In November 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team. But he’d become impatient with pandemic restrictions, and his grandmother had just passed away from COVID-19.
One night, Glenn and his mother got in a fight, and he left the house. The next day, Old Bull learned that Glenn was killed in a police car chase, that he died in a head-on collision with a train. Old Bull was desperate for details about the accident, but when she went to the police station, she discovered it had shut down without any notice.
Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels follows Old Bull’s search for answers about her son’s death and discovers serious lapses in policing on the Crow and other reservations. Old Bull encounters many roadblocks. She files a Freedom of Information Act request for the police report, but her request is denied. As months pass, she still doesn’t have basic information, like which officer chased her son and how he ended up on the train tracks.
Next, Michaels traces the origins of the police force that chased Glenn. It was created by the Crow Nation’s chairman to address a lack of policing on the reservation. Before the new police force was launched, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs was mostly responsible for policing. But its force was underfunded and understaffed, with only four or five officers patrolling an area nearly the size of Connecticut. The new department was supposed to be a solution, but there were problems from the start. Old Bull learns from a former dispatcher that officers were not trained after they were hired and the department was under-resourced.
Nearly three years after Glenn’s death, Michaels is able to obtain information about the accident and share it with Old Bull. Through a FOIA request, Michaels receives official reports about the accident that explain how Glenn ended up on the train tracks. The reports also show how the investigation into the chase was flawed. Old Bull processes the information and grapples with a disturbing fact: The federal government denied her own FOIA request, even though she’s Glenn’s mother, but handed over documents to Michaels, a White reporter with no connection to Glenn. Days later, Michaels brokers a meeting between Old Bull and the former tribal police chief. Old Bull shares how the department’s sudden closure – and the lack of information about her son’s death – affected her family.
Dig Deeper
Read: A New Police Force Chased a 17-Year-Old Boy to His Death. Then It Vanished. (Mother Jones)
Watch: He Died in a Police Chase. Then the Police Vanished. (Mother Jones)
Credits
Reporter: Samantha Michaels | Producers: Najib Aminy and Mark Helenowski | Editors: Jenny Casas and Maddie Oatman | Fact checkers: Nikki Frick, Nina Wang and Henry Carnell | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Legal review: James Chadwick | Cultural competency reader: Jordynn Paz | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks to James West and Ruth Murai
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation. This episode was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Blossom Old Bull had a lot on her plate. In the fall of 2020, she was looking for work as a nursing assistant and she was a single mom raising the three youngest of her nine kids, all of whom were teenagers. Together they lived with a few other family members in a small house on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. It was a cramped space for seven people and it felt even more cramped after the pandemic hit, especially for her youngest son, Braven Glenn. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | He didn’t want to be isolated from his friends. He was always asking to go be with them, and I told him, “It’s a pandemic. People are getting COVID and dying,” and he just insisted on being there with them. |
| Al Letson: | 17 years old, Braven hated the new normal of going to school behind a screen. He also just suffered a big loss. His grandmother had died from complications with COVID. One night that November, Braven wanted to go to her house. His cousins who were some of his closest friends and who were also grieving her death were going to be there. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I was like, “No, you’re going to stay home now.” I got after him and he got upset and he just got his stuff and walked out the door, so I let him go. I just figured he was going to cool off. We knew where he would be at. I was going to go have another one of my sons go look for him and bring him home, and by that time it was too late. |
| Al Letson: | The next day, Blossom gets a phone call from one of Braven’s older brothers. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | He was crying and I said, “What? What’s going on? What’s going on?” He was like, “He got into an accident.” |
| Al Letson: | Her son doesn’t have many details, but he tells her there was a car accident, that Braven is dead. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | Then I started screaming. I just dropped my phone and I just went crazy. |
| Al Letson: | A half hour later, Blossom gets a knock on the door. It’s an investigator from the Bureau of Indian Affairs delivering the death notification. He tells the family that Braven was in a car chase with law enforcement, that he died in a head-on collision with a train. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | It was all confusing to us. We didn’t know what to think, and the main reason he gave us for them chasing Braven, “He was clocked going 90.” Those were his exact words. It was like, “Why did they chase him? I’ve never heard of people getting stopped for speeding.” |
| Al Letson: | The rural highways on the Crow Reservation don’t have much traffic. Speed limits are rarely enforced, and Braven was known to be a cautious driver. It seemed unlike him to speed. The BIA investigator doesn’t offer much more information, not even which police agency chased Braven. Like on many other reservations, the Crow Nation has a complicated patchwork of law enforcement policing the area. Blossom finds out which agency was involved from the local news. |
