Driving south on a two-lane highway in Montana, Braven Glenn stared at the open road, the cold, dark night sky. It’s November 24, 2020, six months into the pandemic and 3 months into her 17th birthday. He’s a smart student, picking up his girlfriend, a basketball player like himself, at their home on the Crow Indian Reservation.
Most of the time, Braven took his time driving; His friends would make fun of him for obeying the speed limit. But lately he doesn’t feel like himself anymore, since his grandmother died of Covid a few weeks earlier. That night, when a car in front of him stopped at about 60 mph in a 70 mph zone, he signaled and passed her, slowing to the speed limit after crossing the yellow dotted line.
Then the lights illuminated him. The car he had passed belonged to a white police officer from the reservation’s newly formed tribal police. Based in a former Subway restaurant, the branch had announced a Covid relief investment five months earlier, an attempt by the tribal nation’s president to fight crime and a huge deficit of federal law enforcement.
The officer called the dispatch to report that a driver was speeding, according to police records, even though Braven did not speed when he activated his siren.
A chase followed.
In less than 70 seconds, his car hit a train.
More than two years later, on a Sunday night in May 2023, Braven’s mother, Blossom Old Bull, took a deep breath as she parked her Honda Odyssey on the side of the road near the crash site. Together, we walked knee-deep on the grass to the exercise tracks. “That’s what’s left of it,” he says, leaning in to show me a piece of burnt metal. Also nearby were a suspension spring, a radiator, and a wheel.
Old Bull tilted one of the ledges to get a better view, revealing a tattoo with Braven’s call on his forearm. He took detours to make sure the monument in his honor was still there, a cross over which his basketball jersey was draped.
He had found it difficult to move on after the accident; I still had a lot of questions about what had happened. According to interviews, public records requests and court documents from a lawsuit related to Braven’s death, a Crow couple who had stopped at the scene of the crash said Braven was denied medical attention for part of an hour. as I begged for help. The police pursuing him, exposed from his job as a security guard at the Department of Veterans Affairs, left the scene with one piece of evidence: his patrol car. Someone broke into the police headquarters and the incident report disappeared, along with files from other cases. Two or three days after the accident, the entire police force disbanded, with no explanation given to the network or Braven’s family. When Old Bull went to the branch to get answers, he discovered a locked door and windows covered with white paper. “Everyone gave up and left,” he recalls.
The disappearance of a new police force so soon after the sinking was highly unusual, the kind of story one would never hear twice. But other parts of Braven’s story were deeply familiar: unanswered questions after deaths on the reservation, insufficient law enforcement. In 2020, the federal government rein in policing in the Crow Nation, offering only a handful of officials for a domain two-thirds the length of Connecticut. Crimes went unsolved, grieving relatives complained of flawed investigations, and some of those affected did not even ask for help, fearing police violence. (Nationally, police kill Native Americans at higher rates than other people of color. )The Crow Tribal Police Department was a desperately needed but underfunded counterweight to a failed federal system. And Braven was caught in the malfunction.
After the disappearance of the tribal policemen, it was as if no one on the force spoke to her, as if no one had seen the life lost or taken responsibility for it. “I think they thought this was how our circle of relatives was going to be, that we were going to let it go. “
“They didn’t expect us to reach out and seek answers,” he added.
Blossom Old Bull at his home in Crow Agency, Montana
The Crow tribe has about 13,400 members, most of whom live on or around the southeastern Montana reservation, a lush landscape with towering mountains, open skies and rivers teeming with trout. The tribal country profits from its vast coal and oil reserves. Other people speak Cuervo as their first language and the extended matrilineal family formula is still strong.
Braven and his mother moved to the reservation when he was in eighth grade. Old Bull, a single mom and fitness worker from South Dakota, is Lakota, not Crow, and raised Braven in New Mexico; He is her youngest son, the eighth of nine children. But she wanted him to grow closer to his father, who was named Crow, and some of his older brothers, and to learn more about that component of their indigenous heritage. When she had spent time on the reservation before, she remembered families camping in teepees for the Feria del Cuervo, an annual birthday component with a congress, horse races and rodeo, or enjoying dancing in the sun and sweat lodges.
Braven hadn’t intended to walk away from Albuquerque. Es a susceptible child and cried in 2017 when he learned he would have to give up his basketball team. In Montana, the family settled in the town of Crow Agency in a dilapidated one-story space that was remodeled. new paint. It’s a complicated transition; A few weeks after his arrival, Braven’s father died of pneumonia after a war with alcoholism. Braven, just thirteen years old, at his bedside the day he was taken out of the resuscitation system. “I know you weren’t there for me because you were sick,” she said, “but I still love you. “”He’s such a generous person, even to think in terms of units at that age,” says his sister Marissa.
Braven did his best to settle into the bunk room he now shared with his older brother Emilio, who played basketball with him on the corner courts. He grew closer to his half-siblings’ grandmother, who followed him as her own grandson. He enjoyed spending time in her space and would show up to take her to her appointments, bring her groceries, and buy pots and pans on the most practical shelf in her kitchen.
Braven, an honor roll student who ran cross country, track and field and played JV basketball.
Although he didn’t have to move to the reservation, it didn’t take long for Braven to find his groove. His cousin Jayden remembers how Braven made friends temporarily: “I went out over the summer and came back and everyone and everyone knew him. It was actually popular. ” He had a goofy personality,” says his girlfriend, Jordan Jefferson. Over the years, Braven stood out: an honor roll student who ran cross-country, track, and played JV basketball, and who was unanimously selected through his teammates to co-lead the varsity team, which he hoped he would eventually sign up for himself, running miles. Almost every day to be in better shape. “He was unique and ready for a challenge,” says Mike Beads Don’t Mix, his first-year coach.
But the pandemic ushered in an upgrade after Braven’s top school switched to remote learning and he couldn’t see his friends much anymore. In August 2020, the month she was 17, her grandmother contracted Covid; He fell into a coma and was unable to sing “Happy Birthday” to her as he did. A few weeks later, he died. ” He took it very badly” and “became a little further away from all of us. “In his room, Braven played his grandmother’s favorite song, “Blue Ain’t Your Color” by Keith Urban, over and over again. His grades plummeted and he began drinking more.
