Name: Fort Peck
Tribes: Assiniboine
& Sioux
Population: 10,321
Native: 60%
Counties: Daniels,
Roosevelt, Sheridan,
Valley
Driven by Loss
Embittered by how their daughter's death was handled by Fort Peck and federal authorities, a family looks for justice
Written by Kayla Matzke
The crosses are almost as frequent as mile markers along U.S. Highway 2 as it cuts across Montana's 110-mile-wide Fort Peck Reservation. Attached to steel posts driven into the prairie, they stand, symbols of stories and lives that ended in littered ditches. Next to old beer bottles, baby diapers and bits of paper, they remain as memories, fading into the wide-open prairie.
Across the blacktop from mile marker 615 on the north ditch of U.S. Highway 2 stands one cross, different from the others. Pale pink flowers adorn its post and a single worn red ribbon is tied loosely to its top. Black bold letters read: Sierra Renee Follette, 12- 26-86 to 10-24-06. Fresh rust unevenly outlines its edges.
They called her Beasty. She was both Assiniboine and Sioux. She was strong and confident; nobody messed with her. She was always smiling, always positive. If she knew you she would greet you. People always said she resembled her mother, Mary, that they had the same soft, round face. She was a daughter, a mother, a sister, a niece and a friend.
Donelle Buckles remembers the pounding on her door. It was early in the morning hours of Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006, when she and her husband woke to the sound of frantic, thrashing fists. It was Sam Four Star. She was hysterical, shrieking something about her friend, hit by a vehicle and lying on the road.
Buckles grabbed a blanket and ran to the highway with Four Star while her husband called 911. Nineteenyear- old Sierra Follette was on the asphalt, her left leg bent beneath her. Morning Wise Spirit lay on top of her, trying to soothe her friend.
When tribal police arrived they told Wise Spirit to get off Sierra, but she refused. Finally, they dragged her away from Sierra's limp body and locked her in the back of a police car.
For 40 minutes, the family says, Sierra lay on the edge of the road with Buckles' blanket over her. No one performed first aid. Once an ambulance came it rushed Sierra to Poplar Community Hospital, two miles away. Her pelvic bone was fractured and her left leg was broken, the bone piercing through her skin. She had lost a lot of blood.
The driver, the girls told the police, didn't even brake. They said he was driving a white sport utility vehicle, which one of the girls described as an Oldsmobile Bravada.
After Sierra's funeral Mary and Verle Follette say people in town told them that a former tribal police officer whose brother owned an Oldsmobile Bravada was bragging that he had run over Sierra and killed her, but that nothing would be done about it. People in the town of 900 residents would come up to them on the street or leave messages on their answering machine saying they heard the former officer admit to running over Sierra, Mary says.
"They would call and they would say, 'We want to testify,'" Mary says. She would always tell them to call tribal police. Fort Peck tribal police did not charge anyone and the family says the FBI closed the case with no charges and no prosecution. Blood was found on the suspect vehicle's front bumper, Mary and Verle say. They say tribal police claimed the blood was from a deer, though an FBI investigative report obtained by the family's attorney says blood found on the front bumper of a vehicle that was tested was determined to be human.
"Something needs to be done," Verle says. "Our hope is that this doesn't happen to other families. We're not a case, we're a people."
The Follettes can't help but smile when they talk about their daughter. She liked to joke and play tricks on her mom. "She was always different in everything she did," Verle says, smiling. She was the third born of their five children, the second eldest of their four daughters. The loudest too. Many Sundays she would go to the House of Prayer where her parents served as pastors, a pack of friends in tow.
By the fall of 2006 Sierra was a new mother to a baby boy, Trent. "My little man," she called him. A month before the accident, Sierra had moved out of her parents' house into a mobile home in downtown Poplar, a place for her and Trent.
The smiles quickly fade from Mary and Verle's faces when they talk about Sierra's death. "I don't even know where to start," Verle says, shaking his head. Verle gets anxious when he talks about Sierra, and busies himself shuffling papers, fixing coffee and finding things. Mary says he's the type of man who will pick up hitchhikers, take them home and feed them, give them money and pray with them. He likes helping people. But he couldn't help Sierra that night.
It started out as a normal Monday night. Sierra asked Mary if she would babysit 13-month-old Trent while she hung out with friends Sam Four Star and Morning Wise Spirit. Around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, Mary went to Sierra's trailer and found Sierra and her friends watching movies. She says she didn't see or smell alcohol and stayed only briefly.
"Next thing I know the cops are pounding on the door," Mary says, telling them a car hit their daughter. It was close to 4 a.m.