TC made a good comment on my post yesterday.
“I will tip my hat to KGVO however. If one wants to truly see what is happening in Missoula it is the only site that pulls the curtain back.”
KGVO really digs into the shit, er…police reports. I visited the site today, and guess what?
Another crazy-woman post! We’ve been getting a lot of these lately.
Let’s tell the story of today’s crazy-woman.
Amy Hout was born in 1975…somewhere.
We don’t know much about her early life, her loves, her interests, her hopes or her dreams.
All we know is that something went terribly wrong for Amy in the mid-2010s. Perhaps it was a divorce, a mid-life crisis, maybe a death of a loved one.
Something sent her spiraling over the edge shortly after turning 40.
By 2017 she had the first run in with the law that we know of.
Something happened, she got a misdemeanor. No big deal…but she didn’t show up to court.
So the cops show up at her house and arrest her for failure to appear. Three months later she’s arrested for the same thing. She looks defiant in her mugshot, like she knows - and is - better than everyone else.
Three months later she’s busted for theft. It’s just ten days before Christmas.
A little over a month later she’s busted for theft again. This time in her mugshot she’s smiling defiantly. Then five months later she’s busted for a third theft offense, as well as a failure to appear on the first two.
A year goes by. Perhaps Amy is in jail or prison during this time…we don’t know.
We do know that in the summer of 2019 she’s arrested on four counts with an extra jurisdictional warrant as well as another failure to appear. Sounds like she’d run off to another state. But she couldn’t escape her problems. In this mugshot she actually looks sorry.
Three months later Amy is arrested for trying to strangle a partner or family member, her first offense, as well as trying to tamper with the person’s phone. She looks like hell in her mugshot.
Two years go by where we don’t hear from Amy. She’s probably doing time at this point, likely in the women’s prison in Billings.
Then in August 2021 she’s arrested for misdemeanor assault. She looks high as fuck.
Two months later she’s busted on an aggravated burglary charge. That means she had a weapon on her.
Exactly one month later she’s arrested for burglary again.
Nearly a year went by where Amy stayed out of trouble. Then the other night at the Pov she pulled a metal stake out, put it to someone’s throat, and threatened to kill the person and everyone around.
In Amy’s mugshot this time, she looks defeated.
Perhaps she knows this is the last straw, that she’ll be doing some serious time in Billings this go-round.
Or maybe she’s frustrated, knowing she’ll be out again soon to make the same mistakes, to add mugshot #11 to the collection.
It’s hard to say who Amy Hout is or what her goals or motivations or dreams and desires are. I don’t think she could tell you anymore.
It seems like meth or heroin or fentanyl got into her life, perhaps all three. Maybe she had an abusive family or husband or series of boyfriends. It’s likely she never caught a break. It’s likely she never will.
But she did commit a lot of crimes and hurt a lot of people. She got a lot of second chances.
It’s hard to say what the cost of someone like Amy is to Missoula or society at large. We do know that she committed a series of crimes one atop the other and was quickly released back into the community.
This was June, September and December of 2017 and then January and June of 2018. Five clear indications this woman was heading out of control, likely due to drugs, and no one was there to stop her.
The same thing happened recently leading up to this week’s felony incident. October and November 2021 and now August 2022.
What the hell are our judges doing?!?
I don’t know.
I don’t know if we’ll see another mugshot of Amy down the line sometime. Maybe we’ll just get a short obit telling us she’s dead.
Or maybe she’ll turn her life around this time. Let us hope.