Story by Daniel Person
Photos by Ryan Tahbo
William Westwolf Jr. was known as Ice Man around Browning on the Blackfeet Reservation. He got the nickname in high school for his ability to score 40 points in basketball games before they invented 3-pointers.
He’s got ice in his veins, they would say.
Officers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs picked up the 46-year-old Westwolf on an unusually warm Saturday in February that didn’t give any hint of the northern cold front about to descend.
Though police arrest records are not available, his family speculates it was for public intoxication. On the reservation, a person can’t be charged for public intoxication, but can be picked up and detained as a safety measure. Police use what’s commonly called the “eight-hour rule,” holding people in jail until they sober up, then letting them go free. Eight hours after Westwolf’s arrest was at 2:15 a.m.
By then a cold front had broken the winter silence, roaring along the eastern edge of the towering Rocky Mountains, sending the mercury plunging to 2 degrees at the nearest weather station, in Cut Bank, 34 miles to the east.
When Westwolf didn’t come home that night, family members say they called the jail on Sunday to see if he had been picked up, but were told he wasn’t there. When the family asked to file a missing person report with Bureau of Indian Affairs police, they say they were told to go to the tribe for help. The family started searching and asked the tribe for aid.
Mark Keller, head of Disaster and Emergency Services for the tribe, was amazed by the BIA’s inaction.
“They didn’t take no action,” he says. “It was kind of left to us.”
Keller, who used to work for the BIA police, organized a formal search on Tuesday after informal efforts turned up empty. Over several days almost 200 people joined the search, which, aside from volunteers, included tribal agencies, the FBI and, by then, the BIA. Keller says the BIA didn’t tell the family Westwolf had been in jail until Tuesday, after the formal search was under way.
Only one person reported seeing Westwolf after his release from jail. But security cameras around town occasionally caught his lonely pre-dawn wanderings.
His brother Arthur Westwolf and search and rescue leaders stared at grainy black and white videos as they tried to piece together clues to his whereabouts.
A camera outside the jail caught him traveling north toward Blackfeet Community Hospital. He was caught next on hospital security cameras, walking down halls inside the hospital, exchanging words with a security officer.
A camera outside the adjacent Blackfeet Chemical Dependency Treatment Center caught him next, placing a hand on one door and then another, but not entering.
The final clips of his life are the hardest for his family to understand. The treatment center security cameras show Westwolf heading west. West, toward his family’s 120-acre plot of land, where horses roam in packs. West toward the jagged Rocky Mountains where a Hollywood camera crew shot the scenes depicting heaven for “What Dreams May Come.”
But a few minutes later, Westwolf has turned and is headed east. There was nothing for him to the east, just open fields and rubbish the wind collects as it swirls through Browning.
Six day after he disappeared, on Friday, Westwolf’s frozen body would be found in one of those fields next to a broken down barbed wire fence tangled with fast food wrappers and plastic bags from the IGA.
His eyes were wide open, his arms curled at a 90-degree angle, his skin blackened. An autopsy lists hypothermia as the cause of death. His blood alcohol content was .12 percent.
Though Keller is upset the BIA jailers didn’t tell him sooner that Westwolf had been detained and let go at that early hour, he knows it wouldn’t have saved his life. Keeping Westwolf in jail until morning, he says, or calling his family, would have.
For his family, and many others in Browning, Westwolf’s death is one sign that points to what is wrong on the reservation: A Bureau of Indian Affairs police force they consider foreign, committing acts they consider careless, in a town severely in need of better law enforcement.
On Feb. 15, 2003, more than 50 Bureau of Indian Affairs agents swept into Browning just after noon with assault rifles at the ready. BIA officers from tribes across the West converged on the police station and jail, seizing tribal officers’ guns and badges and relieving 37 employees of their duties. Even the jailhouse cook was fired.
Many on the reservation cheered the changing of the guard.
Corruption was rampant. In 2001, the federal government had released a report that detailed 58 accusations of corruption and misdoings in the tribal police force and correctional facilities. A few changes occurred after the report, but most were inconsequential in comparison to the real problems that bedeviled the police.