| Speaker 3: | Tonight we’re learning about a fatal vehicle versus train crash that took the life of a seventeen-year-old. Well, what we’re learning is that it happened last Tuesday evening as local tribal officers were pursuing the teenager’s vehicle. |
| Al Letson: | Local tribal officers could only mean one thing. The cop who chased Braven worked for the Crow Nation Tribal Police Department, a brand new police force that was only five months old. Within days, Blossom hears rumors that the department is disbanding. She calls the headquarters, but it seems like the phone line has been disconnected, so she goes to the station. It’s normal business hours, but nobody’s there. The windows are covered with paper, so she can’t see inside. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | The doors were locked and looked like it wasn’t in operation anymore. They’re just up and left. I was upset because it’s like there was a life taken and you guys just closed everything down without giving the family any answers. |
| Al Letson: | What happened to Braven and how can a police department shut down without any explanation? Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels has been looking for those answers in court filings and law enforcement reports, following Braven’s case and Blossom’s search for accountability, Samantha starts the story going back a few years to 2017 when the family moved to the reservation. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Blossom is a member of the Lakota tribe, originally from South Dakota. She’d been living with Braven and some of his siblings in New Mexico. She decided to move them to the Crow Nation in Montana so Braven could be closer to his Crow father and learn more about his Crow roots. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I felt he was doing well here. He was getting to embrace his culture and he was finding out who he was and where he was from. |
| Samantha Michae…: | The reservation had mountains, rivers, and big open skies, and most people there speak Crow as a first language. It’s also home to Crow Fair, a week-long cultural celebration with a rodeo, horse racing and a powwow, but the transition wasn’t easy for Braven. Just weeks after they arrived, his dad died from pneumonia. Braven was only 13. |
| Emilio Old Bull: | He had a tough outer exterior. He had a tough exterior. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Emilio Old Bull is Braven’s older brother. They were close. They shared a room and a bunk bed, Emilio on the top, Braven on the bottom. |
| Emilio Old Bull: | If you see him, you probably thought he didn’t want to get to know anyone or he wasn’t… He kind of looked mean, but once he smiled, that changed everything. |
| Samantha Michae…: | When Braven first moved to the reservation, one of his closest friends was his cousin Jayden. |
| Jayden Old Bull: | He could talk to anyone in school. There’d be random kids that no one would talk to you and he would just go up to him and like, “Hey, what’s up? What’s your name?” Then he go to other people like, “Yeah, this is my bro,” this and that. He was friends with everyone. He was just really social and just a great person. |
| Samantha Michae…: | By the time Braven entered high school, things were falling into place. He made a solid group of friends, ran cross-country and track and field, but his true passion was the basketball team. |
| Jordan Jefferso…: | He was always in the gym or always working out or always at our wellness center, just always wanting to get better and improve. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Jordan Jefferson was Braven’s girlfriend. They went to rival schools and met playing basketball. |
| Jordan Jefferso…: | A lot of people adored him and he was a fun person to be around. If you got to know Braven, you were just a lucky person because of how awesome he was. |
| Samantha Michae…: | In the months before his death, Braven had gotten a new job at McDonald’s. He was planning to save up to buy his own car. Braven talked a lot about getting off the reservation and traveling the world. He was thinking about joining the army, but he also wanted to stay near family, especially his mom, Blossom. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | Braven was a mama’s boy. He stuck around me a lot and none of the other kids would say that, but he would say he was going to live with me forever, even after he grew up. |
| Samantha Michae…: | After his death, Blossom and Braven’s siblings wonder why Braven was chased by police in the first place. Again, Braven’s older brother, Emilio. |
| Emilio Old Bull: | Well, it just didn’t seem right. Whatever the cops are saying didn’t seem right at all. A majority of people go 85 on that road. I just don’t understand why you would chase somebody at that speed. |
| Samantha Michae…: | When they go together to the scene of the accident in the days after it happened, they’re even more confused. The family had been told that Braven was speeding, that he’d gone off the road at a curve and that maybe he was trying to cross over the train tracks to lose the officer. |
| Emilio Old Bull: | They said he was trying to beat the train and that sticks with me because why would he go over the train tracks and beat the train into the middle of nowhere? |
| Samantha Michae…: | On the other side of the train tracks, there isn’t a road, just an open field with cows grazing near a stream. It seems strange that he would drive off into nothing. Without more information from authorities, the family wrestles with theories about what might’ve happened. They often jump to the worst possible conclusions. For example, when they see a second set of tire marks alongside Braven’s, they wonder whether the police ran him into the train. The family is skeptical. They don’t believe what they were told about the crash is the full story. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I kept contacting the BIA and they wouldn’t give me no answers. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Blossom just wants some basic information about what happened to her son the night of the crash and which officer was involved in the chase. But since the police department disappeared, she’s not sure where to turn. She tries the BIA office asking for the police report, but she’s told she’ll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I also went to the Indian Health Services to see if there was an ambulance sent out. Any little thing I could find out, I tried because nobody was giving me any kind of answers. |