The week of Braven’s birthday, Old Bull discovered him passed out on a couch at his older brother’s house. He attacked her after she woke him up and she called the police, hoping they would teach her a lesson. Police arrested him for disorderly conduct and took him to juvenile custody in Billings, about an hour’s drive away.
“My mom had to raise all those kids alone, so I guess you can say she’s tough, but bad,” Emilio says. “She’s affectionate, she’d give us a lot of basketball shoes, but she’s going to give us hard love, you want to make it in this world. “
When Braven returned three days later, now on parole, he hugged Old Bull and passed him a letter he had written apologizing for the incident. “I don’t need to leave you anymore,” she wrote. I know everyone in our circle of family members is disappointed in me. . . I cried as I wrote that letter just because I knew how much I had hurt you. “
He told Old Bull that while he was in custody, a Crow tribal police officer “strangled” him, according to court records, and that scared him, reaffirming all the bad stories he’d heard about the law. Law Enforcement: His Cousin Jayden Once “I saw a cop shove his uncle’s head into the concrete, and they both recalled the time the Crow Fair cops punched Braven’s cousin, 15-year-old Esaias, at the Pretty Places stop. That’s why I didn’t have to call the police,” Old Bull said. “But now you have to be informed, Braven, that if someone has to call the police against you,” he added, “that’s what’s going to happen. “
Tattoos reminiscent of his son Braven Glenn Blossom Old Bull’s forearm.
For centuries before the arrival of Europeans, the Crows had no police. Instead, warriors team up with other people and enforce laws such as regulations on buffalo hunting. “There’s a big difference between a warrior and a policeman,” says historian Crow Alden Big Man. Jr. , who has studied the tribe’s classic justice systems. Warriors’ punishments may simply be severe, such as burning a person’s space or killing their horses, but if the offender responded favorably, the warriors would compensate for their loss, perhaps by giving him as many horses as they had taken from him.
In the 19th century, the federal government confined the Raven, also known as the Apsáalooke, to the reservation; The white settlers shot at other people who tried to leave. The tribe’s nomadic hunters and gatherers were forced to become sedentary farmers and conform to Christianity, learn English, and teach their young people in the manner of the colonizers. While railroads took white ranchers to their pastures. In spaces and banks that were denied loans to the Ravens, the former warriors were “reduced to begging during rationing days,” according to Big Man, while “witnessing an entire annihilation of buffalo, as well as the disappearance of an entire way of life. “In 1887, after a Crow guy led an off-reservation war party to borrow horses, a colonial agent sent the organization to prison. “That’s when,” says Big Man, “the formula went from warrior societies to police societies. “government. “
Around this time, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began appointing Indigenous officials to oversee reservations, ordering them to ban classical rituals that colonizers deemed immoral, ration food and other supplies, and stop any activity that might interfere with the white economy. In 1885, Congress had taken away the right of Indigenous peoples to prosecute serious crimes, such as homicides committed by Indigenous peoples against other Indigenous peoples on reservations. (U. S. lawmakers were outraged that a South Dakota Sioux government had punished a murderer according to its own principles of justice (that the death penalty imposed a fine of $600, 8 horses, and a blanket. )Instead, murders and other violent crimes would be investigated through federal agents, some of whom traveled long distances to tribal lands and had little or no lasting relationship with the other people who lived there.
Nearly a century later, as activists in the American Indian Movement protested police brutality and emerging crime, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act in 1975, which paved the way for tribes to regain more power over law enforcement. able to take the mandatory steps to secure a contract with the BIA, they can simply divert the federal budget intended for BIA officials to their own tribal police. “It’s been a real game-changer,” says Lauren van Schilfgaarde, an Indian law expert who is going through the so-called Cochiti People and in the past led UCLA’s Tribal Legal Development Clinic. Since then, the tribes have established more than two hundred law enforcement agencies on reservations, far exceeding the number of BIA agencies.
But many tribes have failed to sign a contract, in addition to the crows, and those with tribal police still lack jurisdiction to deal with primary crimes. In 1978, the Supreme Court also stripped them of the ability to prosecute non-indigenous people, even for serious crimes. maximum misdemeanors. ” Even if you have an infinite budget, if your police departments have questionable, fragile, or even non-existent authority over someone within their territorial boundaries, that compromises the company as a whole,” van Schilfgaarde says.
The federal government, for its part, has skimped on investments for reserve policing, just as it has skimped on health care, education, housing, and rural infrastructure. In 2001, violent crime on reservations doubled or tripled the national average. “Ultimately, you’re part of your environment,” says Crow tribal historian Aaron Brien in the recent documentary Murder in Big Horn. “When you take an entire society and strip it of all confidence and self-esteem, it becomes very fragile. “Tribes had slightly component police resources per capita as non-native communities: while Baltimore, Detroit, New York, and D. C. They had between four and seven officials per thousand inhabitants, few tribal disintegrators had ratios higher than two officials per thousand inhabitants. . While some communities of color protested overpolicing in cities, van Schilfgaarde says, reservations suffered the opposite extreme, along with a lack of resources to ensure public protection in other tactics such as drug treatment, employment, and school. “It’s incredibly frustrating and dangerous,” he said.
Under the Obama administration, Congress passed the Tribal Law and Order Act, creating a commission to examine the problem. The commission, which included Republican and Democratic lawmakers as well as experts in Indian law, advised that the federal government nearly double the number of police officers on reservations, noting that crime dropped by more than a third on four reservations that hired more police officers during a pilot program in 2009. The tribes themselves, rather than the BIA, deserve to lead the police, the commission argued; This substitution would help create acceptance as part of the network and more clearly reflect tribal priorities and customs. ” the commission wrote, describing the federal policing formula as “a labyrinth of injustice. “The commission has set a goal of “closing the public protection gap” in reserves by 2024.
But until 2018, the number of standby agents funded through the BIA had not increased at all; in fact, it had declined by about a third. Carole Goldberg, a member of the Obama-appointed commission, says the Trump administration focused more on approving pipelines on Indian lands than reforming enforcement on reservations. In 2020, the BIA estimated that tribes needed $1. 4 billion to run the national police, but admitted they only provided $246 million, about the same budget as a decade earlier. (The Justice Department provided less than $100 million. )”Sometimes it’s like running with strings and cans,” Penobscot Nation Police Chief Robert Bryant told the commission.
