Unanswered questions follow death of Montana Blackfeet man

Eljay Young Running Crane was a young man with all the possibilities in the world laid before his feet.

After a rough start in high school, Eljay was accepted into the Montana Youth Challenge Academy, a program for at-risk youth sponsored by the National Guard. Eljay excelled within the structured environment and earned the rank of a Battalion Commander, the highest leadership position a cadet can achieve at the academy.

"We see a lot of kids coming and going, but kids who rise to the top like Eljay did are special," said Trent Gibson, deputy commander of the Montana Youth Challenge Academy. "He was one of those kids that the more you challenged him, the harder he worked."

"He was a likable young man and very respectful, Gibson added. "He had a lot of potential to go on and do good things. He had all the potential to do — really whatever he wanted."

Eljay was on the cusp of something special.

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In recent weeks, he'd been offered the opportunity to travel to Phoenix to work as a stunt rider for a movie production crew. His grandfather, Jay Young Running Crane, had just sold a horse to raise a little extra money — spending cash for Eljay to live on while he was in Arizona.

"He was just so happy to be going out and doing something like that," Young Running Crane said of his grandson's final days.

On Jan. 22, Eljay Young Running Crane's broken body was lowered into the frozen ground at Heart Butte Cemetery. Six days earlier, Eljay was struck by a car as he walked along the edge of the road

He had not yet turned 21.

The death of any young person is a tragedy.Young Running Crane's is all the more distressing in light of his family's allegations that the police investigation into Eljay's death was compromised from the very beginning.

"Somebody has to be held responsible for this," said Jay Young Running Crane, who is a retired police officer with eight years experience serving with Blackfeet Law Enforcement Services. "I've basically taken it upon myself to make sure the Bureau of Indian Affairs is investigating this. I don't want this to fall through the cracks."

Jay Young Running Crane has voiced a lack of confidence in how BLES responded to the crash, alleging that sloppy police work and nepotism resulted in evidence either being tainted or willfully ignored.

Under other circumstances, the process to confirm or refute the basic outlines of Jay Young Running Crane's allegations would be fairly routine.

Within hours of a fatal crash, the Montana Highway Patrol typically files an incident report with details on the physical circumstances of the crash. The identity of crash victims can be obtained through the county coroner's office. Within a few days, often a single workday, the county attorney's office will release an affidavit detailing progress in the investigation to that point, and identifying any individuals charged with a criminal offense connected with the incident.

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All these documents are a matter of public record and obtainable by any individual with an interest in them.

This straightforward transparency and public disclosure does not apply to a majority of the nation's Indian reservations. There, a complex web of local, state and federal jurisdiction often blocks any public disclosure at all.

Young Running Crane's death serves as a perfect example.

When asked for an incident report on the crash that took Eljay Young Running Crane's life, a Montana Highway Patrol dispatcher responded that state law limits the Justice Department discretion to release information on fatal crashes occurring within the boundaries of Montana's Indian Reservations. She suggested contacting the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Justice Services (OJS).

The Assistant Special Agent in Charge for OJS in Montana, William LaCompte, declined to respond to any questions regarding Young Running Crane's death. A receptionist for the BIA said any inquiries should be directed to the Public Affairs Director for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior.

That office in Washington D.C. is responsible for public communications regarding all 567 federally recognized Indian tribes and 326 reservations. There was no response to an e-mail sent on Jan. 18 requesting more information on Eljay Young Running Crane's death.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is tasked with investigating most major crimes that occur on Indian Reservations. Sandra Barker, a media spokeswoman for the FBI's regional headquarters in Salt Lake City responded to a request for more information by stating "the BIA is investigating so they will be the one to release any info."

To date, there has been no response to multiple calls to BLES Police Chief Jess Edwards and BLES Capt. Edwin Salois requesting more information on the death of Eljay Young Running Crane.

Nine days after Eljay Young Running Crane's death the Montana Highway Patrol issued an incident report, which among other things detailed the following;

"Incident occurred in Pondera County on Jan. 16 at 4:15 a.m. One vehicle involved, one person killed, one person injured.

"Vehicle was a Jeep Cherokee driven by a 19-year-old female from Browning. Passenger was an 18-year-old female from Heart Butte. Pedestrian was the fatal, a 21-year-old male from Heart Butte. (Jay Young Running Crane said Eljay would have celebrated his 21st birthday soon)

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"Vehicle was traveling northbound on Heart Butte Road. At mile marker 7.9 the vehicle entered the northbound lane and made a sharp turn, striking a pedestrian standing in the road at the intersection. The vehicle continued off the roadway, carrying the pedestrian on the hood, impacting a fence and two full oil drums before coming to rest in the ditch.

