Washington Wizards (16-55, 14th in the Eastern Conference) vs. Utah Jazz (21-51, 14th in the Western Conference)

Salt Lake City; Wednesday, 9 p.m. EDT

BOTTOM LINE: Washington heads into the matchup with Utah after losing 16 in a row.

The Jazz have gone 13-24 in home games. Utah ranks second in the Western Conference with 16.6 fast break points per game led by Lauri Markkanen averaging 3.3.

The Wizards are 5-29 in road games. Washington is 9-10 when it has fewer turnovers than its opponents and averages 15.3 turnovers per game.

The Jazz score 117.4 points per game, 6.7 fewer points than the 124.1 the Wizards give up. The Wizards’ 46.1% shooting percentage from the field this season is 2.9 percentage points lower than the Jazz have allowed to their opponents (49.0%).

The teams square off for the second time this season. The Jazz won the last meeting 122-112 on March 6, with Ace Bailey scoring 32 points in the victory.

TOP PERFORMERS: Kyle Filipowski is averaging 10.5 points and 6.9 rebounds for the Jazz. Brice Sensabaugh is averaging 19.9 points over the last 10 games.

Alex Sarr is averaging 16.5 points, 7.4 rebounds and two blocks for the Wizards. Will Riley is averaging 14.4 points over the past 10 games.

LAST 10 GAMES: Jazz: 3-7, averaging 116.4 points, 43.3 rebounds, 27.7 assists, 9.9 steals and 4.4 blocks per game while shooting 45.9% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 122.7 points per game.

Wizards: 0-10, averaging 114.3 points, 37.4 rebounds, 24.5 assists, 6.9 steals and 4.5 blocks per game while shooting 47.1% from the field. Their opponents have averaged 130.6 points.

INJURIES: Jazz: Lauri Markkanen: out (hip), Isaiah Collier: out (hamstring), Keyonte George: out (leg), Cody Williams: out (shoulder), Walker Kessler: out for season (shoulder), Jusuf Nurkic: out for season (nose), Jaren Jackson Jr.: out for season (knee).

Wizards: Anthony Davis: out (finger), Tristan Vukcevic: day to day (back), Cam Whitmore: out for season (shoulder), Alex Sarr: day to day (toe), Tre Johnson: day to day (foot), Kyshawn George: out (elbow), D’Angelo Russell: out (not injury related), Trae Young: out (quad).

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The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.

For four straight nights, Game Warden Spencer Carstens and a fellow officer sat in an unmarked vehicle at a Cody city park, windows down, staring into the blackness from dusk until 3 a.m.

Nothing happened.

The poaching caper that would become known internally as the “Cody Park Case” had been building since late August 2024, when residents began finding mule deer carcasses in their front yards and floating in a pond at the Park County Complex. The deer body count reached nine.

According to Wyoming Game and Fish, all nine were killed “right in the middle of town where deer like to hang out” by the library, not far from Canal Park and Glendale Park

All shot with a compound bow, all left to rot.

By the time wardens launched their stakeout, and the only lead was grainy security camera footage of a silver car cruising the neighborhood.

The full story of how the case came together is now the subject of an episode of the Wyoming Wildlife Podcast, hosted by Robert Gagliardi, the assistant editor of Wyoming Wildlife magazine. The podcast is a newer offering from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and this particular episode stood out for good reason.

“Our law enforcement stories, those are a fan favorite because they’re very exciting, they’re incredibly interesting, and they do a great job just highlighting just how much work goes into successfully investigating and closing a case like that,” Amanda Fry, public information officer for Wyoming Game and Fish, told Cowboy State Daily.

First Blood

In 2024, the first dead buck appeared in someone’s front yard near a city park, with a blood trail leading across the street and footprints disappearing into the grass. An arrow wound made the cause of death obvious.

“The first thing I kind of thought of was maybe it was a kid,” Carstens recalled for the podcast. A deer in a backyard, shot for fun — that was going to be the end of it.