For much of that year, the Crow Nation had only four BIA police officers to cover an area of 3,500 square miles. BIA officials were so overburdened that “we were working 18-hour days” and “going months without a day off,” says Josie Passes, a former officer who wrote a letter to members of Congress asking for reinforcements. A belief in a lack of responsibility has contributed to a climate of fear. “When you start thinking about it,” says Birdie Real Bird, 70, a longtime Crow resident whose aunt was assaulted in a burglary at her home and never made a police stop, “you’re a simple target. “
Added to this is the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, a foreign problem that is particularly acute in the Crow Nation, where women are rarely sex trafficked and used as drug mules along Interstate 90. Seventy-four other people are missing. Crow Nation and in the neighboring northern region. Cheyenne reservations in 2019, more than any other region in Montana, which has one of the highest rates of Indigenous women missing nationally. One of them was Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, a cousin of Braven, an 18-year-old girl. -years who loved to sing, dance, run and fight. Five days after her disappearance, the sheriff’s office found her body face down in a fenced-in yard, but the office didn’t notify her family for about two years. Weeks. Four and a half years later, the cause of his death remains undetermined.
Families of missing persons complain of a lack of transparency and insufficient investigations, and jurisdictional barriers exacerbate the situation. The BIA cannot arrest others for crimes committed outside the reservation, even in border towns like Hardin, where Kaysera died. And on the reservation, other agencies, such as the FBI or sheriff’s office, could have jurisdiction depending on the type of crime and whether the culprit was Indian. Because it’s complicated to know whether a crime took place on or off the reservation and who committed it, it’s simple for law enforcement to avoid accountability. When corpses are discovered, researchers routinely dismiss the deaths as accidental. Normally, “when our Indigenous women and women go missing,” says Mary Kathryn Nagle, a Cherokee attorney who helped Kaysera’s relatives, “Law enforcement decides to do nothing and it’s up to the family members to do the hard work of investigating. “
In 2019, the Crow Reserve desperately needed a change. In August, one of the BIA’s few law enforcement officers — the police leader, no less — resigned in protest of his agency’s understaffing. In November of that year, Crow Chairman AJ Not Afraid, the tribe’s executive leader, issued an emergency related to the lack of police officers.
A few days later, he traveled to Washington with other Indigenous leaders to discuss the issue with President Trump, whose leadership was launching Operation Lady Justice, an initiative to improve the federal response to tribal missing persons cases. Some indigenous critics have called the effort ill-informed. Trump, for his part, seemed obsessed with President Cuervo’s call. “Is that true, are you afraid? Are you not afraid of anything?” asked Trump with a laugh.
On New Year’s Day 2020, Not Afraid’s 16-year-old niece, Selena Not Afraid, disappeared into a resting domain between Hardin and Billings. A search team, which included Braven, scoured the surrounding fields with all-terrain vehicles, helicopters, horses, dogs and drones. Three weeks later, a team from the Ministry of Interior discovered his body less than a mile away. His death is attributed to hypothermia, but some locals suspect it is a crime.
Selena’s sister had already been killed in a hit-and-run and her brother was killed by Billings police. “The Crow Tribe,” Not Afraid said in its emergency declaration, “will no longer settle for ‘words’ for the disturbing lawlessness. He and his leadership thought it was time to create their own tribal force.
Not Afraid pleaded with the BIA to fund a new police department, according to correspondence records. But the BIA continued to reject his request, arguing that the tribe, which had no criminal or other infrastructure, had not met the needs and may simply not manage law enforcement well.
The pandemic has provided Not Afraid with an opportunity. In May 2020, Crow Nation won $27 million in investments to combat the coronavirus through the CARES Act. As a result, he no longer needed the BIA’s cash; He had enough to start a police section on his own. Soon, he hired about 15 police officers, tripling the police presence on the reservation. “I was excited about the idea,” says Yolanda Fraser, Kaysera’s grandmother. “I had the idea that we would still have a judicial unit that could only investigate cases of disappearances. “
However, tribal legal experts say Not Afraid failed to get mandatory approval from tribal lawmakers. “The branches of the police have to be identified through the law; they weren’t,” says Dennis Bear Don’t Walk, the tribe’s former judicial leader and now a legislative aide, who says Not Afraid probably also needed lawmakers to approve the use of the CARES Act money for police. Not Afraid declined to comment, but former officials who helped him free up the branch told me he has the authority to control spending and identify authorities during an emergency like the pandemic. (The Treasury Department is investigating the matter and declined to comment, as did the BIA. )
In Indian countries, tribal leaders have been accused of co-opting police facilities for their own purposes: officials can act as enforcers for anyone who has the upper hand in tribal management. After the introduction of the branch last June, Not Afraid issued a press release. communiqués that promised to prioritize participation and rehabilitation of the network, but he also followed tactics that seemed to benefit him personally. In August 2020, it responded to a slight increase in Covid deaths by imposing a lockdown and curfew across the reserve, which had favorable effects. on public health, but he also prevented warring political parties from campaigning ahead of the November election, even as he arranged occasions to get help himself.
Some doubted the legitimacy of Not Afraid’s new force. “And if they point a gun at you, are they real cops?”Big Man, the historian, wondered. Gerald “Jay” Harris, the chief prosecutor for Big Horn County, which includes most of the reserve, sent a memo to the sheriff’s section warning that the county could be exposed to prosecution if it worked with tribal police, which Harris, who is also Crow, did not legitimize. The BIA continued to patrol alongside the new officers, but at times did not send them calls, according to resources close to tribal forces. Passes, the BIA officer, saw the tribal police are more of a “militia organization than a law enforcement service. “
The federal government has never invested enough resources to create a strong pool of trained local police. Shilo Bad Bear was hired as a supervising dispatcher for the new department, even though she only had about 10 months of previous experience. “I didn’t have the necessary qualifications,” he says. Basically, I had to find out on my own,” added another operator who requested anonymity; He had no prior experience and said he was given a sheet of 10 codes but received no formal training.
Shilo Bad Bear, a former 911 operator for the Crow Tribal Police, says she hired without much experience.