An inmate given trusty status walked away from the jail and stabbed a man to death in 2002. A few months later another inmate jailed for partner abuse was given a pass to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but instead went to his girlfriend’s home and raped her.
Days before the BIA swept in, after a 13-year-old girl was raped, a doctor at the hospital called law enforcement and asked for an investigator. Hours passed and no officer showed up.
The BIA had had enough. The contract the Blackfeet Tribal Council had negotiated in 1995 to take over law enforcement was now null and void.
It wasn’t long, however, that the optimism residents of the reservation felt after the takeover turned to disillusionment.
The size of the police force has gone from about 30 following the takeover to just 10. At the jail, six guards share duties 24 hours a day. The BIA has posted openings for two correctional officers and a supervisor, but in late March those jobs were still unfilled.
At most five police officers are on patrol on a weekend night, but most of the time it’s fewer. At best, the officers work five 12-hour shifts a week. At worst, they don’t get weekends off, says Police Chief Clifford Serawop.
Outside of Serawop’s office, thank you cards written by a class of third-graders are tacked up on a wall.
Thank you for saving our town, saving our roads, and picking up drunks, one reads.
I want to thank you for making sure nobody steals me and protecting me, reads another.
They are motivation for his officers, Serawop says.
“It’s a battle here,” and it can wear on the officers, he adds.
Serawop knows there is animosity toward his force. He is the second chief in four years. It’s the response the BIA gets on every reservation, as far as he can tell. He has been an officer for the force for seven years. He concedes, though, that Browning presents challenges that not all towns do.
“It’s a lively town,” he says, and then pauses to find more words to describe it. He can’t. “It’s a lively town.”
Serawop’s office lies behind a locked door in the sterile building that holds the courthouse, police station and jail. He arrived in Browning on a cold November day in 2005.
In his powder-blue uniform, he diplomatically dissects the challenges he faces as a police chief in Browning.
Manpower is the biggest.
His budget allows for 16 officers, but keeping the 10 he has is hard enough.
“People don’t consider that we don’t have many officers coming in here” looking for jobs, he says, well aware of the criticisms voiced outside the walls.
The BIA enforces high standards for police, he says, and that narrows the field of potential applicants even more. He estimates his officers get 70,000 calls a year. And not all the calls come from Browning.
The reservation spans 1.5 million acres, larger than the state of Delaware. While Serawop acknowledges that’s a lot of land, he says because the population is concentrated in a few communities it’s not hard for officers to respond quickly.
Jolene Vance, however, disagrees. She lives in Heart Butte, on a winding and undulating road 26 miles south of Browning.
“You could be beat to death by the time they get here,” she says while tending the counter in her small Heart Butte shop where she rents DVDs and sells cigarettes and sunflower seeds.
“There are fights, but by the time they (the police) get here, they’re too late,” she says. “They’re all gone.”
She says she broke up a street brawl a while ago between men using sticks as weapons. Despite all the noise, nobody bothered to call the cops.
“People don’t call, because it takes so long,” Vance says, estimating the response time at between 45 minutes and an hour.
Serawop is an officer in a chain of command that reaches all the way to Washington, D.C. For him to even release a police report requires that he contact superiors in Billings, possibly Albuquerque, N.M., or even Washington, D.C.
Many in the community complain that it takes six months to even get an accident report so they can file an insurance claim.
For the Westwolfs, it’s more serious. They can only speculate why William was picked up, or at what time, and it causes them considerable anguish.
“It’s hard enough to move on,” says Arthur Westwolf, surrounded by his grieving family. “But when you really don’t know and you have all these questions, it’s hard to get on with your life.”
As for Westwolf’s release from jail, Serawop says he has no oversight of the jail; that was a duty removed from his office and given directly to Deirdre Wilson, supervisory correctional program specialist with the BIA in Billings, 360 miles away.
Wilson would not comment for this story.
When Arthur Westwolf talks about Wilson, whom he says he’s tried to reach several times, she barely seems real, a person living in a far off world.
“They tell us to call this Deirdre Wilson in Billings,” he says in his slow, careful drawl, stressing the word Billings to highlight the hopelessness he feels.