"Alcohol suspected as a factor in the incident."

What the Montana Highway Patrol's incident report does not do is name the Heart Butte man who died in the crash, name the driver of the vehicle or the injured passenger, nor does it state if any criminal charges have been filed in connection with a fatal crash in which alcohol is suspected as a factor.

After more than a week and dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages, no additional information regarding Eljay Young Running Crane's death has been released — even to acknowledge him as the victim of a fatal crash or to confirm if anyone has been identified for possible prosecution.

This basic information; information that would be publicly disclosed as a matter of course in nearly every other fatal crash in the state of Montana, is being withheld by law enforcement agencies at every level from tribal police to the FBI.

Jay Young Running Crane said he has been contacted by an agent from OJS and that an investigation into his grandson's death has been opened.

However, there is often a lack of confidence in Indian Country in a criminal justice system which appears dysfunctional and unresponsive to the needs of Native American communities.

"The Commission has concluded that criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country is an indefensible morass of complex, conflicting, and illogical commands," states a report to the President and Congress of the United States authored in 2013 by the Indian Law and Order Commission.

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The report goes on to catalog a list of failures within the Indian justice system, including delayed prosecutions, too few prosecutions, investigators and prosecutors unfamiliar or even hostile to Indians and tribes, greater criminal activity and increased endangerment to people living within Indian reservations.

Comprehensive statistical data on crime rates within Indian Reservations is almost non-existent. A 14-year-old report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found American Indians experience violent crime (rape, robbery, aggravated assault) at a rate nearly 2 1/2 times the national average and Native American women are about 80 percent more likely to be murdered than non-Native women.

Despite these grim statistics, federal prosecution and conviction rates on reservations lag behind the national average.

A Government Accountability Office report released in December 2010 found that U.S. attorneys decline to prosecute about half of all major crimes cases filed on behalf of Indian reservation residents. Fold that into a complex criminal prosecution system that is poorly understood — one which places no priority upon openness or public disclosure — and you have a criminal justice system ripe for criticism.

"The system is also badly dysfunctional," states a frequently quoted story on the nation's broken Indian justice system, written by Michael Riley of the Denver Post. "Burdened by competing federal priorities such as immigration and terrorism and undermined by institutional resistance to using the high-powered federal judicial machine to prosecute run-of-the-mill violent crime."

"I've had (assistant U.S. attorneys) look right at me and say, 'I did not sign up for this," said Margaret Chiara, a former U.S. attorney for western Michigan who spoke with Riley in 2016. "They want to do big drug cases, white-collar crime and conspiracy."

"And I tell you, the vast majority of judges feel the same way," Chiara added. "They will look at these Indian Country cases and say, 'What is this doing here? I could have stayed in state court if I wanted to do this stuff.'"

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Many tribal law scholars trace deficiencies within the system back to an antiquated system that was imposed in the 19th century, wherein the federal government had almost absolute authority to administrate governmental activities within the nation's Indian reservations.

"We're talking decades if not centuries of the federal government not committing to protect Indian people in the same way they've committed to protecting everybody else," said Professor Monte Mills, co-director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana School of Law.

Mills notes that the sheer complexity of governmental jurisdiction on Indian reservations contributes to the lack of effectiveness. As many as six law enforcement entities may or may not have jurisdiction depending upon the nature of the crime, where it was committed and whether or not the victim and perpetrator were tribal members.

"You get three agencies in a room, and you have four opinions," Mills observed. "It's all complicated just by virtue of those inter-agency dynamics. When you add on the layer of logistics of where the FBI's offices are located, how remote Indian Country often is, where the federal courts are located, it just makes it all that more complicated."

The problem had become so acute that in 2010 Congress passed the Tribal Law and Order Act, a piece of legislation that among other things attempted to clarify the responsibilities of federal, state and tribal governments with respect to crimes in Indian Country, promote better communication and coordination between these agencies and demand that federal law enforcement agencies produce annual reports on the number of cases they investigated and those which they had declined.

It is a step in the right direction, but many within Native American communities - including Eljay Young Running Crane's family - remain skeptical that the cause of transparency and public disclosure surrounding criminal investigations in Indian Country has been fully resolved.

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