Passes questioned whether the force’s workers had undergone sufficient background checks; He recalled that the BIA had arrested some of them in the past. Some officials had retired years ago from other agencies, meaning they were no longer certified, according to a former officer, who also requested anonymity. Others had never worked as police officers. Under Montana law, they can simply patrol for about a year before attending a police academy to become certified. It’s not an unusual delay in small rural counties, but Michael Gennaco, a California-based representative specializing in civilian oversight of Geoffrey Eastman, a tribal patrol sergeant who had his certificate, testified later in the litigation surrounding Braven’s death that “there’s no policy” to show officials what they expected of them.
And resources were limited. To create a police headquarters, Not Afraid’s management purchased an enclosed Subway restaurant, attached to a museum commemorating the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Confused tourists would come here to buy sandwiches, but the counter that once offered deli meats had become a transient rack for officers’ guns. “It was like a joke,” says Bad Bear. We were getting by with what we had,” says the department’s first police chief, Terrill Bracken, and “while we were flying we were building a plane. “
The purpose was to create “a department of the people, for the people,” Bracken explains, “with members of the tribe overseeing theirs. “But recruiting Crow cops is challenging because of long work hours, low pay, and limited benefits, as well as the reserve’s extensive experience. extended family system; Few citizens sought a task that might involve the arrest of their loved ones. Therefore, Not Afraid also appealed to outsiders, which he hoped would be more impartial.
Bracken himself was a white martial arts instructor from Billings who had briefly worked as a sheriff’s deputy; He moved to a caravan outside tribal police headquarters, away from his wife and two children, so he could spend more time with police. “I had a lot of hobbies for this project,” he says. It wasn’t going to happen unless someone stepped in. “After a month, it was replaced; Crow local Larry Tobacco, who had previously worked for BIA, became a chef.
The new police branch also recruited staff from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Sheridan, Wyoming, which employs about a dozen federal police officers to patrol a well-maintained VA campus. “The reservation is still very busy and you would be exposed to many more primary crimes than here,” the VA police leader told his team in May 2020, according to emails received through a request under the Act. Freedom of Information. Under VA ethics guidelines, the agency’s police officers would not be able to work on the reservation if tribal police got federal funds. Although Not Afraid introduced the force with the CARES Act budget, the tribe trusted the VA that no federal budget would be used, according to emails and interviews, so the VA ethics committee gave its blessing. (A former law enforcement official told me he was pleased when a lawyer told Not Afraid that the budget had become tribal after entering the tribe’s bank accounts; a Treasury Department spokesperson said the budget would still have been federal. Not Afraid did not respond to my request for comment. )
Old tribal police cars are deserted on the Crow Reservation.
Some Crow residents, adding Old Bull, questioned whether it made sense to invite outdoor law enforcement officers to the reservation. And those VA officials probably wouldn’t have been prepared for actual surveillance, says Seth Stoughton, a former cop who lectures on policing issues. at the University of South Carolina; Patrolling a VA medical center, he says, is more like running as a security guard than as a city police officer. Bracken told me that those officers had already been trained to operate a police vehicle to unload federal certification at the VA. But a VA spokesperson told me that its agents don’t get any education about high-speed chases because they’re prohibited through the agency.
On the night Braven died, it was a VA policewoman-turned-tribal policeman, Pamela Klier, who chased him.
Crow tribal policing “was a smart idea,” says Bad Bear, the dispatcher, but “it seemed like something bad was inevitably going to happen because those guys didn’t know what they were doing. “
The morning before Braven’s death, he and his brother Emilio played basketball for a few hours. Afterward, Braven went to his deceased grandmother’s space in Hardin to see his cousins Jayden and Trey, who were still mourning his passing. It looked good, Jayden recalls; They were “dancing with each other,” as they did to greet each other, and then Braven went fishing in a nearby pond.
Around 1 p. m. , she texted her friend and showed up to pick her up at her space after her shift at Boys.
Blossom Old Bull was not informed of the twist of fate until several hours later. He had just woken up from a nap when he received a phone call. Braven’s older brother, Gavin, was sobbing. He had heard that Braven had been caught up in a twist of fate.
“Where is he? Which hospital do I go to? Old Bull asked frantically.
“He’s dead,” Gavin said, crying.
Old Bull dropped the phone and shouted. No, he shouted. How do you know?
Emilio hit a bookshelf in the room he shared with Braven, breaking it. Her sister Jolene threw herself on the ground and sobbed. Everyone was still crying, suffering for each other’s comfort, when they heard a knock on the door an hour later. at 10 pm.
Outside, a tall guy in a black blouse and a badge stood on the rickety front steps of the store. It was BIA Special Agent Jose Figueroa Jr. , who had just returned from the crash site.
A banner that is not easy justice for Braven hangs outside the Old Bull house.
I’m sure you know what happened,” Figueroa told Braven’s older brother, Keenan, outside, according to Old Bull and court records. They timed him at 90° and chased him down, and he ended up facing the exercise head-on. Figueroa said: It’s possible that family members will go to the morgue the next morning. He asked if Braven had been drinking or using drugs and then left without offering condolences.
When Braven’s older brother walked in, he had a fixed look on his face. Sometimes there were no speed limits on the reservation. And Braven was as slow as ever behind the wheel.
“I didn’t know what to think,” Old Bull says. She used to assume Figueroa was true, since her father worked as a police officer in South Dakota when she was younger. But Figueroa had given her family practically no importance. She points out (she didn’t even know which company she had sued her son) and she couldn’t reconcile the story she had been told about Braven’s haste with the cautious child she had raised. The next morning, she was even more bewildered when the morgue owner told her she still couldn’t see Braven’s body. The owner didn’t tell him that he had already been sent to a crime lab for an autopsy.
Their confusion turned to surprise in the days that followed. On the news, he learned that it was the tribal police who had chased Braven, so he went to their headquarters. But by then the force had dissolved and the windows of the old subway were covered. with paper. Seething with anger, he pulled the closed door and pressed his face to the window, seeking to see inside. “Do they take a life from you and you shut everything down without giving any answers to the relatives?”When he went to the BIA office looking for a police report, a police officer handed him a sticky note that simply said “FOIA. “Over the next few months, he hired a lawyer, Nagle, who had also helped Kaysera’s circle of relatives, and they filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents with the BIA, but the company rejected it, raising an ongoing investigation.