| Samantha Michae…: | She sets up a Facebook page asking anyone who knows anything about the crash to talk to her and she goes to the county court looking for Braven’s death certificate. The person working the desk there can’t find it. Then, her FOIA request for the police report is denied. The BIA says it’s because an investigation is ongoing, but she doesn’t even know which agency is investigating the case. For weeks, the only information she can get is from Braven’s toxicology report, and that’s only because the coroner personally called to offer his condolences. Then almost a full year after Braven’s death, Blossom gets a big breakthrough. She finally learns some details about her son’s final moments. |
| Maurice Mountain Sheep: | We stopped there and helped out and directed traffic. |
| Samantha Michae…: | A couple named Maurice and Mavis Mountain Sheep were there the night Braven died. They had been driving down the road on their way to get gas when they saw the wreck and stopped their car. This is tape from an interview that Maurice and Mavis gave to Blossom about what they saw. They recorded it for her to use as evidence in a lawsuit. |
| Mavis Mountain Sheep: | [inaudible 00:11:23] saying, “Help me,” They just sit there and stared at him. |
| Samantha Michae…: | The tape is hard to hear. People are talking and the TV is on in the background. Mavis is saying they could hear Braven when they stopped. He was still alive and calling for help and there was a female officer standing over him. |
| Speaker 24: | How many officers did you see over at the crash site? |
| Mavis Mountain Sheep: | That lady cop. |
| Maurice Mountain Sheep: | Yeah, that lady cop, He was standing by him. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Maurice and Mavis say they were there for about a half hour. They say they didn’t see anyone give medical aid to Braven. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | It made me angry. It made me really, really angry that my son had to go through that |
| Samantha Michae…: | Months go by and Blossom keeps pulling threads. She gets a tip from a stranger in Wyoming that leads her to the name of the officer who chased Braven, Pamela Klier. Blossom learns Pamela is a White cop who lives outside the Crow Nation, but that’s about all she can find. By this point, Blossom also has the autopsy and toxicology reports. They show that Braven had alcohol and THC in his system when he died. She also has the death certificate, which describes Braven’s death as an accident, but she still doesn’t have a police report or the dashcam footage, things that could show how the chase actually unfolded and ended with the train and she’s still struggling with the most confusing part. |
| How could a police department shut down with no explanation days after a fatal encounter? Blossom tries a new tactic. She hangs a giant banner on the shed in her front yard. It’s one of those signs that’s hard to miss if you’re driving by. It’s black and orange, the same colors as Braven’s high school basketball team. On it are pictures of Braven and at the top are the words “Justice for Braven Glenn. He was 17 years old.” At the bottom is the question, “Why is it hard for a mother of a minor child to get answers?” Then one day she gets a text. It’s from someone who used to work at the Tribal police department. | |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | She told me that she said she wasn’t working for them at the time that this happened to Braven, but this police force was not trained well. |
| Samantha Michae…: | The text message says, “I can tell you right now, absolutely nothing was in compliance. That place should have not ever been opened. It was a show out there.” |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Samantha meets the author of that text message. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | I felt like what I was doing was wrong and I felt like I was going to get in trouble with the real law. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Alvin Not Afrai…: | At this time, the Great Crow Nation. This is the Oval Office. |
| Al Letson: | The Crow Nation Tribal Police Department had been around just five months when one of its officers began a fatal pursuit of Braven Glenn, but the idea for the department came years before that and you can trace it back to one person. |
| Alvin Not Afrai…: | I, Alvin Not Afraid Jr. elected chairman of the great Crow Nation do solemnly swear… |
| Al Letson: | Alvin A.J. Not Afraid was elected in November 2016 as the Crow Nation’s chairman and leader. He’s from a big political family on the reservation and previously served as the tribe’s secretary. His inauguration was attended by more than a hundred community members. |
| Alvin Not Afrai…: | Respect for your reservation, for your honor. That means so much more to me in my heart that if I cannot do this, I’ll die trying. [foreign language 00:15:47]. |
| Al Letson: | Not Afraid served as chairman for four years and he made public safety one of his priorities in office. In June 2020, he launched the Crow Tribal Police Department and in November of that year, the force closed up overnight. Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels has been reporting on Braven’s death and his family search for answers and asking the question, how could this police department shut down without any explanation? She starts with how it was created. |
| Samantha Michae…: | It was politically savvy for Crow Chairman AJ Not Afraid to focus on public safety while he was in office. I spoke with a number of Crow Nation residents who are worried about crime and the lack of police response. |
