Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming! I'm Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom, for Monday, May 20th.

The father of 17-year-old Lenea Brown, who was gunned down at a Casper park Tuesday by her ex-boyfriend, is devastated. He told Cowboy State Daily's Dale Killingbeck that he wants justice for his daughter, who he says exuded compassion.

"He just shared that she was a beautiful girl, that she had just turned 17 on May 4, that the day of her death he had gotten a copy of her birth certificate so that she could get her driver's license, and she was going to start driving to work, to where she worked at an ice cream shop. She loved her job. He said that all of the people that work with her loved her, and he just said she didn't have an angry bone in her body."

Brown was shot in the head and killed at Buckboard Park, in a southwest Casper neighborhood, just after midnight Tuesday. Police have charged her former boyfriend, 15-year-old Eavan Castaner, with her murder.

Wolf 907F in Yellowstone has lived an unusually long life.

Along the way, she's given birth to multiple litters and lost her left eye. Outdoors reporter Mark Heinz says it's quite a feat for a Yellowstone wolf to survive to age 11, which is more than three times the average lifespan of a wolf.

"They're very territorial, and they fight a lot with other packs. So a lot of wolves get killed doing that. And then also a lot of wolves die trying to take down prey… She just gave birth to pups here about two weeks ago, which is incredible… no telling how much longer she'll live. Typically, you know, if they don't get killed, usually they get killed when they're still young. But if they do live to an advanced old age, the biologist said it's about the same as a large breed of dog, just biologically 10 or 12 years is about all they can expect."

Only about one out of every 300 wolves even makes it to age 11 in the wild. Most are killed around age 3 or 4.

Natrona County Coroner James Whipps was shocked to find inconsistent and haphazard treatment of unidentified remains.

Whipps found remains stored on shelves, buried in communal coffins or shipped out of state. So he told Cowboy State Daily's Pat Maio that he's on a mission to change that.

"He first became alerted to this issue of the remains back in August '22, kind of the tail end of the pandemic. And when a local funeral director in Casper came knocking on his door to recover a body to return to his funeral home. And he casually asked Mr. Whipps, 'What do you want me to do with the rest of the bodies back at the funeral home?' and Mr. Whipps was surprised, and had no clue what he was talking about. A couple of questions and answers later, he was able to determine that these funeral homes, two major ones in Casper, have been engaging in different ways of either holding the bodies locally, burying them, or they were sending them off to the Topeka, Kansas area."

Whipps says the number of unclaimed cremated remains fluctuates because of the endless stream of people who die, and those who are too poor to get a proper burial.

When safely compressed in its steel can, ready to save someone's life on a hiking trail in Yellowstone or Grand Teton national parks, bear spray is not only useful, it's essential gear.

Left in a hot car, however, it becomes a ticking time bomb that could really, REALLY ruin someone's day - and car - if it explodes. That's a lesson a worker at Yellowstone National Park recently learned the hard way, by leaving a can of bear spray on the dashboard of his vehicle. Cowboy State Daily's Andrew Rossi reports that the canister blew through the windshield and launched its