County Attorney Addresses Serious Hate Crime in Missoula

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 11 new felony complaints this week, which is eight fewer than last week and less than the weekly average. County Attorney Matt Jennings provided this week’s report.

“Four of those were violent crimes; that's a little bit below average,” Jennings said. “We had one endangerment crime, which was driving under the influence, fifth offense, and had some fleeing and eluding from law enforcement when they tried to stop him. We had two property crimes and four drug crimes, rounding out that 11.”

Jennings mentioned that there was one case this week that he wanted to highlight.

“We had a very tragic and unfortunate situation where a person was near downtown with a Star of David tattoo on his arm and another person who identified himself as a Nazi approached him and picked a fight with him over his ethnicity and religious beliefs and ended up beating him pretty severely because of his Jewish heritage,” Jennings said.

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Jennings said they take these offenses very seriously.

“By all means, people can have various beliefs, even some of them can be distasteful in society, but if people act out in hateful manner like that, if they hurt somebody because of their religious beliefs or their political beliefs or something else, we have a couple things that we call hate crime enhancements in the state of Montana,” Jennings said. “We will use those, and we will prosecute them vigorously to the full extent of the law. That's what we're doing in this case because that type of behavior is extremely harmful, not only to the individuals who are hurt, but to our free society in this democracy as well. That's a case that we're going to put a lot of resources into.”

The Missoula County Attorney’s Office provides a weekly crime report every Friday morning at 9:00 on Talk Back.