That makes his brother George’s anger flare.
“The cops said, ‘We have no control over the facilities,’” he says, then, nearly shouting, exclaims: “They took over the jail!”
On the other side of town, near the field where Westwolf was found, live the Gervais family.
Eighteen-year-old Zach Gervais was stabbed to death on Jan. 28.
When his father, Joe Gervais, talks about his son, his hands work a piece of purple plastic rope, wrapping it around his knuckles and then giving it a tug.
On the night he was stabbed he was doing “what teenagers do,” his father says.
Zach and his cousin brought a girl to her home, so she could pick up clothes left there after she had been staying in the home, Gervais says. She was uneasy about her relationship with the people living there, so before she went inside, she told the boys she would shout if she needed help.
She shouted. When they came into the house, the elder Gervais says, they were ambushed by several men with knives, who stabbed both Zach and his cousin John Gervais.
The only stab wound Zach suffered entered through his upper back and traveled 8 inches to his heart. As he was taken from the scene by paramedics, Joe Gervais says his son told his cousin, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”
By the time he got to the hospital, he was non-responsive.
One suspect is being held after he and another man were caught in Great Falls shortly after the stabbing.
The suspects have a criminal history, Gervais says, and should not have been on the streets.
The man accused of stabbing Zach was facing trial a week earlier for another stabbing. However, Gervais says, because of missing paperwork, he was freed.
“He was in court the week before, and the system failed,” he says.
“I don’t feel any anger at him,” Gervais, who is tribal council treasurer, says about the suspect. “I feel anger at the system.”
It’s a system that has let people commit crime after crime with no repercussions, he says.
Gervais says he knows the suspect was involved in two previous stabbings and has heard he played a part in two others.
And while the Blackfeet tribal prosecutor says he will try the suspect for assault, the family does not know if felony charges will be brought against him. The tribal courts try only misdemeanor crimes. Federal prosecutors bring felony charges on the reservation, after FBI
“We don’t know what story we are getting, or if they are investigating anybody,” he says.
“If this happened anywhere else, these boys would (have been) in jail and I wouldn’t have to worry about my kids.”
Outside, his daughter plays on a crooked, twisted swing damaged by a week of winds that peeled back roofs around the town of about 1,100 people.
In the parking lot is a 1969 red Camero that Zach was fixing up. The rims were an early graduation present for a milestone that was supposed to happen this spring.
A public hearing about law and order on the Blackfeet Reservation was called in mid-April to talk about Zach and other victims on the reservation, in hopes of bringing to light problems organizers claim the BIA is causing.
In attendance for the tearful accounts of BIA misdeeds were Serawop, an FBI special agent and a federal assistant attorney.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to work,” Gervais said about the BIA law enforcement before the meeting.
Later he adds: “To me, they don’t care. It’s just two Indians.”
Prosecutions are another casualty of understaffing.
Mike Connelly is the tribal prosecutor who handles all misdemeanors committed on the reservation.
Connelly says he’s forced to dismiss about 30 to 40 cases a week because police officers don’t show up in court to testify against offenders. He estimates that over a year, 30 percent of cases are dismissed because officers fail to show.
He acknowledges that the police force is understaffed, but says that’s no excuse.
“To me they have the attitude that they don’t care,” he says. “Maybe they do and they are overworked and burned out, but that’s no excuse for not doing your job.”
The frustrations are mounting, and some tribal members are calling on the Blackfeet Nation to take back control.
Betty N. Cooper, a tribal councilwoman, concedes that the tribe was doing a poor job enforcing laws when the BIA took over. The tribal council fought the takeover, but finally relented after talks between the council and the BIA. Since the takeover, however, the BIA has proven to be worse than the tribe, Cooper contends.
Like most other people, she has personal stories of her kin being mistreated, but she also hears stories by the droves from people coming to her office for help. She tells them to write the BIA and other government officials.
They rarely do.
“People are so discouraged that they don’t have a voice,” she says. “They are hopeless. They can’t go to anyone.”
“We are human beings,” she adds. “We need to be protected.”