But then, more reports came in the same day. A second buck, a couple of doors down, also arrowed.

Then a third, in a nearby park, where wardens recovered an arrow — an expandable broadhead fired from a compound bow, a typical hunting setup. Then deer four, five and six. Then number seven, found floating in a pond at the Park County Complex, requiring Carstens to wade out in chest waders to retrieve it.

All nine carcasses — two bucks, six does and a fawn — turned up within a tight radius around the county library and city park, right in the middle of town.

Every animal was shot and abandoned. None were harvested in any way.

“They were just killed and left,” Fry confirmed.

Silver Car

Being in city limits gave wardens tools they rarely get to use. Ring doorbell cameras from cooperative neighbors produced footage of activity on the nights deer were killed. Security cameras at a local business captured a silver car driving slowly up and down the street before parking, and a figure stepping out with a flashlight.

It was the first real break, but the footage was too grainy to identify a make and model, let alone a license plate.

“And of course, it’s one of those deals where there’s just silver cars everywhere you look, once you start looking for them,” Carstens said.

An early lead pointed to a group of teenagers spotted on Ring camera footage running around and riding in the back of a truck. Wardens tracked them down at a local school — only to learn they had been playing a supervised game that night, organized by Cody police. They were ruled out.

With no suspect and deer still turning up dead, Carstens and his team decided to stake out the park. They would sit in the dark and wait.

Fifth Night

By the fifth night of the stakeout, the wardens were running on fumes.

“We’re kind of tired, kind of getting sick of it, trying to figure out what are we going to do next because this isn’t working,” Carstens recalled.

Then they heard it — the unmistakable thwack of a compound bow firing in the darkness, followed by the sound of an arrow hitting flesh.

Using night vision, the wardens looked out into the park. A man was standing there holding a bow, standing over a dead deer.

Carstens crept out of the truck and got as close as he could before making contact. The man bolted.

“I actually get in a foot pursuit with this guy,” Carstens said. “He was a young, pretty fast guy, so he got away from me.”

But the suspect had to have driven there. Wardens fanned out and found the silver car parked about a block away. Peering through the window, they saw an arrow lying on the front seat that matched the one recovered from an earlier crime scene.

And the car was full of fresh groceries.

“Basically went out to get groceries, on his way home decided to pull over and shoot a deer in the park,” Carstens said.

Blood Science

The suspect — later identified as Joshua Tamirat Wielhouwer — fled the state. But wardens had his vehicle and, soon, search warrants for the house where he had been staying. Inside, archery equipment was scattered through multiple rooms. A second vehicle yielded more gear, including a bow and broadheads.

Some of that equipment had blood on it. In some cases, only minuscule traces.

Wardens had also been collecting the deer carcasses and storing them in an evidence freezer. They sent tissue samples from eight of the nine deer to the Wyoming Game & Fish forensics lab, along with every piece of blood-stained archery equipment from the house.

What came back was, in Carstens’ word, “remarkable.”

The lab matched all eight deer to specific pieces of equipment — individual broadheads, arrows and metal inserts — through DNA analysis. Trace amounts of tissue inside a tiny metal arrow insert were enough to tie a specific deer to a specific arrow.

“This is the first case that I’ve worked where we’ve actually been able to take nothing but DNA evidence and make a full case on it,” Carstens said. “Big kudos to the forensics lab. They really helped put this case together. We wouldn’t have a case without them.”

A cell phone search warrant then connected the suspect’s archery equipment to an older case — a beef cow shot with multiple arrows and left to die the year before, a case the Park County Sheriff’s Office had been unable to solve.

Serial Poacher

With a nationwide extraditable warrant issued through the Park County prosecuting office, officers in another state began looking for the suspect. He eventually turned himself in, flew back to Cody and sat in jail for 75 days before posting bail.

A trial was set for February 2025. Before it began, prosecutors and the defense reached a plea deal: guilty on nine of the 18 misdemeanor charges, $18,000 in restitution for the deer and one full year in county jail, with 73 days credited for time served.