| Speaker 12: | There’s no public safety here. There’s people riding around in cars, but they don’t really do anything. I just am living on my own. If I need help, I’m scared nobody’s going to help me. We need policemen to be visible at least so that people don’t break into our homes and do horrible things to us. Everybody’s unsafe, when you start thinking about it, you’re like a sitting duck. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Many Crow Nation residents blame the federal government. The Crow tribes homelands once spread across what is now Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota. The Crow were known for their skills with horses and inter-tribal warfare. For centuries before the Europeans arrived, Crow warriors enforced tribal laws and they were responsible for protecting people and settling disputes in the camp. In the 1800s, US government colonized tribes across the continent by confining them to reservations, often through violent force. White settlers sometimes shot at those who tried to leave. To formalize this forced relocation, the federal government signed treaties that justified taking native land and took responsibility for law enforcement on reservations. |
| The Bureau of Indian affairs started policing on many reservations. Today, BIA cops still manage policing in the Crow Nation alongside officers from other agencies like the FBI and the local sheriff’s department. They don’t have a great reputation. In Montana and around the country, BIA officers have been sued repeatedly for excessive force against native people. Many tribal leaders also say the BIA doesn’t properly fund policing on reservations. In recent years, the BIA has told Congress that the agency funded only about a fifth of what tribal nations would need for law enforcement officers. The year before Braven died in 2019, the Crow Nation had only four or five BIA officers to patrol our region roughly two thirds the size of Connecticut. | |
| Speaker 13: | Tribal leaders say they will no longer accept lip service when it comes to public safety concerns and want something done about it now. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Chairman Not Afraid declared a state of emergency over the shortage of police. |
| Alvin Not Afrai…: | The Crow tribe has a treaty and the government did say that they would uphold the treaty and along those lines is safety and welfare of the Crow people. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Less than a week later, Not Afraid was invited to the White House. |
| Donald Trump: | We have a man whose name I want to use. I maybe have to change my name. I love this name. Alvin A.J. Not Afraid, chairman of the Crow Nation. I love this name. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Not Afraid and other tribal leaders from around the country were gathered in the Oval Office. They were there to watch then President Donald Trump sign an executive order creating a task force on missing and murdered indigenous people. |
| Alvin Not Afrai…: | Knowing that you support in the realm of this executive order, the Crow tribe is honored. Thank you Mr. President. |
| Donald Trump: | Thank you for coming. I appreciate it very much. Is that true you’re not afraid? Are you not afraid of anything? |
| Alvin Not Afrai…: | Yes, sir. I also have a gift. |
| Samantha Michae…: | About a month after his White House visit, the lack of policing on the reservation became even more personal for Not Afraid. |
| Speaker 23: | Tonight, more information surrounding the tragic death of sixteen-year-old Selena Not Afraid, found 20 days after she went missing. Her body- |
| Samantha Michae…: | On New Year’s Day, Not Afraid’s, sixteen-year-old niece, Selena went missing and a search party was launched. Braven joined the others looking for Selena with ATVs, helicopters, horses, dogs, and drones. Three weeks later, a team from the Interior Department discovered her body near a rest stop off the highway. The official cause of death was hypothermia, but some locals suspected foul play. 74 people had disappeared on the Crow Reservation and the neighboring northern Cheyenne Reservation in the year before Selena went missing. Many of them were women and girls. That’s more than any other area of Montana, which has one of the highest rates of missing indigenous women nationally. |
| These deaths and disappearances added to the community’s grief and frustration over federal policing. The solution, as Not Afraid saw it, was to create a tribal police department to put law enforcement into the hands of the Crow people. To start his department, he hired a police chief, a man named Terrill Bracken. | |
| Terrill Bracken: | I believe that Chairman Not Afraid had very admirable goals in mind. His heart was definitely in the right place. He had a passion for improving law enforcement on the reservation and making it safe. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Terrill isn’t a member of the Crow tribe. He’s a White guy who lives off the reservation. He was previously a patrol sergeant at the nearby Bighorn County Sheriff’s Office, and he also used to teach martial arts. He and Not Afraid met through a mutual friend around 2018 and they’d been talking for years about how to build a police department. |
| Terrill Bracken: | We started from scratch with everything from policy and procedure manuals for both full-time officers and for a reserve officer program, new hiring procedures, hiring standards, just a lot of work went into build the foundation of the tribal police department. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Not Afraid still had a major hurdle to overcome. He needed money. Like many tribal leaders trying to create new police agencies, Not Afraid was applying to the BIA for federal funding, but his applications were denied. Then in the spring of 2020… |
| Speaker 15: | Downtowns are becoming ghost towns in cities across Montana. Today, bars, restaurants, and casinos closed their doors trying to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The move… |
| Samantha Michae…: | In May of 2020, the Crow tribe received about $27 million in coronavirus relief funding through the Cares Act. Suddenly, Not Afraid had enough money to launch the police department on his own. |