The question was: who was doing the research? The BIA told Nagle that the FBI had jurisdiction, but an FBI agent told him that his workplace had no case for Braven. (The FBI, in reaction to my own FOIA request in 2022, did not verify or deny whether it had documents similar to Braven’s death. The BIA told me that both agencies investigated first, but that the FBI eventually took control because Klier didn’t know how to get the job done. When Old Bull tried to download Braven’s death certificate, a Big Horn County court assistant may simply not be able to locate him. In seeking to locate his car, insurer Progresista said the government had not yet made it public. For weeks, the only data he could access came from Braven’s toxicology report; The coroner personally called to offer condolences and tell him that Braven had THC in his formula when he died. It would take 4 months to get the full post-mortem report. She still didn’t know the call from the worker who chased her son or how the chase unfolded.
Old Bull, a medical assistant at a nursing home, is far from naïve when it comes to requesting medical documents. But federal and state authorities have a reputation for keeping indigenous families in the dark after the killings. “There’s an expectation that families may not get information,” says Rae Peppers, a former Crow state legislator.
Other families have also struggled to download critical documents after the death of their loved ones. “I was never warned, not once,” Fraser, Kaysera’s grandmother and legal guardian, says of the workplace of the sheriff who discovered Kaysera’s body. “We don’t need any support,” said Alvilene Buffalo Bull Tail, whose 14-year-old grandson, nicknamed Jr. Boy, was fatally run over during an exercise on the Crow Reservation in 2017. Authorities considered his death to be a accidente. me I fell asleep on the railroad tracks; Buffalo Bull Tail suspects that someone drove it and that authorities never investigated well. “We may not be able to conclude until we at least know what happened. “
In Deer, a town on Cheyenne’s northern reservation that borders Crow, Maureen Bryant says her circle of relatives has yet to obtain a death certificate or post-mortem report more than two years after her niece DeAnna Limberhand was found tied up in Stillwater. River. Ir the courthouse to look for documents was “like a dead end. “”We’ve waited for documents or information, but we’ve never heard back,” he says. “What do you do if no one helps you?” she adds through tears. ” We’re going through a lot right now and not knowing makes it even worse. “
Rae Peppers, a former Crow state legislator, says Native families struggle to get data from federal and state authorities after the killings.
This obstruction led Old Bull and his circle of relatives to speculate about what happened to Braven, and at times latched onto provocative theories. When they drove up to the tracks after the twist of fate and observed a second set of tire tracks along Braven’s path. From the road through the grass to the tracks, they wondered if the police had thrown him on the train. And they wondered if the lack of transparency on the part of law enforcement is a sign of something more dire. ” If you haven’t done anything “It’s wrong, just leak the information,” Old Bull told them. “What are they trying to hide?”
His suspicions grew as witnesses came forward. According to his lawsuit, Maurice and Mavis Mountain Sheep, the couple who had walked past the rubble on their way to get gas, told him they had waited by the railroad tracks for about half an hour and had not realized he was giving first aid to Braven. Braven “kept saying, ‘Help me,'” Mavis told the family. But the authorities “stood there and stared at him. “
Old Bull also won a text message from Bad Bear, the tribal police dispatcher. “He had quit smoking when this happened with his son, but I can tell you right now that he surely didn’t deliver,” Bad Bear wrote. “This position has never been open. . . It was an exhibition there. “
For Old Bull, the lack of clarity about the night Braven died was like torture. And she’s not one to let something like this go. In February 2023, she attempted to sue Klier in federal court for wrongful death, waiting for the legal proceedings to end. It would bring new data to light. He had also sued the BIA, which sent officials to the crash site, accusing the company of negligently allowing tribal police to operate without proper education and failing to provide medical care to Braven. “The U. S. defendant’s agents shock and offend the community’s sense of fair play and decency,” his attorney wrote.
Last April, a ruling allowed Old Bull to plead against the BIA, but not Klier, because Klier had persecuted Braven as a tribal, not federal, employee. By that time, it was too late for Old Bull to sue Klier in tribal court; She had not complied with the tribe’s statute of limitations.
Old Bull to try another tactic. In July 2023, he traveled to Billings to share his story with a wider audience, adding federal officials seeking comment on law enforcement on the reservations.
She wasn’t sure what to expect, but she hoped that someone with strength could pay attention to her regardless. In the years after Braven’s death, President Biden appointed the country’s first Indigenous Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland. Haaland left Congress to take office, she and other Indigenous lawmakers passed a bill allowing testimony to be heard about the crime and the crisis of missing Indigenous peoples. Now, Indigenous families came from Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota to testify in federal court. Some drive 20 hours in circles to have a chance to talk for 15 minutes.
Grace Bulltail, Kaysera’s aunt, was a member of the commission and encouraged Old Bull to sign up for her. But Bulltail was disappointed by the involvement of elected officials. “We invited the Montana Department of Justice, but no one came,” he says. Not even many Crow tribal leaders showed up (a Justice Department spokesperson said he was not aware of an invitation).
Still, Old Bull told me afterwards that the rally had made her “a little bit sure that something was going to change. “It helped her feel less alone knowing that her circle of relatives wasn’t the only one waiting for answers. If you pay attention to everyone’s stories, you realize that you are part of a very big project. “
The following month, I at the Crow Agency reported again on Braven’s case. It had been barely three years since Old Bull began investigating the cases of his son’s death, but there had been a vital progression since my last visit: the BIA had sent me an email containing a large number of documents about the incident. It took me months of correspondence with the firm (after a year of reviewing the case, interviewing dozens of people, and consulting court and government records) to get the main points of their case. my son’s last few minutes. I wondered if my luck at the BIA had anything to do with all the time that had passed, or with my prestige as a foreigner. Nagle, the Old Bull attorney, told me that bloodhounds are “much more likely” than indigenous people. families download documents from the federal government through the Freedom of Information Act.
At Old Bull, he put on his glasses and sat with me on the couch, where I showed him the highlighted pages for him to see.
Initially, what Old Bull read in the BIA’s investigative report matched what he already knew. All on Highway 451 on Nov. 24, he reads. But the next detail made him purse his lips: At 5:39 p. m. m. , Braven made a “lawful pass” of Klier’s police car over a dotted yellow line, according to the BIA’s description of Klier’s dashcam footage, which does not specify at what speed. He walked past her. Then, once in front of her, he slowed down to the speed limit, about 70 mph, and Klier turned on his hazard lights to stop him.
He to drive.
