events. “So we do investigate that stuff.”
It looks like I talked to the right detective. At least I hope I did. Now, here’s the video:
