Klandre Willie, left, and her mother, Jaycelyn Blackie, of Aztec, New Mexico participate in a candlelight vigil on May 3, 2016 for Ashlynne Mike at the San Juan Chapter house in Lower Fruitland, New Mexico. JON AUSTRIA/THE DAILY TIMESKlandre Willie, left, and her mother, Jaycelyn Blackie, of Aztec, New Mexico participate in a candlelight vigil on May 3, 2016 for Ashlynne Mike at the San Juan Chapter house in Lower Fruitland, New Mexico. JON AUSTRIA/THE DAILY TIMESABOUT THIS SERIES: "A Crisis Ignored" focuses on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, a grassroots movement to draw attention to disproportionate levels of violence against Indigenous people, particularly women and children. USA TODAY Network reporters in nearly a dozen states worked for more than a year to examine the factors that contribute to the crisis and how laws enacted in many states and at the federal level have largely failed to address it. Tribal Officer Karletta Tso-Tapahonso arrived for her shift at the Navajo Nation police station to find a woman crying outside the weathered converted post office in the Shiprock, New Mexico, district of the reservation. The pandemic prevented her from going inside, so she’d been waiting in the parking lot in jeans and a T-shirt beneath a blazing July sun. Tso-Tapahonso approached the woman, who haltingly explained she needed help finding two of her three children, just 3 months and 16 months old. “She was visibly upset … distraught,” Tso-Tapahonso recalled. The mother wasn’t making much sense. Then she shared a series of texts from the children's father. In rapid order, the texts revealed how he had taken them from their home in Aneth, Utah, about 45 miles northwest of Shiprock, an area known for its agriculture and split by the San Juan River. Heavily intoxicated and “not in his right mind,” in Tso-Tapahonso’s view, the father had threatened to kill himself along with the children using a recently purchased handgun. Tso-Tapahonso, 43, and with more than 20 years at the department, tried to calm the woman before she hurried into the station. It was 4 p.m.; two hours had already passed since the mother had last heard from her baby boy and toddling girl. The more time they lost, Tso-Tapahonso knew, the harder the search would be, and the harsher the conditions would become in the desert. Because shifts were changing, extra supervisors were at the station, along with officials from the emergency management department, which runs 911 and other vital communications. At 4:21 p.m., an Amber Alert went out for the endangered children and the dad. An all-points bulletin for the father’s beaten, two-tone brown and white pickup also was issued. The fact that an Amber Alert had gone out was borne of a tragedy five years earlier — and, for many Indigenous people, an unforgivable lapse in tribal, state and federal planning and response.
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