Perhaps he was afraid, the Old Bull thought, remembering the policeman who had strangled him on his way to the juvenile prison just a few months before the accident.
Anyway, Braven drives, still close to the speed limit.
A few seconds later, he slowed down significantly and looked like he was going to stop. Klier, who was now following him at 55 mph, called the dispatcher and reported that he had passed him at 90 mph. But Braven didn’t stop. Klier activated his siren.
Now Braven started to speed up and she chased after him. Seventy-seven miles per hour in part of a minute. One hundred and nine miles per hour in one minute. They passed two other cars traveling in the opposite direction.
So Braven made an ambitious decision. He turned off headlights and other external lights, a tactic drivers use to hide from police. At the bend in the road, he stepped on the grass and headed in the darkness toward the tracks.
The old Bull stopped reading and put his glasses back on his forehead. “He’s legally overstepped his bounds,” he said. Everything this kid was looking for to go through to see his girlfriend, that. It doesn’t make any sense. ” She covered her face with her hands and cried.
In the United States, one-third of all law enforcement efforts end in an accident, sometimes resulting in property damage, injury, or death. Many of those chases begin after an officer becomes aware of a traffic violation; However, due to the threats involved, some police departments only allow chases after a violent crime or anything that puts the public in danger. imminent danger. It is unclear if the Crow Police had a similar policy. Police Chief Tobacco and Sergeant Eastman testified at the trial related to Braven’s death that no policies and procedures manual existed, or at least that they were not aware of having one. But the tribe submitted one to the BIA in the months before the accident, according to records I obtained. This manual states that an officer may only pursue a motive force if there is a “compelling need” and if the pursuit poses less of a threat to the public than the motive force that remains at large. A “pressing need,” the manual adds, “is not achieved simply by fleeing, even recklessly,” nor by “traffic and license violations, in addition to driving. ”
Some police officers argue that a traffic violation is worth pursuing because the driver may be fleeing from a more serious violation, such as a dead body or bags of cocaine in the trunk. But suspicion alone, says Stoughton, the South Carolina expert, is not enough. “If you’re not sure about the benefits of going ahead with this, but you know the dangers,” adds one fatal accident, “clearly the dangers outweigh the benefits,” he says. “Failing to stop by rushing is not a good reason to kill someone. ” And this is especially true if the driver is drunk, he says. In Braven’s case, “what’s more dangerous: speeding while drunk” or being chased and “driving one hundred mph while drunk?” drunk? Stoughton said, adding that Klier may have simply stopped him later: According to court documents, she had already written down his license plate number. “Had he avoided the chase,” police expert Susan Peters said at the Old Bull trial, “Braven J. Glenn most likely would not have been involved in a car accident. fatal car. “
Pieces of burnt metal, plus a suspension spring, a radiator and a wheel, are what’s left of Braven’s car near the crash site.
As Old Bull and I read the BIA reports, it became increasingly transparent that the investigation into the twist of fate had been done all along.
Moments after the accident, Klier called emergency services. “Send a doctor,” he said, according to call logs. “He just got run over. ” Soon more law enforcement officers, from the Tribal Police, the BIA, the National Highway Patrol, the Sheriff’s Office, and the fire department arrived. But according to other documents in the investigation, they struggled to get on the same page, which is not unusual. Reservation complaint. Body camera footage of Deputy Sheriff Michael Colvin, a county police officer tasked with diverting traffic, gives a small insight into the confusion.
“Hey, where’s the body?” An officer Colvin.
“I don’t know,” he said Colvin. La tribal police were the first to arrive on the scene and told BIA where Array was. He said he destroyed a position here. “
“Was it a crossover or what?
“I don’t know. That’s what I asked him, but he didn’t answer.
Seconds later, paramedics drove past Colvin with their lights on. A voice plays on his radio: “They’re there, but they’ve been canceled. The paramedics left.
Six minutes later, a tribal police officer called the center, according to records I received from the county district attorney’s office. “Tribal asked why they canceled EMS,” the operator noted in a call log, “because they hadn’t decided that the person(s) had died. “The tribal officer asked the paramedics to return. Later, Braven’s friend Jordan, who arrived after Braven failed to pick her up after work, saw men loading a bag onto a white truck.
Meanwhile, BIA Special Agent Figueroa arrived. According to an investigative report, he told Klier that the BIA would investigate the crash. Later, he told the tribal officer at the scene that Klier would want a blood draw and that he wanted the dashcam footage from his patrol vehicle. The officer stated that he received her request, however, when Figueroa backed away after speaking with the exercise driver, Klier had left and taken the police vehicle with her. The tribal officer had given Klier permission to return home, according to the report. ; She was visibly shaken after the accident.
“It’s like, what the heck?” said attorney Tim Bechtold, who represents Old Bull in his lawsuit. “All those cops don’t know what to do. ” Klier’s decision to seize his vehicle was “unbelievable and absolutely inappropriate,” says Stoughton, the South Carolina police expert. “It’s not much different than an officer involved in a shooting taking your gun house instead of turning it over as evidence. “
A former tribal police officer, who requested anonymity, later told me he saw Klier at the police station shortly after the crash. The officer went to the train tracks and alerted Figueroa that the car might be at headquarters. go over there and take this vehicle now,” he recalled telling Figueroa. But it is not known if Figueroa went; He did not locate the car that night.
The next day, Figueroa told the Crow Police Department he would want a copy of Klier’s incident report and dashcam footage. The next day, it was Thanksgiving. A day later, Figueroa learned that the police section had already been “disbanded and shut down. “store,” according to BIA research. ” No one knows who has access to their reports. “
Then things got even more complicated. In mid-December, when Figueroa reminded the tribe that they still needed the report, he learned that the former police headquarters had been damaged. Now the documents I needed were missing.
Figueroa also didn’t yet know where Klier’s police car was, so in January he traveled to Wyoming, where she lived and worked with the VA, to locate her. He said he was waiting for a lawyer and didn’t need to talk. (My request for comment was also denied. )
Figueroa returned to Montana and contacted the tribe’s homeland security director, who said he was “not sure where anything was” — this time mentioning two raids on police headquarters — but that he would do his best to track down the records. (Police equipment and weapons were also missing. ) Two weeks later, in February, Figueroa learned that the headquarters had been raided four times, but that someone had nevertheless located Klier’s police car; Figueroa copied the photographs from the dash cam. In May, he received dispatch records from the BIA, but tribal police records related to Braven’s death, as well as Klier’s incident report, were still missing (they do not appear to have been found).