| Terrill Bracken: | It went from, “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” to, “Wow, we just got the green light. It’s happening one month from today.” From the time the chairman said, “We’re doing this,” I was given one month to get all the equipment ordered and tell the officers “You’re hired, come to work.” We were literally building an airplane as we were flying it. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Soon, Not Afraid’s administration had hired about 15 officers tripling the number of police on the reservation. |
| Speaker 16: | Upset over the federal government’s handling of criminal activity, the Crow tribe is starting its own police department, which the tribe’s chairman says will make for a better justice system on the reservation. The department… |
| Samantha Michae…: | But some people wondered if Not Afraid was moving too quickly. I spoke with tribal legal experts who said he didn’t get approval from tribal lawmakers to launch the department with COVID money. Some community members questioned whether the new cops had the authority to do things like arrest people. |
| Alden Big Man J…: | I was like, “Oh my gosh, what if they stop you and they all of a sudden pull a gun on you?” |
| Samantha Michae…: | Alden Big Man Jr. grew up on the reservation. He’s a historian who studied the evolution of policing in the Crow Nation. He understood the goal was to put law enforcement back in the hands of the Crow people, but he knew from personal experience that it would be difficult to recruit Crow cops. Decades ago, his uncle had encouraged him to go to a police academy. |
| Alden Big Man J…: | I looked at him and I said, “No way, man.” I said, “I’m not being a cop.” I said, “I’m not going to arrest my own brothers, my uncles, my aunts. I’m not going to arrest my relatives. I’m not going to put them in handcuffs.” It’s just something that a lot of Crow will not do. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Not Afraid did not respond to my request for comment. Former officials who helped him launch the department, including Terrill, told me they believed that he had the power to control spending and establish law enforcement during an emergency like the pandemic. As for finding local officers and dispatchers, Terrill told me he tried his best, but ultimately the department had to recruit outsiders, cops who had prior experience with other agencies but weren’t Crow and had never lived on the reservation. Some of them didn’t even live in Montana. The officer who chased Braven was one of them. |
| Alden Big Man J…: | There’s always this belief that if we go outside that brings other people in, they’ll do a better job. But it just doesn’t work that way. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Even with the influx of COVID funding, resources were tight and there weren’t many options for a police headquarters. Not Afraid’s administration bought a building that housed a museum commemorating the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. It also had a post office and a closed down subway restaurant. That’s where they put the police headquarters. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | It’s locked. Well, this was an old Subway building and it was supposed to be a police department, but we still had the Subway sign up. We still got many people coming and knocking and trying to buy sandwiches. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Shilo Bad Bear joined the tribal police department as a dispatcher during its major recruitment drive right before opening day. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | You still have your Subway sandwich display area right here, and they would also leave the assault rifles just laying around anywhere. It still looked exactly like a Subway building because you still had the rack of chips over here. You still had the pop over here. |
| Samantha Michae…: | A relative suggested she applied to join the force and when she got the job, Shilo had been looking forward to serving her community. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | In the beginning it was exciting. I was like, “Oh, a new police department and they want me to work here?” I tried to help them as much as I could with what I knew. |
| Samantha Michae…: | But in the department’s first month, Shilo said she didn’t have the essential tools to do our job. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | There was really no point for them to even have dispatchers because we weren’t allowed to use the telephones. We weren’t allowed to take actual calls. It was supposed to be sent over from BIA, and so we weren’t allowed to speak on the radios. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Dispatchers got access to radios after several weeks, but Shilo says there was very little training for her and her colleagues. She only had 10 months of prior experience as a dispatcher, but the new police force made her a supervisor. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | That raised a big red flag with me. I started panicking. I was like, “I don’t have a lot of experience. I still consider myself new to this,” but here they were expecting me to do this training and I knew I had to get out of here. I was just looking for a reason to leave. |
| Samantha Michae…: | I spoke with other former police employees who confirmed there was no on-the-job training after they were hired. On top of that, many of the records were not digitized. This was a police department in 2020 that was still mostly working on paper. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | I felt like what I was doing was wrong and I felt like I was going to get in trouble with the real law for dispatching here. Being back in here, I don’t like it brings back bad… I remember a lot of screaming in here, a lot of screaming, a lot of shouting. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Shilo only lasted about a month before she quit. She left the force a few months before Braven’s death. She heard about the accident on the news and from people she knew on the reservation and every day on her way to work, she would pass by Braven’s home where his mom, Blossom Old Bull, had hung a banner asking anyone who passed for information about what happened to her son. Shilo felt bad that nobody from the police department had talked with Blossom and wanted to share the information that she had. After driving by the house for a year and a half, she finally reached out. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | It just took me a little time to gather up the courage to finally just stop and I saw somebody outside one day, and so I stopped. |
