It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Thursday, October 22nd. I’m Mac Watson.
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GREG - MIDWEST SAVE SCHOOL
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A Rock Springs businessman said gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Bextel's accusations about him are “pissing him off.” Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that Bextel has claimed that Bruce Pivic approached her at a UW game, which he says didn't happen.
“In one account, she claimed he was foaming at the mouth. She has said that he was demanding more money for the university and more help for the business community. And in a recent video, she said that it was Bruce Pivick. And Bruce Pivick has said all along, ‘I never had any such interaction with her. I don't know what she's talking about. I don't know where she got this idea.’ So Pivic set out this week to correct the record, because he had finally had enough. For one thing, she said that he is a UW trustee and on the Wyoming Business Council. For another, she said the man was about a foot shorter than she was. Pivic is 5’10” according to his driver's license, which he showed me on Wednesday, and Bextel is 5’9” according to her court record.”
Bextel has said repeatedly that the accoster, “Bruce,” is on the Wyoming Business Council’s board and the UW Board of Trustees, plus on the “board” of Barlow’s campaign committee. The Wyoming Business Council and UW Board of Trustees don’t share members currently, except for Gov. Mark Gordon, who serves both.
Read the full story HERE.
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The parents of a 26-year-old Casper woman who was killed while filming herself driving 105 mph off Highway 487 are heartbroken. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that as Sydney Ruschmann’s parents rushed to the accident last week, her stepfather says an officer warned him, “Do not come here, sir. Do not come here.”
“Sydney Ruschmann was reportedly using a social media app called Snapchat when her tires left the pavement, going over 105 miles per hour. She overcorrected to the left, sending the Ford Contour into a passengers’ side-leaning skid. She struck a delineator post before the vehicle rolled and ended up in the opposite ditch. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The crash happened at about 10 p.m. at night. By this time, her parents, Adam and Melinda Doyle, had been notified as her emergency contacts through her cell phone's emergency services, and so they started driving towards the scene of the crash because they could tell where her location was using the Find My App.”
According to Wyoming Department of Transportation crash data, 4,452 crashes involving suspected distracted driving happened between 2020 through 2024. Those crashes killed 52 people.
Read the full story HERE.
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The longtime Uinta County Coroner was arrested Wednesday morning. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that Gregory Crandall faces allegations that he stole more than $41,000 of public money, intentionally falsified a death certificate, and committed numerous other acts of misconduct.
“DCI did an exhaustive investigation here, more almost more than a year and a half, and what they found, according to DCI, are allegations of a lot of financial alleged financial misappropriation services getting the county was getting billed for that weren't getting done, services that were greatly exaggerated with what the bills were. But some of them, a couple of the more serious allegations, one of them deals with allegations that the coroner deliberately altered a death certificate to cover up potential malfeasance in how they handled a body. And there's another allegation too about a body from an officer-involved shooting that was sent down to Denver to a pathologist down there. And when it arrived in Denver, it was just wrapped in a blanket. It didn't have all of the evidence tags. It wasn't put in plastic.”
The 66-year-old Crandall has been the county coroner since 2003 and is unopposed on the upcoming Nov. 3 general election ballot.
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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A Cheyenne man who told a trooper that a pound of meth that was sticking out from under his butt was just a burrito was sentenced to more than 8 years in jail last week. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports the trooper didn't believe the claim and called in a K9 which confirmed the substance.
“A Wyoming trooper who stopped a 58-year-old Cheyenne man on I-80 and noticed that the man was sitting on something silver and cylinder-shaped. When the trooper asked about it, Matthew Jacoby told him it was a burrito. Federal prosecutors later said that the Wyoming trooper was prepared to testify that in his thousands of traffic stops, he's never seen anyone sitting on their food. Three weeks later, Jacoby was also caught throwing methamphetamine out of the window of a stolen Dodge.”
Authorities say Trooper Austin Barker was sitting in his patrol vehicle when a silver four-door Saab blew past him at 95 mph in a 75 mph zone on December 8, 2025. Barker pulled out and stopped Jacoby, who was alone behind the wheel.
Read the full story HERE.
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American Fertilizer is pitching a massive "world-scale" nitrogen fertilizer plant outside of Cheyenne. Cowboy State Daily’s Emma Jane Jackson reports that Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins calls the prospect "an exciting opportunity."
“A lot of the interest in this plant is coming from a national security angle. Right now, the U.S. imports a good chunk of the fertilizer. A lot of the fertilizer that U.S. farmers use is imported, so we're reliant on other countries to keep our supply chain going. The project is in very early development. It's a company called American Fertilizer. Right now, according to federal filings, they've raised over $2 million dollars from their own investments, but Mayor Collins told me that the project could be a lot bigger, even up to a multi-billion-dollar facility. Although the exact site has not been nailed down yet, Cheyenne looks promising and potentially having the plant at the Swan Ranch Business Park. Mayor Collins said this is a good spot because of the rail access and the intersecting highways.”
Cheyenne already has a nitrogen plant operated by Dyno Nobel, but American Fertilizer claims that its proposed facility would be the first world-scale nitrogen fertilizer plant in the region.
Read the full story HERE.
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Cody-based US Ballistic Laboratories plans to open a second military-munitions site in Romania to churn out 155-millimeter high-explosive shells. Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that CEO John McCue says with conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, “everybody’s scrambling” for ammunition.
“They've got their occupancy permit for that space, and hope to be actually churning out ammunition very, very soon. The CEO, he's a Cody native, so he kind of wanted to bring the business back home anyway. And then it was just just a good location, and Wyoming is a very business-friendly as well as munitions-friendly location, and so that and plus that the fact that it's near a railspur also helped.”
A $25 million deal to establish an ammunition production facility with US Ballistic was announced in September by Romania according to international reports. McCue tells Cowboy State Daily before the announcement, US Ballistic was very much “below the radar” in Romania but is now well-known and generally highly regarded there.
Read the full story HERE.
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The story of a giant 28-foot inflatable pumpkin rampaging more than 60 miles across southeastern Wyoming is being reported by news outlets as “breaking news.” Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that it’s fake, another Casper Planet satire story picked up and reported as “real” news.
“One outlet that I saw said that this is the Wyomingest thing ever. And I talked to Mr. Hathaway, who runs Casper Planet, and he says he can't believe that it took off the way it did, the story, not the pumpkin. And it's just incredible to him that people take that as real news when he goes out of his way to say this is satire. It's fake. I just make it up.”
The monstrous squash rambling across Wyoming toward Colorado was just the latest of those brainstorms, which he posted Sunday evening. The Wyoming Highway Patrol confirms it's had no reports of a giant pumpkin rolling anywhere.
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.
