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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>You Still Here? Sunday, January 7, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

You Still Here? Sunday, January 7, 2024

 If this doesn't make you look forward to the next Olympics, nothing will...

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Business & Tourism

Tourism

The Maverik gas station in Montrose, Colorado, can’t sell any diesel after someone dumped an RV’s waste tank into the station’s underground diesel supply.

The incident happened sometime on Monday, and a woman who answered the phone at the Montrose Maverik station on Tuesday confirmed that someone had dumped an RV waste tank into its underground diesel storage tank.

She said the pumps “are shut down right now,” that the store was busy, and hung up.

Cowboy State Daily hasn’t been able to confirm the status of the situation at the Montrose Maverik since that call. Subsequent calls weren’t answered.

Evan Peters shared details of the incident in the Facebook group Montrose Message Board.

“They dumped into the large manhole covers near the road directly into the diesel tank,” he wrote. “They have a dedicated dump at the larger pumps, but I guess someone decided to undo the manhole and dump there.”

To add insult to injury, Peters said a cashier at the Montrose Maverik told him the station had “just gotten a new delivery of diesel.”

Now, they’ll have to pump everything out of the tank and thoroughly clean it before it’s operational.

That’s what happens when someone’s No. 2 becomes someone else’s No. 1 problem.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Necessary Evil"}]

Bill Sniffin, an avid RV enthusiast and Cowboy State Daily columnist, said emptying an RV’s waste tank is “a necessary evil of RVing.”

“Let me tell you, it’s not fun,” he said. “It's usually a two-person operation, and it’s pretty darn rank.”

When Sniffin heard about the incident at the Montrose Maverik, he said it was “almost unbelievable.” 

He couldn’t see how anyone could confuse an RV dump station for the portal leading to a diesel fuel tank, regardless of how the gas station is situated.

“The dump stations are very obvious,” he said. “They’ll have signs all over the place, and it’s very self-explanatory.”

When people rent or buy RVs, they might not anticipate that anything that’s flushed down the on-board toilet needs to be emptied, usually every week or so. It’s the least glamorous part of traveling via RV.

“You can’t hire anybody to do it for you,” Sniffin said. “Luckily, I've got a wife who's a pretty good sport about it, but I have to admit that I have many pictures of her standing over the tank, holding her nose, and trying not to yuck.”

When discussing the Montrose incident, Sniffin kept referencing the 2006 film “RV” starring the late Robin Williams. In the movie, Williams plays an oblivious dad who rents an RV for a fun family vacation.

There’s a particular scene where Williams’s character has to empty the RV’s waste tank. Williams used his comedic genius to make the most of the all-too-relatable moment.

“He doesn’t know how to do it, so of course it explodes into a brown Old Faithful,” Sniffin said. “Anybody who's ever been in the RV business looks at that scene, cringes, and says, ‘For the grace of God, go sweet, those hoses better not pop loose.”

Sniffin has never had an incident as severe as depicted in “RV.” His worst experience was when one of the hoses he used to empty the waste tank split in the hot sun.

[{"type":"text","text":"“It was a helluva mess,” he said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Black Then Gray (In That Order)"}]

RVs have two notable tanks that need to be emptied regularly. The gray water tank holds the water used for sinks and showers, and the black water tank holds the smelly stuff.

According to Sniffin, an experienced RVer knows they need to empty the black tank before the gray tank.

“You have two valves and one hose,” he said. “The routine is to do the black valve first, so all the really bad stuff is gone, then you do the gray valve to rinse out all the stuff as it goes down.”

Where can you empty the black tank? It can be more logistically challenging than many people, especially first-time RVers, realize.

Most RV campsites have waste tank dump sites, either a singular designated spot or one at each hookup, if it’s a full-service site. RVers on the road can empty their black water tanks at fairgrounds, truck stops, and water treatment plants, usually for a fee.

Some gas stations, including Maverik, have dump stations available for free. 

They’re usually clearly marked, with lots of signage telling RVers of all stripes exactly where to back up and bail out their black water tanks.

That comes with a certain risk, as the Montrose Maverik discovered this week.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Everyone Has Stories"}]

Andrea Wood, general manager at the Devils Tower/Black Hills KOA campground, has an RV waste tank dump station at her campground. However, it’s only available to “registered campers.”

“They can reserve a water and electric site, which means they use our dump station, or they are in a full hookup site, which means they hook directly to the sewer system.”

Anyone else who asks to swing in and use their dump station is directed to the Crook County Fairgrounds in Sundance. It’s best not to take chances.

“Anyone who works at a campground will have fecal matter stories for you,” she said. “It is not a daily occurrence, but it happens with frequency, without question.”