Harris, a former Big Horn County district attorney whose term ended at the end of 2022, believes the U. S. government would possibly be responsible, at least in part, for the mistakes made by law enforcement that night. In saving the medical car, the BIA failed to protect the scene of the accident well and allowed Klier’s police vehicle to flee, then took months to locate him. “You’d think [the BIA] would make its hair stand on end if it prosecuted everybody,” says Jonathan Smith, who oversaw police negligence investigations at Obama’s Justice Department. If it took so long to locate the car, he adds, “it’s unlikely they did the best they could. “
The Old Bull trial is expected to go to trial this summer. The U. S. government denies any wrongdoing. Since the BIA did not employ the Ravens’ tribal police force, a government attorney wrote in reaction to the complaint, “the United States will be held accountable. “. . of their negligence. “
After reading the BIA reports, Old Bull tracked down the new data. “There are so many things they did wrong. . . It’s like a ton of bricks falling on you,” he told me, pointing to his chest with his hands. She wondered if things would have been different if she had gotten some of this data faster, if it had helped her in her trial, or at least helped her heal.
And it hurt, she added, knowing that a stranger like me (a white journalist with no connection to Braven) could have all those FOIA files, while she, Braven’s mother, had been deprived of them. I started getting evidence, and even that, she said, didn’t match up with some of the main points I’d just shared with her. “I’ve fought so hard to get this, years and years,” he said. “It’s like we don’t matter, like we’re nothing. “
Two days later, former tribal police leader Terrill Bracken arrived at my Airbnb in Billings. I told him Old Bull wanted to see him. Bracken did not lead the police branch when Braven died and knew little about the persecution. But if Old Bull wanted to talk, meeting with her seemed like the most Christian thing to do, he says. “Anything I can do to help her get through the pain she’s going through, that’s why I’m here,” he told me.
Old Bull, who had worked 12 hours at the nursing home that day, sat in his car outside the space for a while before going inside. For months, she had been asking God to help her forgive, but it was hard to get rid of him. all the resentments you experience. Perhaps, he thought, it would be less complicated after talking to Bracken and hearing some other point of view. “I want to come face-to-face with someone who started all of this and get undeniable answers. He told me at the front door.
After taking a seat across from the former police chief, Old Bull eagerly tapped his glass of water with his fingers, as tears welled up in his eyes. Bracken said he was sorry for his loss. She thanked him. “It’s our right to know what happened to our son,” she said. And I’ve never had that, I had to fight and fight and fight.
“And that’s the case,” Bracken acknowledged.
“It’s frustrating for me,” he added, “because I know what we were doing is going to be so much better,” he said of tribal policing.
Their verbal exchange lasted two hours. Sometimes, Old Bull merges with Bracken. “I feel better when you communicate with me. Now I can see you as a person,” she said.
But when he talked about Agent Klier, the mood changed. ” As far as we know,” Bracken said of Klier, “she’s not doing very well right now. “
“She’s the one who suffers,” Old Bull said quietly.
“I’m not saying who suffers the most. It’s not a contest,” Bracken responded. “But I’m fair to you: with the data I have, I don’t see how I would have acted if I wasn’t the officer. “. And that’s a difficult component of the job.
Old Bull sighed. I have to go to work in the morning,” he said, signaling his intention to leave.
“Would it be if I prayed with you?” he asked.
She nodded, closed her eyes, and began to cry after he put his hands on hers.
On the way home, Old Bull was glad to have spoken to Bracken. But when he went to bed the next morning, remembering the conversation, his anger increased. “Let her say, ‘Oh, poor Pamela, I wonder what’s going on. ‘? How dare you, he thought.
She picked up her phone and texted me, “Samantha, there were a lot of things bothering me. He put her on that pedestal,” she wrote. To sit there and emphasize your feelings, when it comes to the loss of my son and his movements caused that loss. It feels like an attempt. . . to glorify what she did as a police officer.
“It’s a formula designed to oppress us. It’s been like that since Columbus,” he added before hanging up the phone and getting to work.
The doors to the tribal police headquarters were locked when I first visited last year, but I was able to peek inside to see how abruptly everything had been abandoned. The calendar on the police chalkboard indexed the Thanksgiving holiday scheduled for the day of Braven’s death. The unused call logs were in dusty boxes. In the parking lot was a makeshift prison, two small cells inside a shipping container. The refrigerated counter that once held the ingredients for Subway sandwiches, and then the guns, had been removed. The tables that the policemen used as desks were stacked in the open under the poplar trees.
The Temporary Holding Cell in a Modified Shipping Container Outside the Old Tribal Police Station
The former tribal police station in a closed subway store on the Crow Reservation
There has never been a public explanation as to why the branch closed at the end of November 2020, leading to speculation. Old Bull still wonders if the police are hiding something. Big Man, the historian, wonders if they packed their bags and left because of poor education and lack of online support, and because Braven’s search was “the straw that broke the camel’s back. “
“There were many reasons why they closed the facility,” said one tribal police officer, who requested anonymity. “It started to fail” even before Braven’s accident, and then “the money stopped coming. “
Bracken doubts that Braven’s death is the only motivation for the disbandment, if it is a motivation at all. Blame it on politics: A few weeks before the collapse, President Not Afraid lost the election to Frank White Clay, a former tribal lawmaker who believed that supporting a new police force with a Covid-related relief budget violated federal spending guidelines. “We’re still trying to determine precisely where that money went,” White Clay would later tell a journalism student at the University of Montana in 2021. He agreed that the reserve needed more law enforcement, but said that this police force was simply “playing police. “
Instead of giving White Clay the satisfaction of disbanding the force, Not Afraid beat him to it and shut down the branch about a week before the inauguration, according to another former tribal police officer. It was conceivable that Braven’s turn of fate would be “the catalyst, the icing on the cake,” but that wasn’t the main explanation for the shutdown, he said.
Harris, a former Big Horn County district attorney, says the department’s sudden closure is evidence that it was never set up right. “A legitimate, legal law enforcement firm doesn’t disappear just because a president or a governor says, ‘Okay, enough is enough,'” he said. saying. This [the police department] is a mirage, a façade. It’s “a temporary solution, nothing more than a band-aid,” one of the former police officers told me.
