Towaoc – It was one of five, possibly six, killings on the isolated, 2,000-person Ute Mountain Ute Reservation last year.
Friends were passing an afternoon drinking St. Ives malt liquor when 28-year-old Samson Lameman began to play Russian roulette with a long-barreled, silver revolver. He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger twice, according to the FBI affidavit. The chambers were empty. Lameman then persuaded 26-year-old Tasha Posey to put the gun to her head and pull the trigger.
The chamber was empty. They kept drinking.
Lameman allegedly struck Posey in the right eye with the butt of the revolver. She pushed him, then fell on top of him. Lameman fired the gun into Posey’s chest, according to an eyewitness. Posey died later in the Cortez hospital; Lameman denies shooting her. The case is making its way through the federal court system.
A handful of such incidents each year – fatal stabbings, bludgeonings, beatings, shootings and drunken-driving accidents – have prompted a U.S. attorney to label this tiny sovereign nation “the murder capital of Colorado.”
The Ute Mountain Ute homicide rate, says U.S. attorney Troy Eid, dwarfs the state average of nearly 4 homicides per 100,000 people. The reservation rate is comparable to 250 or 300 killings per 100,000 people, he says, and more federal resources are desperately needed.
“It is a national and state disgrace. … No other place in Colorado is like this,” Eid says. “People shouldn’t go to bed at night wondering if they’re going to wake up.”
People living here acknowledge the plague of alcohol-fueled, and increasingly methamphetamine-caused, violence. But residents see themselves as a community of loving – sometimes feuding – extended families bound by culture and tradition and better off without outside scrutiny or interference.
Eid’s characterization is an unfair exaggeration, says former Tribal Chairman Selwyn Whiteskunk.
“We’re not as bad as the U.S. attorney put out,” the 43-year-old tribal health administrator says.
But in his next breath, White skunk says his own brother, Avery, at age 41, was murdered just north of Sleeping Ute Mountain, the landmark looming over tribal headquarters in Towaoc, in the extreme southwest corner of the state.
“It’s been three, going on four, years since my brother was murdered. He was shot with a shotgun above the neck. It took a portion of his head off. … They put him in a ditch.”
The murder is unsolved. White skunk doesn’t know the status of the investigation. Neither has the family had word of his missing nephew, Odell Vest, who was 18 when he disappeared more than nine years ago.
“All the (trouble) here is pretty much alcohol-driven. We’ve got to stop this,” Whiteskunk says finally. “We’ve got to stop killing ourselves.”
Leadership troubles
Part of the problem may be that tribal leadership has not been stable.
Whiteskunk resigned as tribal chairman in 2005, after about a year on the job, amid allegations of domestic violence and unrelated charges of driving under the influence on this “dry reservation,” where it is illegal to sell, possess or consume alcohol, even in one’s home. All charges were dismissed, he says.
“I’ve been where my people have been,” he says. “I’ve picked myself up.”
Whiteskunk’s predecessor, Chairwoman Judy Knight-Frank, stepped down in 2004 after pleading guilty in federal court to falsifying income-tax records by failing to disclose salary advances.
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council and Chairman Manuel Heart declined to discuss the reservation crime rate, alcoholism or any other facet of life with The Post.
“We are preparing a response paper,” says Tribal Councilor Prisllena Lopez, whose brother, Tracy, was murdered at age 36.
A jealous husband bludgeoned him to death with a tire iron and the help of two Ute juveniles outside Tracy Lopez’s Towaoc home in April 2005.
As for the tribe’s anticipated official public statement, Ute General Counsel Peter Ortego says: “I’ve been working on it for seven years.”
Tribal officials, including Or tego, say the tribe doesn’t trust outsiders, who focus on negative issues.
Only a few generations separate the tribe from genocide, forced relocation, mandatory boarding schools, language suppression and overt racism, either directly caused or tolerated by the federal government.
Why should the tribe trust the outside world? Ortego asks.
Serious crime is one of the few things exposed to the public because it is handled in federal court.
Denver-based Eid acknowledges many things are needed on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, but more police and better court access are among the most urgent requirements.
“We need more police on the ground. The fundamental issue is a need for a U.S. District Court in Durango. We are unique in the Lower 48 in having only one district courthouse (in Denver). Our (two) prosecutors spend a third of their time traveling. It’s an access- to-justice issue.”
One FBI agent is assigned to all of southwestern Colorado, although U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., has said he has a commitment from U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for a second agent to “address the growing lawlessness.”
Patrolling the more than 550,000 acres of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation are six police officers based with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Towaoc.
Eid says the department’s uniformed officers are about one- tenth the number needed for a geographical area of that size.
“There are people who think because we’re a casino tribe, we can throw money at problems,” Or tego says. “We don’t have the resources to compensate for the lack of officers on the ground.”
The tribe would not disclose revenue or profit figures. Not even the state Division of Gaming is given information on tribal revenues.
Tribes have a choice of creating their own police departments, courts and funding streams or relying on the BIA and its chronically underfunded budget, as the Ute Mountain Utes do.
“I’ve told (tribal leaders), unequivocally, that I think they’ve got to get a tribal police department and court (like the Southern Utes),” says Eid. ” It will dramatically improve their safety.”
Ortego says the change has been considered.
“We’re looking at taking over, but that takes years,” Ortego says. “There is a lot of pride here. They want to solve problems on their own. But the problem is immediate.”
Tribal-court void
Misdemeanor crimes are handled in a BIA-run tribal court in Towaoc, but the court didn’t function for three years because of staffing problems, Eid says.
Whenever you have a weak court, says Albuquerque-based Dan Breuninger, the BIA’s special agent in charge of law enforcement for the region, it doesn’t take long for the community to figure out the system is not functioning properly.
“The idea of the rule of law is meaningless to people there,” says one former court official who asked not to be named. “It is a completely dysfunctional society.”
In the summer of 2005, Ute Mountain tribal member Felix “Phil” Hammond died after Charleston “Chuck” Lang stabbed him 21 times in the chest and arms with a bayonet at the end of a rifle. Last month, a jury acquitted Lang of second-degree murder.
The defense successfully argued that the killing was in self-defense after a drunken Hammond barged into Lang’s home “with bad intentions.” Lang also had been drinking, according to police.
Neither Selwyn Whiteskunk, who heads the tribe’s Public Health Department, nor the head of tribal Social Services, Carla Knight-Cantsee, would quote a rate of alcoholism or drug abuse, except to say it is the plague of a small minority.
And despite the focus on alcoholism and addiction, Knight- Cantsee says the problem is similar to any other place in the U.S.
Whiteskunk and Knight-Cant see say they believe the tribe’s policy of a dry reservation is a good one. They wish the tribe had the power to close the nearest liquor store, the Eagle Claw, which sits along U.S. 491/160, about 5 miles from the reservation boundary. The tribe has unsuccessfully petitioned the county to close the store.
“They’re going to blame anybody they can but themselves,” says Eagle Claw owner Sandy Schroeder. But they buy liquor at every store in Cortez (another 5 or 6 miles away).
Knight-Cantsee says people use alcohol to “numb themselves and forget.”
“No one has had a chance to work through the grief of genocide that traumatized generations,” she says.
The legacy of slain or dislocated ancestors does not vanish quickly, she says. The effects of decades of poverty are not vanquished by one decade of casino revenues.
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