Cooper concedes that the tribe would not be able to take over the duties immediately. Instead, she wants to start a five-year transition period during which the tribe would slowly take back control.
Most of the tribal members interviewed for this story say that the tribe would be better than the BIA. Some, however, aren’t so sure.
Charlene Old Chief was a tribal police officer for seven years when the BIA took over. When she came to work that February morning, she was met by an officer with what she says was a machine gun and was asked to hand over her weapon.
While she thinks the methods were heavy-handed, the takeover, she says, was necessary.
As an officer, she would see tribal council members walk into court to get relatives’ charges dismissed.
The BIA is better, she says, just understaffed.
Larry Epstein, county attorney for Glacier County, shares her sentiment.
“It would be great if the Blackfeet could take law enforcement back over, but they are not able to,” he says.
William Westwolf’s mother, Doris, and grandmother Gladys live together in a small home west of town, six miles down Highway 89. When the wind blows, as it so often does, the roof rattles and sometimes even shakes the knickknacks William’s grandmother likes to keep on the nightstand by her bed.
On the walls are so many family photos that those near the top nearly touch the ceiling. They are mostly portraits of children with hairdos only worn on school picture day. Most are the size of notebook paper.
But there are none of William, not on the walls. They make his mother too lonely, she says as she sits on her bed. So she keeps them in a plain cardboard box by her bedroom door. There’s one of him in his basketball uniform, another of him at his high school graduation. When she slides them out, her hands tremble.
Tears aren’t visible, but she clutches a paper napkin in her hand and dabs the outside corners of her eyes.
Westwolf’s brother George still thinks about him when he goes to bed, and when he wakes up in the morning. George was just older than William, was the one who taught him how to play basketball, the sport that brought William fame on the reservation.
His words are harsh when he talks about his brother’s death.
He’ll look you straight in the eye and ask, “Who’s to blame for Ice Man’s death?” He’s not being rhetorical. He really wants to know.
“To me, it kind of looks like the BIA is the cause of his death,” he nearly shouts when you don’t give him an answer.
Even louder: “Put it together. If you were the jailer, you wouldn’t have let him out at 2 in the morning at 9 below, would you?”
Though it was 2 degrees in Cut Bank, Westwolf insists it got much colder in Browning that night. It’s always colder in Browning, he says.
For the Westwolfs, what happened to William is a dishonor to the Blackfeet people, the proud Blackfeet people, whose name, Nanapikuni, means the “real people.”
`When Lewis and Clark came in contact with the Plains Indians, many of the Indians spoke of the ferocity of the tribe that came from the north, and traders kept away from Marias Pass, the lowest pass over the continental divide in Montana, for fear of Blackfeet attack.
Now, Crow and others not from here patrol the streets and lock up offenders.
Though it was well over a century ago that Crow and Blackfeet last warred against each other, the sentiment still lingers. William Westwolf’s grandfather would tell the stories of Blackfeet battles with the Crow, who now live in south-central Montana on a reservation, which like the Blackfeet, is much diminished in size from its original allotment.
Arthur Westwolf has been the most adamant about finding out what happened to his brother. He keeps a diary in neat cursive handwriting, noting anything he hears about that cold week in February.
Arthur teaches third graders the Blackfeet language at the public school.
“A lot of these Indians (on the police force), they are just doing their time, they don’t want to be here,” he says.
He says the five tribes that make up the Blackfeet confederation are like his hand. He holds his hand open, with his palm facing him, and calls out the names of the five tribes in the Blackfeet tongue. His band, the South Piegan, live farthest south.
He is unhappy that strangers oversee life on his reservation.
It’s a thought he ponders as he stands over where his brother was found. Before he turns to leave, he makes a tobacco offering to William, pressing a Marlboro Red between his fingers, letting the tobacco fall to the ground, and says a prayer in Blackfeet.
Oh Source of life
Oh Creator
Help me
Please hear me
Help us so we may avert the path of wrongfulness
Oh source of life please help us
Mother Earth, Sun, help us grow old
And fully raise our children
Long life, survival
Amen.