The suspect also pleaded guilty to felony destruction of property for the cow, paying restitution to the rancher and accepting three years of supervised probation. All seized archery equipment was forfeited.


A year behind bars is an unusual outcome for a wildlife case in Wyoming, where penalties more commonly involve fines and revocation of hunting privileges, explained Carstens.

“This guy had never purchased a hunting license in Wyoming,” Carstens said. “He wasn’t really a traditional hunter in the sense that he buys a license, goes out in the field and looks to harvest anything.”

The warden’s best guess at a motive: the suspect was into archery as target shooting and “maybe just wanted to take it to the next level and see what he could do with his bow.”

Team Effort

Carstens credited his fellow wardens and the Game and Fish investigative unit — which considered the dead cow as a possible predator conflict before determining it had been killed by a bow — and the Park County prosecutor’s office.

“This was definitely the most collaborative effort that I’ve been a part of,” Carstens said.

The community played a role too. Neighbors willingly shared security camera footage, and residents who enjoy the town’s urban mule deer herd were eager to see the case resolved.

“Our hope is to cover everything Game and Fish is doing,” Fry said of the Wyoming Wildlife Podcast. “We have terrestrial habitat work, aquatic habitat work, but our law enforcement stories — those are a fan favorite.”

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.

In the North Bay, the SMART commuter rail line will begin work next week to extend service to the city of Healdsburg, with plenty of challenges, both in construction and in finding long-term funding.

As the largest city north of Santa Rosa, Healdsburg is generating considerable excitement among those who await SMART’s arrival. But first there’s a lot of work to do, starting next week.

“It starts with a topographical survey,” said SMART Chief Engineer Bill Gamlen. “Monday, we’ll be moving into geotechnical boring, where we’ll have a drill rig out on the site, and we are taking cores of soil samples. There’ll be a lot of things going in parallel. We’re going to be taking things apart, tearing out old track, taking out old bridges, tearing up grade crossings.  The bridge across the Russian River will be one of the first activities there.”

That bridge was built in the 1870s and will need a complete replacement to carry the weight of the modern SMART trains. The prep work will take about a year, with actual construction beginning next spring. The $270 million in funding for the extension is already in place and SMART expects to be pulling into the old Healdsburg station sometime in late 2028.

“We think it’s a big milestone,” said Gamlen. “You know, Healdsburg is a delightful place to go visit on the weekends, and even vacation there.  So, we see a lot of ridership heading up to Healdsburg, a destination, probably, more than an origination point.”

But that’s a problem, according to Mike Arnold, an economist and outspoken critic of SMART, living in Novato. Arnold said he thinks SMART will never be financially feasible because it doesn’t take people to any large urban job centers.

“The primary problem is the economics,” he said. “Passenger rail in suburbia just doesn’t get the ridership. And the reason is because there just isn’t a place for people to get to easily. There is no major employment center in either Marin or Sonoma Counties.  And so, therefore, when you take people to stations, how are they going to get where they want to go? The answer is, very few of them do, and that’s why they get very few riders.”

Currently, kids and seniors pay no fare, and Arnold said that means more than 40 percent of riders are riding for free. And he points to Hwy 101, where SMART was supposed to relieve traffic during morning commute times.  

Changes in work habits, brought on by the pandemic, have decreased the number of commuters, but Arnold said it has simply compressed the traffic jams into a smaller time period, with little impact from SMART.

“You’ve narrowed the peak,” he said. “But when you talk about peak-hour congestion at 7:30 in the morning, it looks like it hasn’t changed at all.  And the answer is, based on the count on the cars, it really hasn’t changed at all.”

The debate matters because in June voters will be asked to decide whether or not to extend, for another 30 years, the quarter-cent sales tax to continue funding SMART.  The current tax will sunset in 2029, shortly after the Healdsburg extension is scheduled to be finished.