| Samantha Michae…: | In the summer of 2023, Shilo and Blossom met for the very first time at the old police headquarters. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I thank you for that, because it’s been almost going on three years now since he’s been gone and it’s just, it’s been hard. I appreciate that you came and talked to us because we were reaching out everywhere we could. Like I said, when we came here and everything was shut down, it was like a slap in the face. I’m like “Why would they do that?” |
| Samantha Michae…: | Shilo shows Blossom around the department. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | They made it sound like this place was such a professional thing and no offense to you, but this place was a joke. |
| Shilo Bad Bear: | It was. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | It was a joke. It was just a big joke and a life’s taken and boom, you’re shut down. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Blossom filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government not long after Shilo first texted her in 2022. That’s around the same time I started looking into Braven’s case, trying to figure out what really happened to him and why this police department disbanded without any explanation. Over months, I interviewed employees from the former police department and I filed public records requests with the BIA, the Treasury Department, the FBI, the Veteran Affairs Department, the Montana Highway Patrol and the Bighorn County Attorney’s Office trying to learn what happened to Braven. Then, the documents came back with information Blossom had been wanting to see for nearly three years. |
| Al Letson: | When we come back, Samantha finds out what happened to Braven and shares her findings with Blossom. |
| Samantha Michae…: | This was the FOIA request that I filed to the BIA and here was the response. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. After nearly three years, Blossom Old Bull still had very few details about what happened the night her son died in a car chase with a police officer. Last August, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels finally had some answers for her. |
| Samantha Michae…: | There are a lot of reports about the chase that I wanted to show you. |
| Al Letson: | After months of reporting, Samantha finally received documents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that showed what happened the night Braven Glenn died, what happened after the police chase and what went wrong with the investigation into Braven’s death. |
| Samantha Michae…: | This was the FOIA request and here was the response. |
| Al Letson: | Samantha picks up the story in Blossom’s living room, showing her what she’s found. |
| Samantha Michae…: | One of the first things I show Blossom is an investigative report from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It included a written description of the dashcam footage from the tribal police officer involved in the crash, Pamela Klier. I wouldn’t get the actual video footage until months later. The reports said that Braven made a, quote, “Legal pass of Officer Klier’s car on a two-lane highway.” Officer Klier claimed that Braven was going 90 miles per hour, but once he passed her car, he slowed down to the speed limit. When the officer turned on her lights to pull him over, Braven slowed down even more, under the speed limit, but he didn’t stop. Then she turned on her siren and he started to speed up. |
| Braven’s family says he was afraid of the police, he’d had a bad experience with them earlier that year. He was arrested for underage drinking and told his mom and siblings that an officer had choked him. When Braven speeds up, the situation becomes a high-speed chase. Both cars get up to more than a hundred miles per hour. Braven turns off his lights and he drives off the road, heading toward the train tracks. We finished reading the report together. What it shows is different from what Blossom thought might’ve happened during the chase, but Blossom also feels validated in a way. From the beginning, she’d suspected that there was more to the story than she’d been told. | |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | What I was told that he was clocked going 90 miles per hour and on here it doesn’t look like he was going 90 miles per hour. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Or at the very least, the report showed that he wasn’t still going 90 when the officer tried to pull him over. Independent policing experts I spoke to questioned whether the chase was even necessary, considering that Braven seemed to pose little danger to the public. The documents also show mistakes law enforcement made after the crash. Braven was alive and crying for help. Paramedics were called then canceled and then called again. By the time they arrived, Braven had passed. The police department shut down within three days of Braven’s death and records went missing after a series of break-ins at the headquarters, including reports related to Braven’s case. Blossom had tried to get some of this information by filing a FOIA request herself as Braven’s mother, but she was denied. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | It’s painful because how do you as a stranger get to know what happened to my son and the details of his death? How is that possible that you get that information, and I don’t? I fought so hard to get information, which should be my right in the first place. He was mine. It makes me angry. |
| Samantha Michae…: | I reached out to AJ Not Afraid, the tribal chairman who created this police department. He never responded. I also called Officer Klier. She wouldn’t talk with me either. The only person in police leadership who would talk with me on the record was Terrill Bracken. Terrill wasn’t with the police department anymore when Braven died, but he was its first police chief. He was also the only person in a position of authority with the force that agreed to speak with Blossom. |