Wood couldn’t recall a particularly “exciting” incident at the Devils Tower/Black Hills KOA campground, although there’s nothing exciting about it.

According to her, the most common problem is people “emptying their black water tanks into whatever hole they can find.”

“Not only is it inconvenient and gross, but it's a biohazard,” she said. “The cleanup is never much fun, but it's also a safety concern.”

That said, there’s a particular demographic that’s the most problematic. Nearly every incident Wood could recall involved inexperienced RVers who were “unaware” of what they were doing.

“Lots of people buy or rent campers thinking it's going to be a fun vacation thing, but they don't truly grasp the maintenance and what's required to take a rig down the road,” she said.

Sometimes, people dump their black water tanks in the first spot they find. Sometimes, they don’t even wait for a promising pipe.

“Some people don't bother to put their black water tubing into the sewer hole, and have dumped it straight onto the ground,” Wood said. “Other times, they found something alongside the road that looked like it might work for them and pumped their things into that. 

"It's always amazing to us where they choose to dump, because it's really, it's quite simple.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Unbelievably Newbie'"}]

Sniffin’s guess was that whoever was responsible for the incident was “unbelievably newbie.” They would have had to unscrew the lid to the subterranean fuel tank, insert their hose into it, and let ‘er rip.

“It’s almost unbelievable,” he said. “The whole process is so unpleasant that it's bad enough, but then doing it in the wrong place is just unbelievable to me.”

Wood shared the assessment that the perpetrator was probably a first-time or inexperienced RVer. However, she added that many RV mishaps are caused by foreign tourists who have even less experience with RVs than the average American.

“We get lots of German and French travelers that travel with Cruise America, and they are frequently very unfamiliar with the RVs,” she said. “It's just about knowing and understanding the rig that they're driving and being able to use it the way it's meant to be used, which many don’t.”

Regardless of their experience or ethnicity, the person who made the mistake in Montrose just made their vacation a lot more expensive.

Sniffin, who used to work at a gas station, knows how laborious and meticulous it is to maintain fuel tanks. Correcting the mistake at the Montrose Maverik will be costly and time-consuming.

“I can't imagine the process they're going to have to go through to clean that tank out,” he said. “The whole process of dumping fuel into a fuel tank is very antiseptic. 

"The people driving those trucks make sure not a speck of dirt or anything gets into the tanks or the hose there because that could ultimately mess up a car.”

The Montrose Maverik will have to empty and thoroughly clean the underground diesel tank, along with all the associated filters, pumps, and hoses, before refilling it.

“It's going to be very expensive,” Sniffin said. “If you make that kind of mistake, you are in an unbelievable world of hurt.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Never Never Land"}]

Most people don’t have issues emptying their RV’s black water tank. Wood thinks it’s incredibly simple.

“There's literally only one spot to do it, and all that’s there is a PVC pipe with a cap on it,” she said. “You take the cap off, put your sewer hose in there, and that's where it goes.”

Wood could believe that someone would mistake a fuel tank for an RV dump station, as incredulous as she was that anyone could get that far without realizing what they were doing. 

For her, it’s a reminder that people need to understand RVs before renting or buying one.

“If you're going to use the bathroom in your camper, that goes somewhere,” she said. “It doesn't just disappear into Never Never Land. All of that raw sewage has to go somewhere, and it’s your responsibility to do that the right way at the right spot.”

RV and Montrose Maverik 5 27 26

<title>RV Driver Empties Waste Tank Into Colorado Gas Station's Diesel Supply | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Colorado Maverik station can’t sell any diesel after someone dumped an RV’s waste tank into the station’s underground diesel supply tank this week. One avid RVer said the mistake is “almost unbelievable … the dump stations are very obvious."

RV Driver Empties Waste Tank Into Colorado Gas Station's Diesel Supply

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's managing editor, Greg Johnson.

Greg Johnson

Crime & Courts

CHEYENNE — For those wondering how a dog could pull off shooting a woman with a shotgun while stopped for gas in Nebraska, the answer is simple — it pulled the trigger.

That’s the only way a loaded, properly functioning shotgun could go off, said Arthur Huckfeldt and Ryan Allen at Frontier Arms and Supply in Cheyenne.

[{"type":"text","text":"Simply bumping or jostling a shotgun won’t set it off, said Huckfeldt."}]

“That’s impossible. The trigger has to be manipulated,” he told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday while demonstrating with a shotgun in the East Lincolnway gun shop.

If someone were to say their shotgun went off because it was knocked over or kicked around by a dog, “that someone is lying out their ass,” he added. “That wouldn’t do it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘Heard A Shotgun Blast’"}]

Huckfeldt and Allen, who owns the shop, were weighing in on the question people are asking after a Saturday incident when a dog shifting in the back seat of a truck parked at a convenience store fired a loaded shotgun.

The blast put a hole through the front passenger door of the truck, and a single pellet traveled to a nearby intersection, hitting a woman in a car parked at a stoplight.

“The owner of the truck had pulled into the convenience store to purchase merchandise,” says the Scottsbluff Police Department in a statement about the incident.

“While the passenger of the truck was standing near the front passenger side door, a dog in the back seat moved from one side of the vehicle to the other,” the statement says. “During that movement, the dog triggered a shotgun that had a live shell in the chamber, causing the firearm to discharge.”

Craig Grass owns the Short Stop gas station and convenience store, and was working when the dog fired the shotgun. He told Cowboy State Daily that he heard the blast and knew right away what it was.

“The people (who came in the truck) were in the store shopping and the wife went outside,” he said. “They thought they heard a shotgun blast, but nobody really knew for sure. Then they saw the door had a hole in it.”

The blast through the door was toward the gas pumps, Grass said, adding that he wasn’t worried pellets from the shotgun would touch off an explosion.

“The pumps are safe and really well-built,” he said. “It’s not like in the movies where you touch it and it blows up. There’s a lot of safety built into those pumps, they cost a lot and there wasn’t really any danger.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘Put It In The Case’"}]

While answering how a dog can fire a shotgun is easy — pull the trigger, remember? — there are a lot of missing variables in the Nebraska scenario, both Huckfeldt and Allen said.

The Scottsbluff Police Department didn’t respond to a Cowboy State Daily request for more information, like the breed and size of the dog, model of the shotgun, and whether the gun had a safety that was activated.

While they have no clue about those first two nuggets of information, Huckfeldt and Allen both said if the safety was on, the gun wouldn’t have gone off.

“If a 60-pound dog engaged with that trigger, it’d go off, like if it catches a claw or pad in that trigger guard,” Allen said.

[{"type":"text","text":"It would only take about 3-5 pounds of pressure, added Huckfeldt."}]

Even then, “I would think it would be really hard for a dog to shoot a shotgun,” he said. “The dog would have to have a small (paw) pad, unless it was a small dog. But that’s just a lot of conjecture.”

Both agree that what happened Saturday at the Short Stop in Scottsbluff was “very unusual.”

[{"type":"text","text":"“But Nebraska’s weird,” Huckfeldt added."}]

While it’s fun to joke about a dog shooting a shotgun, it’s only so because nobody was seriously hurt. One thing the Cheyenne gun experts said they know for sure is that if the shotgun had been stored properly in the back seat of the truck, it wouldn’t have fired.

“If you have firearms, they should be secured, put it in the case or in a rack,” Allen said. “Not haphazardly lying around in the back seat.”

He said the lesson here is, “Don’t be a dum-dum, or as my dad would say, don’t be a shithead.”

Shotgun pressure Frontier Arms and Supply 5 27 26

<title>Dog Shoots Woman With Shotgun At Scottsbluff, Nebraska Convenience Store | Cowboy State Daily</title>

For those wondering how a dog shot a woman with a shotgun in Nebraska this past weekend, gun experts say it pulled the trigger. If someone says the shotgun went off because it was knocked over or kicked around by a dog, they are "lying out their ass."

Dog Shoots Woman With Shotgun At Scottsbluff, Nebraska Convenience Store

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's general assignment reporter, Clair McFarland.

Clair McFarland

Courts

A local woman is suing the Green River Police Department and Wyoming Department of Family Services officials on claims she 

 a malicious child abuse prosecution last year. She was arrested for DUI one day before her lawsuit was filed. 

 to wake her 5-year-old sister Annabelle, who lay on their babysitter's couch in Kemmerer with her pulse fading after a brutal beating.

Annabelle died hours later from injuries the girls’ babysitter, Cheri Marler, inflicted on her with her hands, feet, and a wooden spoon.

 more than a year later, and a judge sentenced Marler to life in prison without parole.

Investigators at the time observed numerous injuries on the 4-year-old as well, court documents say. 

 with her foster mother Vallory Dodson, and Dodson’s husband.

[{"type":"text","text":"Dodson was not involved in the Kemmerer incident. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Bruises And A Black Eye"}]

An evidentiary affidavit filed in December 2024 in Sweetwater County Circuit Court says the girl’s teacher in Green River voiced concerns that autumn about bruises, a black eye covered with thick makeup, and a broken arm sustained by the then-kindergarten-age girl.

The girl told Green River Police Department Detective Martha Holzgrafe that November that she’d tripped while walking. She also said she’d been hurt 

pushed on the playground, the affidavit says.

About five weeks later, the girl gave Holzgrafe another interview and said Dodson had grabbed her by the ribs and thrown her to the ground. 

By then, says a court filing from Dodson's counsel, the state had placed the girl in her teacher's home. 

Sweetwater County Chief Criminal Deputy Attorney Micaela Lira charged Dodson with felony child abuse Dec. 20, 2024, and police arrested Dodson, who was reportedly 

Lira asked the court to dismiss the charge permanently the following June. 

She says she did so to guard against re-traumatizing the child by making her testify. 

“While preparing for trial, the state met with multiple individuals, witnesses, support members for the alleged victim, and the alleged victim herself,” wrote Lira in the June 5, 2025, motion to the Sweetwater County District Court. “

"After consultations with the alleged victim’s current caregivers (I find) any form of testifying in this matter would be detrimental to the 

 of the alleged victim and may (undo) the growth and healing she has 

District Court Judge Suzannah Robinson granted Lira’s request and dismissed the case the next day.

Lira reiterated her point in a Tuesday interview, telling Cowboy State Daily that the girl was emphatic about not testifying, “because if she did, it would bring back all the memories of what happened to her when she lived there.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Sweetwater County Attorney Daniel Erramouspe echoed that."}]

“What we put in the motion is accurate,” he said. “It wasn’t something we did lightly. There are rare occasions where that’s actually the case — where testifying is absolutely worse than what would have happened (otherwise). You know, than getting justice in this particular case.”

The prosecutors filed that motion to dismiss the charge about one year before the Wyoming Legislature passed a law allowing children in cases of violence to testify via a video link and bring comfort objects or a therapy dog into the courtroom with them.  

Now Dodson is suing the city of Green River, the Wyoming Department of Family Services, and various officials, saying authorities undertook her arrest and prosecution without probable cause and violated her rights.

Her civil complaint alleges a counterpoint to Lira’s motion, saying that, at least in DFS’s administrative handling of the incident, the child abuse case against Dodson lacked substance. 

The complaint says investigators didn’t request the girl’s medical records until months after filing the charge, and that multiple doctors opined that the girl’s broken arm was consistent with an injury sustained from falling.

The expert Dodson hired in her own case, Dr. Wade Jensen, reportedly said the break was most consistent with “a fall from a standing height.” 

The complaint says the emergency room doctor who'd tended the girl's broken arm did not report any abuse.  

[{"type":"text","text":"Little Did He Know"}]

Dodson’s attorney Jason Gay filed the civil complaint on her behalf in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming on May 11.

Gay didn’t know at the time, he told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday, that Dodson had been arrested on suspicion of driving drunk with a toddler in her car one day earlier.

“That was a coincidence in timing,” said Gay Tuesday. “The lawsuit had been pending for a while.”

He’d sent the state and the city drafts of the complaint before its filing, and before that arrest, Gay added.

As for the DUI charge, Gay noted that his client is 30, saw her now-dropped child abuse case spread via the media, and after a “long, drawn-out process… ultimately dismissed.”

He pointed to her relative lack of criminal history before the felony case was filed and the media attention followed. 

“And I think you’re seeing the impact that that can have on a person,” Gay added.

Dodson remained in the Sweetwater County Detention Center on a $30,000 bond as of Tuesday, the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office confirmed. Court documents claim she rear-ended a Toyota 4Runner while driving drunk in Rock Springs.

A woman in the 4Runner was temporarily hospitalized, and Dodson at first faced the felony of DUI causing a serious bodily injury – which carries a penalty of up to a decade in prison.

But Lira dropped that charge upon the realization that the victim’s injuries weren't serious enough to carry the charge, court documents say.

Still, Dodson faces three remaining charges of DUI with a child passenger, improperly buckling a child under 9 and following another vehicle too closely.

Dodson pleaded not guilty to those three charges May 20. She could face up to a year in prison and fines if convicted.

The alleged crash happened two days after Dodson pleaded guilty for breach of peace – in a case where she was originally charged in March with domestic battery, on claims she attacked her husband with his wristwatch after an argument about his inability to cook quinoa.

She had received six months' unsupervised probation in that case, with the threat of jail time if she failed probation.  

Dodson’s lawsuit accuses Green River Police Department officials of 

It accuses DFS officials of exacerbating that detention by disregarding evidence that didn’t support “their theory of abuse,” and it accuses investigators from both agencies of advancing a malicious prosecution against Dodson.

It also accuses DFS officials of abuse of process and violating Dodson’s rights.

It accuses officials from both agencies of conspiring against Dodson to interfere with her imminent adoption of the girl.

The civil complaint says Dodson took the 6-year-old girl to the emergency room on Oct. 17, 2024, due to pain in the girl’s right arm.

At that time, the girl had indicated another child at school pulled her arm, the complaint says. Dodson had been the girl’s foster parent and was finalizing her adoption of both that girl and the girl’s other, surviving sister.

The complaint says the doctor diagnosed the girl with an arm fracture. Because Dodson was a foster parent, the doctor reportedly contacted DFS to tell the agency about the diagnosis and gain authorization to perform a surgery on the girl.

One month later, Holzgrafe responded to the elementary school to investigate the girl’s black eye.

The girl said her eye was injured while she was playing with a dog, “and the Wyoming Department of Family Services later confirmed this to be the case,” the document says.

[{"type":"text","text":"School staff also told Holzgrafe about the girl’s October arm injury."}]

Both the girl and Dodson said the girl had injured her arm while walking home from the bus.

“Holzgrafe chose not to preserve the video and it was deleted by the school district,” the complaint alleges.

For a few weeks after the judge dismissed Dodson’s criminal case, Wyoming was still waging administrative child protection proceedings against her, court documents say.

But that ended that August when DFS declared its investigators’ findings “unsubstantiated,” the complaint adds. 

Dodson’s lawsuit accuses six people, all in their official capacities, of wrongdoing, as well as the city of Green River.

[{"type":"text","text":"Those six are:"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"• DFS Director Korin Schmidt"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"• Green River Police Chief Shaun Sturlaugson"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"• DFS social worker Victoria Collett"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"• DFS special investigator Cassie Torres"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"• DFS quality improvement manager Lisa Bauman-Brown."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The case is ongoing. "}]

20240526 green river 2088

<title>Green River Woman Sues Cops, DFS For Malicious Prosecution In Child Abuse Case | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Green River woman is suing police and child protection officials for malicious prosecution. Prosecutors charged her with child abuse, then dismissed the charge seven months later, saying they did not want to re-traumatize the child in court.

Green River Woman Sues Cops, DFS For Malicious Prosecution In Child Abuse Case

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Government & Politics

EVANSTON — Prometheus Hyperscale laid out a vision for its massive 1.2 gigawatt data center campus on a ranch east of town owned by native Trenton Thornock. It’s a place where cattle still graze and the residents prize open country and sky.  

That includes Thornock, the fifth-generation ranching family member told a packed room of Uinta County residents, many of whom are wary of becoming the next front in Wyoming’s data center boom.  

“Our family ranches here, and my great-great-grandmother homesteaded here down Bear River back in 1869,” Thornock said. “I started the company because I saw two things that were wrong with the data center industry. 

"They’re using way too much power for the amount of compute that they’re getting out and they’re using way too much water for cooling.”

Thornock said he started his company in 2020 with the idea of first innovating water cooling systems and doing things in a more sustainable way and second improving the economy of his home state.

Wyoming has struggled with outmigration of its youth, losing most of them by age 30 to other states. 

It’s a dynamic Thornock, as an Evanston graduate, said he's all too familiar with. He knows plenty of his Wyoming classmates who wanted to stay in Wyoming, but couldn’t find high enough paying jobs to support a family.

His thought was that data centers could be part of a new story that changes that dynamic.

That’s one of the reasons he settled on a “bring-your-own-power” approach. Because of severance taxes paid on every molecule of natural gas used, that would be the best way, he figured, to support the state.

“Instead of exporting all of this economic value from the gas that’s produced here in Wyoming like we’ve always done, the point is to consume that here, do the compute here, have the property taxes from these facilities here to support our tax base, to support our schools, and all the other county services,” he said. “That’s my reason for doing this project.”

Thornock’s data center would be built on family-owned ranch land near the Silver Eagle refinery.

This, he added, is not a case where some billionaire from far away is coming to buy up Wyoming land. This is a born-and-raised Wyomingite, wanting to make a difference for his home town.

Prometheus Hyperscale has faced a rising tide of opposition against data centers amid broader concerns gripping the state, following a surge of as many as 70 data centers headed for Cheyenne. 

The meeting Tuesday was informational to answer questions from Uinta County residents about the company’s plans — and they had plenty.

Fifth-generation Wyoming rancher Trenton Thornock pitched a huge 1.2 gigawatt data center on family land to a skeptical Evanston crowd on Tuesday. The project is facing a rising tide of opposition against data centers locally and across Wyoming.

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