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Sense of safety disappears with increase in sex trafficking

Edith Chavez’s initial report of kidnapping not taken seriously by law enforcement

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VERMILION RESERVATION— When Edith Chavez, of rural Tower, escaped from a kidnapper in North Dakota in April, she did everything she could think of to let residents know there was a kidnapper in their midst.

Not that long ago, the prospect that a man might be cruising truck stops in small towns in North Dakota preying on unsuspecting women would have been an eye-opener, maybe even unbelievable. But since the oil boom took hold in the past few years, the sense of safety that comes from splendid isolation has vanished in many parts of that state. It’s an unpleasant reality that could have cost Edith her life.

Law enforcement officials and reporters who work in North Dakota are newly familiar with issues like the sex trafficking of women, so Edith’s story, as recounted in the June 5 issue of the Timberjay, surely did not come as a surprise.

What was surprising, says Linda Thompson, director of the First Nations Womens Alliance in Devil’s Lake, N. D., was the collective shrug from too many of her fellow North Dakotans who were in a position to do something about it. “When someone says they’ve been abducted and drugged and tossed in a car, that’s extreme. We should be jumping up and down about it,” said Thompson, a former Bois Forte band member herself, who now works in North Dakota on issues related to domestic violence and sexual assault.

Yet, as the Timberjay reported earlier this month, far from taking Chavez’s report seriously, her initial attempts to alert law enforcement officials in Williston on April 12 led to her own arrest on a minor, four-year-old bench warrant from Grand Forks. New information and new developments since then not only highlight the disconnect between Indian victims and the dominant non-Indian culture of North Dakota, but point also to potential misconduct by the Williston Police Department— including submitting false information to North Dakota’s largest newspaper.

Chavez, who sat down for a second in-depth interview with the Timberjay last week, described in greater detail her visit to the Williston police. She had gone to the police after escaping from her captor in a remote part of western North Dakota. She said she had wandered for at least two days before a local rancher spotted her in a field and went to investigate. He brought her to his son’s house nearby, where she borrowed a cellphone to call her family.

At her mother’s home on the Vermilion Reservation, her sister Roberta took the call, which Roberta said provided few details of what had actually happened to her sister during her nearly week-long disappearance. Roberta and her sister Ladonna had assumed from the beginning that Edith had run into trouble with her ex-boyfriend, whom she had accompanied to North Dakota to visit members of his family near Mandan. Edith said the two argued on the way back to Minnesota and he had dumped her out of the car in Valley City. She was hitchhiking to Fargo to catch a ride home from a relative when she was kidnapped on April 6 in the back of a truck stop on the outskirts of Casselton. She had gotten a ride there and decided the truck stop would be a better location to find a ride the rest of the way to Fargo. At the same time, she used her laptop computer and the truck stop’s wi-fi to message her family on Facebook to let them know what had happened. That was the last message her family would receive from her for nearly a week.

Shortly after Edith’s April 12 call home, Roberta contacted the Williston police and told them her sister was coming in to file a report. Roberta said at that point she still assumed it was Edith’s ex-boyfriend who had abused her, and that’s the story she related to police, and which shows up in the incident report that Williston police produced at the time. “We didn’t know anything else at that point,” said Roberta.

The Williston police have consistently denied requests by the Timberjay for a copy of the incident report, but they did provide a copy to the Fargo Forum newspaper, which requested the document after the Timberjay’s June 5 report appeared. The Forum subsequently provided a copy to the Timberjay.

The police report also states that an officer tried to call Edith, apparently on the rancher’s son’s cell phone, shortly after hearing from Roberta. But the call never went through, according to the report, so they never did hear Edith’s actual experience until she walked into the Williston police department (having gotten a ride from the rancher’s son) later that morning. There, she told police about her abduction, a far different story than the domestic assault complaint they were expecting. The discrepancies, based merely on miscommunication, apparently raised alarm bells with police. When they checked for any missing persons reports filed on Edith, they found the outstanding bench warrant and apparently concluded she was making up a story. The initial police report states that the individuals involved seemed “confused” about the events. Edith said one of the officers told her that she and her sister “should have gotten our stories straight.” Rather than seeking further details, the police halted their interview, handcuffed her, and sent her to lockup.

Police misconduct?

While that action by the Williston police could well be chalked up as a fairly benign instance of jumping to a conclusion without all the facts, a subsequent act by the department is more troubling. Following the release of the Timberjay’s June 5 report, “North Dakota nightmare,” the Fargo Forum, with the Timberjay’s permission, posted the story on the newspaper’s website, guaranteeing far greater exposure for the story in North Dakota.

At the same time, a Forum reporter interviewed the chief of police in Williston and obtained a copy of the original incident report. Then, on June 8, the Forum received a press release, purportedly from the Williston police (although it has no contact information, nor is it written on department letterhead), that told an entirely different story from the department’s own incident report.

In the release, the Williston police now claimed that an unnamed police sergeant had obtained a phone number for Edith and was able to contact her. At the time, according to the release, Edith reported that she was at an unnamed casino and that she had no assault or injuries to report. Even so, according to the release, the sergeant asked Edith to stop by the Williston police department, which she agreed to do. The release states that the sergeant observed no visible injuries, but did smell alcohol on her breath, and said that Edith wanted to “return to Grand Forks.”