| Terrill Bracken: | God brings people into our lives for a reason, and if this is a time that I can help somebody to feel better, ease their suffering, I’ll do anything that I can to do that. |
| Samantha Michae…: | The two meet at the Airbnb I’m staying at during this reporting trip, as a neutral place to talk. Blossom arrives first she just came off a twelve-hour shift at a nursing home, so she’s already had a long day. If she had her way today, she’d be meeting with AJ Not Afraid or Officer Klier. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I know that’s never going to happen though. I guess Terrill’s the next best thing to get some kind of answers, I guess. |
| Samantha Michae…: | When Terrill arrives, he seems calm, but he also tells me he’s nervous. He doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. |
| Terrill Bracken: | Hi, I’m Terrill. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I’m Blossom. |
| Terrill Bracken: | It’s really nice to meet you. |
| Samantha Michae…: | In the beginning it feels a little awkward. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | What, do I sit here? |
| Terrill Bracken: | We’ll just get comfortable. Well, or as comfortable as we can. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | If I seem kind of goofy, I’ve been up since 3:45 this morning, so sorry. |
| Terrill Bracken: | I have not been sleeping well either, so that makes both of us. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Terrill takes the lead. He asked Blossom to tell him about herself, her family, her life on the reservation, and she does. It’s a small talk that she tries her best to navigate. Then she starts talking about Braven and what a good kid he was. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | He was bright, he was a great kid and he was going to be somebody. It’s hard because I feel like I wasn’t there to protect my son, so it’s very hard. |
| Terrill Bracken: | Truly, sincerely, I want to tell you that I am so sorry for your loss. I have two children. I can’t imagine the pain and the grief that you must be experiencing. I don’t think I could handle losing one of mine. I am truly, truly sorry that you’ve had to go through this and that your family’s had to go through this. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I appreciate that. I honestly do, because I haven’t heard anybody even so much as have any kind of compassion or empathy. They didn’t know him, who he was, so it was like it’s just another dead Indian kid. You know what I mean? |
| Samantha Michae…: | Soon Blossom starts asking the questions she came here for. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I know you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Braven. I’m not blaming you at all, but bringing these outside entities to police us from surrounding areas, I just felt like that was a bad mix from the beginning. What made you think that bringing these outside entities on the reservation was going to do any good? |
| Samantha Michae…: | The outside entities Blossom is talking about are the police officers who were hired by the tribe from off the reservation, the officers who weren’t Crow and came from Wyoming. Pamela Klier, the officer who chased Braven was one of them. |
| Terrill Bracken: | We didn’t have a lot of trained officers, certified officers. We had some people that were tribal members. My goal was to bring in people that had either state training or federal training to ride alongside of a person who was a tribal member, who knew the area, knew the language, knew the people. It was trying to have the best of both worlds in one patrol car. They came over because obviously there’s a problem on the Crow Indian reservation with crime and they were invested, emotionally, mentally invested. They wanted to make a difference. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Blossom also brings up the community concern that maybe the new tribal police department wasn’t legitimate. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I don’t think you guys were there legally yet. |
| Terrill Bracken: | We were. We there legally and we were signed off by the judges and it was all covered under the Crow constitution. I wouldn’t have been there if they couldn’t have shown me proof of how we were able to be there. |
| Samantha Michae…: | There are moments when the tension eases, when they see things the same way. Blossom tells Terrill that meeting him has helped her. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | It took me a lot of praying to forgive because it’s like, “Oh, he’s the one that started this and he brought these people in.” I am glad I got to talk to you. It has helped me speaking to you. |
| Terrill Bracken: | I’m glad too, because I didn’t have any idea. I knew you had questions about the department, but I didn’t realize that you had these feelings about it. I’m glad that we get to address it. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | Like I said, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and help me to understand a little bit better. It’s like it was not only losing my child, but that’s our right to know what happened to our child and it should be given freely and transparently and I never got that. I had to fight and fight. |
| Terrill Bracken: | It should not have to be that way. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Blossom explains that she’s had all these resentments and she doesn’t want to hold onto them anymore. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I didn’t want to be driven by hate, even for this lady that did this to my son. I would sit there and I would wish the worst things on her, but it’s like- |
| Terrill Bracken: | Let’s talk about that a little bit. |
| Samantha Michae…: | With the mention of Pamela Klier, there’s a shift in the conversation. Terrill helped hire Officer Klier and he thinks she was a good cop. He says he doesn’t have all the details about the night Braven died, but based on what he knows, he doesn’t fault Officer Klier. |