“Did we do everything perfectly? Not at all,” says Bracken. But did we do the most productive we could with what we had?Oui. Je, in fact, this branch would have prospered and become anything if it had been given a fair chance.
The brief life and abrupt end of the Crow police is rarely just a story of tribal clerical mistakes, Big Man says. It’s also a story of the federal government’s repeated mistakes through 2020: keeping families informed, conducting thorough investigations, and maintaining and showing “a genuine need for transparent and meaningful communication” with Crow people, says Kristina Lucero, director of the Institute for American Indian Policy and Governance at the University of Montana, “about the expected goals and project of what law enforcement does. “
Many families who testified with Old Bull in Billings insisted they sought a more transparent policy, adding easier access to information after the death or disappearance of a loved one. “Authorities at all levels want to improve communication with family members, who are left too dark for days, weeks or months,” causing “enormous stress,” the federal commission wrote.
Indigenous communities also need more funding: In 2022, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Montana sued the U. S. government over a lack of police officers. The Indian network at Fort Belknap in the state also filed a lawsuit, after the BIA refused to supply more money for public safety. “What’s going on in Crow is pretty extreme,” says UCLA’s van Schilfgaarde, but “when budgets are tight, those [police] departments come and go with tactics that would never be applied in other communities. “The challenge is limited to Montana, he adds. Most Alaska Native villages have no police presence at all.
Two days after his inauguration in 2020, White Clay informed the BIA that “an independent law enforcement effort is not the direction the new Raven Tribe administration intends to pursue. “Since then, court cases over the BIA’s policing have persisted. In July 2021, the tribe sued a BIA officer after he was filmed failing to prevent his dog from biting someone in handcuffs after a traffic stop, for about a minute, resulting in 3 surgeries on the man’s ankle and foot. “Unfortunately, nothing appears in this video. ” It’s a blast to anyone who has lived in the Crow Nation,” the tribe’s attorney wrote. “Before, I had a lot of things to accept in the police,” Old Bull says, “but after Braven’s death, I don’t think they’re there to protect us. “
In December, President Biden signed an executive order to remove red tape that has hindered Indigenous peoples’ access to law enforcement funding, but legal action could be more effective. In May, a U. S. district court encouraged the federal government to meet with the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and “find a way to fund tribal policing more equitably,” or move to court. The resolution was “the first to recognize that the government has treaty legal responsibility to fund law enforcement for [a] tribe of Indians,” according to lawyers for the Oglala Sioux. And they say it might, after all, force a legal judgment on the damage Washington has caused for centuries. to indigenous justice systems.
To succeed, tribes will need to be given more jurisdiction and allowed to reimagine public policing and protection in a way that reflects their own cultures and customs, says Goldberg, an Obama appointee to the Indian Law and Order Commission. She has observed that indigenous communities engage religious leaders in court proceedings to influence sanctions and chart a path forward. The Tulalip reservation in Washington state, in keeping with its values, forced police to prevent in Boys
On the Crow Reservation, most interviewees said the tribe needed more law enforcement, but they also emphasized the importance of more officer training. Some said they wanted to look at public protection in a more balanced way, investing in intellectual health, addiction treatment, housing and education. Such investments may make it less difficult to recruit smart local police, says Lucero of the University of Montana, because other people might be less hesitant to monitor their loved ones if the justice formula offers more immediate, healing opportunities. “You can’t arrest other people, lock them up, and expect them to go back to the same situation and change,” Big Man says. “The traumas of the afterlife have created who we are,” Old Bull adds. “Get other people back on their feet and offer them help and formulas before you move on to the police department. “
According to Goldberg, the tribal nations that are successful in enforcing the law are those that have “a strong congruence between the perspectives of the network and the way it’s done. “
Braven’s family built a memorial for him near the site of his death.
The Old Bull buried Braven about an hour from his home in the foothills of the Pryor Mountains, next to the graves of his father and cousin Kaysera. The cemetery is small and quiet, next to a dirt road surrounded by fields, and most of the gravestones are simple, some with flowers and artificial crosses. Old Bull and his circle of relatives stop by to mow the grass around Braven’s court and adorn it with gifts, such as chocolate-covered pretzels, one of his favorite snacks, and a basketball covered in her handwritten messages for him.
Sometimes they put on music and don’t forget how he made them laugh, like how he exercised a muscle like Popeye and kissed him. When two of her older sisters became pregnant, they went to the cemetery and told her. When her younger sister graduated from top school, she wore a cap emblazoned with the words “We Made You Brave. “They rarely feel that he is with them, and he even sends them messages. The night before her funeral, as Old Bull slept in a teepee with his remains, following their Lakota traditions, she and some other member of her circle heard a basketball bouncing in the middle of the night, even though they had all long since gone to bed.
In August 2023, on what would have been his twentieth birthday, Old Bull and his children went to Braven Cemetery. They eat chocolate chip cupcakes, Braven’s favorite, and throw balloons into the sky for him.
“I need them to know that he’s a person too,” Emilio says. “He’s a smart kid and he had big dreams, and for them to hide in the shadows, he deserves justice, right. “
“The responsibility and the bottom line: this is what my mom needs, this is what I need,” Sister Marissa adds.
“I have to give them an account and I have to admit that it wasn’t necessary,” Old Bull said.
On the way home, around 10 p. m. , Old Bull saw a white owl sitting on the side of the road. In their tradition, owls are omens of death. The last time he met one, his mother died, and soon after, so did Bravent. . When he gets home, it’s almost and he’s lighting a packet of sage and cedar, asking his children and grandchildren to come out of the place to dye them and help them stay safe. “Get the little kids out,” he said, approaching each user with the package and watching them stir the smoke above their heads and inside their hearts, all the way down to their legs. “Who’s next?”
This task was made imaginable with the help of a grant from the Ira A Center. Lipman of Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia University, in collaboration with Arnold Ventures.
Old Bull visits the memorial where Braven died.
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The crisis facing journalism and democracy will soon disappear. And neither will Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.
That’s precisely why, despite the demanding situations we face, we simply took a big sip and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of famous journalists who create the podcast and public radio show Reveal.
If you can contribute even a few dollars, please help us accelerate the pace of giving. We simply can’t keep falling behind our fundraising goals month after month.
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