County Attorney says Crime Last Week was Busiest of the Year

Last week was the busiest week of the year for law enforcement agencies responding to crimes, with 26 total felony charges filed, said Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst on Friday’s Talk Back show.

“We charged a strangulation and a PFMA (Partner or Family Member Assault),” said Pabst. “Five of those involved violence amongst people who are not related. In one case, we charged an assault on a minor, an aggravated assault that involved an altercation between a child, a wife and a dad and their neighbors over a dog that was barking, and that deteriorated quite quickly. We charged another assault with a weapon, an aggravated assault and then two more assault with a weapon cases.”

Pabst said there was also a troubling case of a man who was on his way to have relations with what he thought was a 13 year-old minor.

“We charged one sex crime, and the allegation is sexual abuse of children,” she said. “There was no actual victim. The defendant allegedly went to a location to meet with a fictional 13 year old girl to engage in sexual activity.”

Pabst said there were many non-violent crimes as well.

“There were five new property crimes,” she said. “Three of them involved a group of folks, a family that allegedly were going around town breaking into mailboxes, both locked and unlocked and using checks cash and sensitive identification information that that was taken from those mailboxes.”

She said there were also a number of drug related crimes.

“In the drug category we charged nine,” she said. “There was one heroin case, two methamphetamine cases and two that involved both meth and heroin. And finally, last but not least, we charged failure to give notice of change of address by a sexual or violent offender. In that case, the defendant was allegedly a non-compliant sex offender who had been convicted out of the state of Colorado for soliciting a child.”

Pabst admitted that a large majority of the crimes prosecuted by her office have some sort of connection with illegal drugs, most often methamphetamine.