| Terrill Bracken: | In this case with where the chase took place, because it wasn’t a residential zone, there was not a lot of traffic. I would’ve done the same thing and it would’ve wrecked me. It’s one of those things where you finally get the person and you get them pulled over and you find out that there’s a kidnapping victim in the car. You feel like a hero, or something like this happens and you don’t feel like you can ever drive a car again. None of us unfortunately know what Pam Klier is going through right now, because none of us have been able to talk to her. For all we know, she’s not doing very well right now. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | That’s one thing I don’t care about though. It’s like she’s not the one hurting, Pam, it’s us. |
| Terrill Bracken: | She’s the one shouldering a responsibility that her actions resulted in a life being lost. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | But how? She’s going on with her life, she has her life. My son doesn’t. My family is suffering. |
| Terrill Bracken: | I’m not saying who’s suffering more. It’s not a contest of who is suffering more. It’s just unfortunately a lot of lives got changed in this situation. |
| Samantha Michae…: | After that exchange, Blossom seems ready to leave. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | I go to work in the morning. I have to get up at… I have to be at work at six. |
| Samantha Michae…: | The next morning around 4:30 A.M., I start getting text messages from Blossom, dozens of them. She’s really upset with some of the things Terrill said, so I meet with her a few days later to talk about it. |
| Blossom Old Bul…: | He stuck up for this woman, made her out to be such a great, great person in life, her being such a great officer, and never asking about my son, never asking how great of a kid he was or I had to tell him and just he acknowledged our pain. But that was like a slap in my face to sit there and, “Oh, poor her.” No, there’s no poor her. This is about my son’s life being taken. These were the choices she made. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Blossom and the rest of the community still haven’t gotten a clear answer about why the police department shut down so abruptly and she still wonders if they were hiding something about the accident. Some people I spoke with speculated that the department shut down because of the investigation into Braven’s death. Here’s Josie Passes, who was a BIA officer at the time. |
| Josie Passes: | I heard that it was directly because of the pursuit and the fatality. From my understanding, it was common knowledge that that’s why they shut it down because of the investigation that was going on. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Former tribal police employees who spoke to me on background said that it closed because it was running out of money. Others pointed to politics. Remember A.J. Not Afraid? He lost his bid for re-election. |
| Speaker 15: | There are officially new leaders on the Crow tribe as the inauguration ceremony was held today, Frank White Clay will serve as the new chair. |
| Samantha Michae…: | Frank White Clay said he didn’t think it was right that Not Afraid’s administration propped up the police force with COVID funding. Everyone expected that he’d shut it down when he came into office. The theory is that Not Afraid closed it himself before White Clay had the chance. Today, policing on the reservation is back to what it used to be before, mostly in the hands of the BIA. Residents are still unhappy about it. Going forward, Blossom says that no matter who controls policing, families need more transparency from their law enforcement. In 2023, a federal commission agreed with her. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland held the National Listening Tour, inviting native families to share their thoughts. When the commission stopped in Montana, Blossom testified |
| Speaker 19: | Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland in delivering the commission’s recommendations, said, “Crimes against indigenous peoples have long been underfunded and ignored.” |
| Samantha Michae…: | Last December, President Biden signed an executive order to make it easier for tribes to access federal funding for projects like locally run law enforcement. |
| Joe Biden: | Today, there’s still too many hoops to jump through. Too many strings attached and too many inefficiencies in the process. |
| Samantha Michae…: | But none of what the federal government does or doesn’t do at this point will bring Braven Glenn back. Braven is buried at the foot of the Pryor Mountains, an hour drive from where Blossom lives. The family gathers there multiple times a year. Everyone will sit and visit with him and swap stories about the way he used to make them laugh. |
| Jolie: | Remember when he was dying his hair blonde? He’s like, “Jolie, do you think it’s going to look all right? Do you think it looks good?” He just kept asking me. I was like, “Yes, it’s going to look good. Let’s try it. Come on hurry.” He was like, “But is it going to look good though? Do you know how to do it?” I was like, “Yes, I know how to do it.” He was like- |
| Speaker 27: | Lies. |
| Al Letson: | Blossom hasn’t given up on seeking accountability for those involved in her son’s death. Her lawsuit is still moving forward, and she filed a motion that she hopes will lead to a ruling by this summer. This story was reported by Samantha Michaels from Mother Jones. You’ll find a link to her written story on our website. Our lead producer for this week’s show is Najib Aminy, with help from filmmaker Mark Helenowski. Mark produced a short film about Braven’s story that you’ll also find on our website. Jenny Casas edited the show with help from Maddie Oatman. Special thanks to our partners at Mother Jones, James West and Ruth Murai. Jordynn Paz did the cultural competency read for this episode. Samantha’s reporting was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, as well as Arnold Ventures. |
| Nikki Frick is our fact checker. She had help from Henry Carnell and Nina Wang. Legal review by James Chadwick. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are the Wonder Twins, Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. Remember, there is always more to the story. |