Edith was dumbfounded when shown the release during an interview with the Timberjay last week. She denied ever having been contacted by the Williston police, or having been in a casino. “How could they contact me?” she asked. “I didn’t even have a phone.”

While she had borrowed a cellphone to contact her family the day the rancher discovered her in his field, Edith said she never used it to contact Williston PD, since she was, by then, making arrangements to be driven there by the rancher’s son. And, she said, the police never got through to her at the number. Edith’s story is consistent with the original incident report, which indicates no success in reaching her by phone.

The original incident report says nothing about locating Edith unharmed, at a casino, nor did Williston police ever report their purported contact with Edith to her family at the time. Further, the incident report says nothing about alcohol on Edith’s breath, nor does it explain why Edith wanted to return to Grand Forks, since she had no reason to go there.

“I haven’t been there in years,” said Edith. Police might have assumed she lived in Grand Forks, however, since that’s where the bench warrant for her had originated. In fact, Edith resides mostly on the Vermilion Reservation or in nearby Virginia, and was headed to Fargo at the time of her abduction.

Edith noted that the Williston police department has security cameras throughout and she urged the Timberjay or any other media to seek access to the video logs. “They would show I was trying to tell them what had happened,” she said.

The Timberjay did attempt to clear up the discrepancies between the incident report and the press release, but a Lt. David Peterson with the Williston police said the department would release no new information to the newspaper, nor would he have any further comment or answer any questions.

Numerous friends and family members contacted by the Timberjay confirmed that Edith had no cellphone at the time, nor does she have one today. Instead, Edith had routinely used a laptop computer to post Facebook messages to family and friends.

Telling her story

Yet Edith’s run-in with the Williston police was far from the only case where Edith’s experience failed to make an impression. Edith said she found indifference from jailers in Williston, who told her it wasn’t their job to take her report. She said she tried telling the story yet again to a driver who later transported her to Minot to a larger jail facility there, but was ignored.

Once in Minot, jail officials talked to officials in Grand Forks, who agreed to drop the warrant for Edith. They soon released her and gave her directions to Trinity Hospital, a block and a half away. There, documents reviewed by the Timberjay, show Edith reported her assault and her, by then, week-old injuries, and was treated and released an hour-and-a-half later with instructions for treating a head injury and the recommendation to drink plenty of fluids. The Timberjay was not able to obtain her actual medical records.

With no place to go, Edith stayed in a waiting area at the 24-hour hospital while she waited for a friend, whom she had contacted while in the hospital, to pick her up the following day.

Despite Edith’s experience in Williston and Minot, she remained resolved to tell her story, said April LaFave, a Nett Lake resident who traveled to North Dakota with her mother Sheila to bring Edith home. Rather than heading straight back to Minnesota, the three of them headed first to the Minot Daily News, where Edith related her experience to Editor David Rupkalvis, who has since moved on to a newspaper in Tucson. “I thought it was a great story,” said Rupkalvis, “but I didn’t know how to handle it.” He said parts of the story struck him as odd and he couldn’t get confirmation or cooperation from police. But he said other parts of the story did check out. “There were certainly parts that made it seem true,” he added. “I was in North Dakota long enough to know of other stories that sounded similar and kind of out there, but turned out to be true,” he said.

LaFave said Rupkalvis told them he used to work in Williston and said he was aware of the growing problem of sex trafficking of women in the Bakken oil patch. In the end, however, the Daily News never ran the story.

It was a similar experience at the Bismarck Tribune, where the three met with reporter Andrew Sheeler. Sheeler said he recognized Edith’s story when he read the Timberjay’s June 5 report. “She pretty much told me the same thing,” he said.

Yet the Tribune never published the story either. Sheeler said her visit coincided with a busy grass fire season, which kept him occupied on more immediate news.

Thompson, of the First Nations Womens Alliance, said it’s not unusual for Indian victims to face uncertainty or even distrust from the broader non-Indian community. “I think it’s a problem everywhere, not just in North Dakota,” she said. She said most non-Indians know little about the Indian experience in America. “In school, we’re forced to learn about the Holocaust and slavery, but we’re never taught what happened to the indigenous people of this continent,” she said. That lack of knowledge, she said, creates a sense of mistrust that makes it difficult for Indian victims to obtain justice, or even to be taken seriously when they report wrongdoing.

Still, at least one law enforcement agency confirmed they are still investigating the incident. On the same trip home, in Fargo, Edith reported her abduction to Cass County deputy Keenan Zundel. Zundel confirmed that Edith told him she’d been kidnapped from Casselton, but said he found her timeline difficult to follow.

He confirmed he took pictures of her, but said he didn’t recall seeing any injuries.

LaFave has a different recollection, and confirms she saw bruises on Edith’s hands and scratches on her back. She said Edith also still had blood on some of her clothes and she had urged her to save the clothes as possible evidence should her abductor ever be caught.

Information, including photos, that could clear up discrepancies between LaFave’s and Zundel’s accounts of Edith’s injuries is unavailable, however, since the case remains under investigation according to Cass County law enforcement officials.