Missoula Crime Report: Stopping a Man From Stealing a Plane

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - The Missoula County Attorney’s Office filed 14 new felony complaints this week, which is seven less than last week and right around the weekly average. According to County Attorney Matt Jennings, they had a variety of charges this week.

“We had nine violent crimes and that is quite a bit,” Jennings said. “We only had two endangerment crimes. That's probably about average, maybe a little bit low. Those are usually related to driving behavior, DUIs, and kids being in the car sometimes.”

Jennings said we only had one property crime.

“You may remember that we kind of had a property crime explosion post-COVID,” Jennings said. “Around 2021 through 2023, we were seeing a lot of burglaries, high-value shoplifting, and stuff like that. It feels like we've been seeing less and we'll run some data here soon to see if that's true or not.”

There were two drug crimes as well. Jennings also wanted to highlight an attempted airplane theft that occurred last week.

“A guy was able to run past TSA agents and actually get onto an airplane at the Missoula airport,” Jennings said. “Of course, that's a crime that we take extremely seriously in this post 9/11 world. That's very terrifying. I do want the public to rest assured that there were actually no weapons involved. There was nothing like a bomb. It's both extremely serious because of the nature of it and the fear that it can cause with people, but there wasn't anybody in serious danger of things that you can contemplate.”

Jennings went on to praise the two female airline workers who stepped in the way of the person and tried to stop him from getting on the plane and into the cockpit.

“These women really demonstrated amazing courage and fortitude trying to stand up to this person while not knowing exactly what was going on,” Jennings said. “Obviously, it's so unfortunate they got injured, but their courage is also just really inspiring to me. I'm constantly amazed when we see crimes like this or something bad happening, and how many good people also really step up and surround that nasty incident with a lot of upstanding citizenry.”

Jennings acknowledged that this was a scary incident, but he was also inspired by how some people stepped up to make sure nothing else happened.

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: