Missoula Crime Report: Back to Back Jury Trials This Week

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 13 new felony complaints this week, which is two more than last week and slightly less than the weekly average. According to County Attorney Matt Jennings, seven of those were violent crimes. 

“We break down our violent crime category every week,” Jennings said. “We had three family violence events this week. Those were all basically domestic violence. We had two non-family violence or robbery charges and we had two sexual assaults that were charged this week. We also had four property crimes and we had two drug crimes.” 

In addition to the new cases this week, Jennings said there were two jury trials that he wanted to highlight. 

“This week, we had two very similar trials,” Jennings said. “The first of which was one individual had threatened to kill a doctor and various people in her practice back in 2023 because he was frustrated with his medical care. That person went through a trial that started on Tuesday and he was convicted of intimidation. The day after that, while that first trial was still going on, another trial started with a man named Valentino Vanderbilt.” 

Jennings said he was a fugitive out of California who had been in a shootout with law enforcement and was out on $1,000,000 bail.  

“When our local law enforcement went to place him under arrest, he started making various threats to kill the law enforcement officers and spit on them,” Jennings said. “His trial overlapped with the first one and he was also convicted of three different charges, including intimidation, threats of improper influence, and assault with a bodily fluid for spitting on the officers.” 

READ MORE: Missoula News - Crime Reports

Jennings said the First Amendment protects people to have any opinions they want. 

“They can even say mean things,” Jennings said. “They can be frustrated, they can criticize, but we do take it very seriously when people have what is called the law true threats when they indicate that they have access to firearms, they articulate a specific plan to cause harm to somebody, and they explain essentially a motive of why they do it. We do take these cases once in a while. But the good news is, and this is just anecdotally, it does feel like they've been a little bit less over the last year or so.” 

The Missoula County Attorney’s Office provides a weekly crime report every Friday morning at 9:00 on Talk Back. You can listen to Jennings’s full report below: