It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, August 24th. I’m Mac Watson.
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Wyoming police are testing artificial intelligence to write reports and analyze evidence, but the rules of how that happens haven’t caught up. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that a former Wyoming attorney general has mixed reactions on it and said her concern is AI's ability to “hallucinate.”
“Technology that police in Evanston are experimenting with was actually created by a 20-year-old MIT student with his roommate in a college dorm room last year. However, former Attorney General Gay Woodhouse does have a few concerns. She says, although it may help officers save some time. There have been reports that AI hallucinates, and this is something that the founder does talk about a little bit. In AI terms, a hallucination is when the system generates information that sounds plausible and authoritative, but it's actually not backed by evidence. And the founder of Code Four, this company Evanston is experimenting with, acknowledges that AI is not perfect, and so the onus is really on the officer to review that narrative before signing off on it. It's not made to replace the officer; it's simply made to assist the officer.”
Woodhouse remembers federal investigations when prosecutors spent weeks combing through hundreds of hours of pole-camera video trained on suspected drug houses, searching for the few moments that mattered. Artificial intelligence could find those moments in minutes.
Read the full story HERE.
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An intense search in rugged territory in northern Campbell County this past week has found more evidence of 43-year-old Derek Schaff of Gillette, who has been missing more than two months. Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports that his sister-in-law says the discovery brings officials closer to “the answers our family so desperately needs.”
“He was last physically seen on June 12, and his vehicle was later found five days later on June 17. It was high centered on a road leading into the Weston Hills Recreational Area. Now it hasn't found him, of course. That's the question, where he is and what happened to him. But finding that additional evidence was helpful to know. Okay, he's definitely in here. It's just more evidence to point that he was there.”
Sgt. Gary Sams of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, confirmed Schaff’s presence in this area between his last sighting in Gillette on June 12 and when his girlfriend reported him missing on June 19 after he failed to return home. Downhill from the recovery site, the sheriff’s office found Schaff’s cellphone and other personal items.
Read the full story HERE.
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A couple accused of moving into a locked-up home and selling off the owner’s possessions allegedly told the homeowner they were squatters, they have rights, and he couldn’t do anything about it. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that’s when the owner called police and had the couple arrested.
“There's two people living there, and he notices a lot of his stuff is outside, and his vehicles have been moved, and all kinds of stuff. And so, what he discovers is, as he's going into the house, someone sees him coming, walking inside the house. They tell him repeatedly, ‘We have squatters' rights. We're not leaving, and you can't do anything about it.’ And so he called 911, and lo and behold, yeah, you can do something about it. They got arrested. It's an example of a new law that went into effect last year in 2025, what it does is it makes squatting a criminal offense. So when when people are squatting in your house in your property, if you can show that you know they're not real tenants. They're not former tenants. They're not family. They can arrest them for trespassing, and in this case, a lot more.”
Crystal Curiel (born in 1985) and Salvador Curiel-Aviles (born in 1986) were both detained at the scene on suspicion of burglary, the affidavit says. On Wednesday, the pair had their first appearance in Laramie County Circuit Court, and found out they each face the same trio of felony charges that include burglary, property destruction and theft.
Read the full story HERE.
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Kyle Berkshire sent a golf ball screaming above a windswept Rawlins golf course for 588.1 yards on Wednesday, breaking his own world record for distance. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that the record-breaking swing took the 29-year-old long-drive specialist from Maryland more than 200 swings to do it.
“On Wednesday afternoon, Berkshire launched a ball 588.1 yards. There were only a handful of people watching. He'd been trying it since Monday. He was kind of waiting on the winds to be in his favor. And after about 200 swings on Wednesday, he was able to beat his own record by about nine yards. Rochelle Ranch Golf Pro Kevin Gannon said that he went out, measured it, verified it. It is the longest drive in golf pro history, and he was excited that Berkshire was able to come and do it in Rawlins, Wyoming.”
Gannon tells Cowboy State Daily that long-drive competitors build their equipment and their swings around speed in ways that would make little sense during an ordinary round of golf. While powerful golfers generally gravitate toward stiff shafts, Berkshire has used a regular-flex shaft, creating an effect he compares to a whip.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll have more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily News continues now….
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On a hot August afternoon at the Deer Creek Lounge in Glenrock, a man named Nile is reflecting proudly on the time he clocked his 84-year-old brother in the mouth. Cowboy State Daily’s Zak Sonntag reports that stories like these are common inside the Deer Creek Lounge, where the politics are blood red, the conversations are delightfully profane, and the people are not the type of folk you want to cross.
“Why Nile clocked his brother is between Nile and his brother, but suffice it to say, he was unabashed and unequivocal about his contentious relationship with his brother. So I don't know what that battle was over, but what stuns me is he's literally limping from a hip replacement. He's got a crutch in one hand, he's got a cane in the other, and he's in the parking lot altercation with his brother, his older brother, who's 84 years-old at the time, and he picks this thing up like a baseball bat, and just knocks his teeth all over the parking lot. I don't know who's in the right or the wrong, but these are the type of folk that you are liable to run into at Deer Creek Lounge.”
Many institutions across Wyoming have slowly trended toward indoor smoking bans.
Not Deer Creek. All down the bar top lay packs of Sonoma-brand cigarettes, which this bunch prefers for a simple reason. They’re cheap.
Read the full story HERE.
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For Virginia-based PAC “Make Liberty Win” $479,000 of the $550,000 it spent helping Freedom Caucus-aligned candidates went to lost races. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that Sen. Cale Case, who was targeted by the group, said he was unsurprised.
“So that's an 87% failure rate. What they've done is, in the past, in the 2024 election, they sent out mailers that were not quite right. They'd have the wrong titles on people's names. They'd have wrong information, and then this year they sent out a huge deluge of mailers, including some attack ads. They spent more attacking Senator Cale Case than any other legislator, and he said that the prior push from 2024 probably inoculated the population against that kind of thing, so that this year people were wiser.”
Americans For Prosperity spent nearly $286,000 on Wyoming’s primary election cycle, but fared better on their political scoreboard.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Casper contractor has spent weeks trying to make a trashed house livable again, tearing out urine-soaked flooring, ripping down drywall and digging moldy cat food from clogged drains. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports there’s just one problem – the cats refuse to move out.
“Dustin Crapo says that the home was once repossessed, and then he was hired to come in and repair it. But when he walked in, he saw that there were seven litter boxes and what appeared to be abandoned cats living inside what he's calling the cat squatter house. Crappo said that the bid and estimate on this job didn't even include any of the cleaning, and he's spent a better part of two weeks just trying to get rid of the smell.”
Crapo has been doing construction and remodeling work since 1997. He was hired to rehabilitate the property after it was purchased by a real estate acquisition company.
He first walked through the house in May.
Read the full story HERE.
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When the next lunar eclipse reaches its maximum at 10:12 p.m. on Thursday, 96.2% of the moon will be covered by the Earth’s shadow and blood-red. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that one Wyoming astronomer describes the phenomenon as “a reddish moon with a slight sliver of silver at the edge.”
“What you'll see when the moon rises that evening, which I believe is after 7 p.m., is the eclipse has already started. It's going to reach its maximum around 10:12 p.m. That's when the fullest extent of the shadow will be covering the fullest extent of the moon, and from there it'll drop off. So it should be very easy to see. It'll have a blood red color, and it won't be too late. So this is a good one to see. It's not a full eclipse, but it's as close as you can realistically get.”
Lunar eclipses occur when the moon’s orbit aligns with the Earth and the sun. When the Earth moves in front of the sun, it casts its shadow on the moon. The Earth's shadow usually makes the moon appear blood-red because the wavelengths of sunlight are filtered through Earth’s atmosphere.
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
