Navajos, FBI Now Trailing Crime Suspects Together : Justice: On nation’s largest reservation, evidence quickly fades. Task force shares skills to solve felonies.

Scanning the horizon through binoculars, Navajo criminal investigator Michael Henderson spotted the telltale dust clouds kicked up by a suspect on horseback whom he’d been trailing for days.

The man, who allegedly had nearly beaten a 16-year-old girl to death with a board, was riding along with his brother across a moonscape of dormant volcanoes and copper-colored mesas.

Henderson radioed orders to move on the men. Fellow tribal police in Jeeps bounced across two miles of roadless prairie and corralled the pair in a dry wash.

Knowing that the Jeeps could not traverse the rocky wash, a tribal officer dashed out of his vehicle, forced the brother off his horse, then leaped on and continued the pursuit at a gallop. He caught up with the exhausted suspect on a hillside. The man surrendered without a fight.

“We’ve been looking for this guy for a week,” Henderson exulted. “We got him before he could flee into the mountains.”

Henderson is no rookie. He’s seen it all on the nation’s largest reservation, where the homicide rate is running at twice the national average and sexual assaults and gang violence are becoming as much a part of life as the traditional activities of sheep herding and farming.

But there was something different about this manhunt. Although the FBI normally heads felony investigations on the reservation, the effort last month was led by a new task force of Navajo investigators designed to hasten the machinery of justice in a place where even homicides take years to resolve in court.

If the FBI had handled the case, Henderson reckoned, they might have arrived weeks or months after the crime, finding a cold, perhaps disturbed trail of evidence--and a wall of resistance from witnesses, because the federal agents have difficulty with the Navajo language and culture.

Answer to Complaints

The year-old program is called Operation Safe Trails. It is one response by the FBI, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and the Navajo nation to years of complaints by Native American officials who say federal authorities fail to adequately respond to, investigate and prosecute violent crimes in tribal country.

The program teamed four FBI special agents with 12 Navajo investigators who were trained in criminal investigation techniques at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., and equipped with Jeeps, radios, cellular phones, computers, fax machines and video cameras.

Together they target homicide, sexual abuse of children and gang-related crimes on the reservation of 250,000 people, which occupies 25,000 square miles in the Four Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

And Janet Napolitano, the U.S. attorney in Phoenix, has committed half of her staff to cases generated by the program, which has surpassed expectations by speeding up the time it takes to prosecute serious felony cases here from an average of two years to about three months.

“It’s a good marriage,” said FBI Deputy Director Weldon Kennedy, formerly the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Phoenix office.

“The Navajos bring knowledge of their language, culture and geography--an understanding of every nuance of a situation,” Kennedy said. “The FBI brings an extensive background in criminal investigation techniques and forensic science. The U.S. attorney’s office knows how to put people in jail.”

The Justice Department hopes to expand the program to other large reservations in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Oklahoma, where FBI agents also have to travel long distances to crime scenes in villages without names, street addresses or witnesses who speak English.

To be sure, the fledgling program could use some fine tuning. Navajo investigators are assigned to serve only two-year terms in the new detachment. Communication equipment donated by the FBI is not reliable. And no one can predict whether a new Administration in Washington would want to continue the effort, which is funded by the FBI at an annual cost of $200,000.

But Napolitano figures that these problems will be worked out in time.

“In the long term, this is a way of bringing together groups that in the past did not even talk to each other--and that silence bred ill will on all sides,” Napolitano said. “I hope the relationships developed among people under this program will survive long after I’m gone.”

Search Yields Evidence

Henderson, a 32-year-old investigator with the Operation Safe Trails detail at the tribal capital of Window Rock, Ariz., is too busy to worry about whether the bubble will burst.

Like every other officer in the program, his personal caseload bulges with at least 35 active investigations. But the taciturn, committed detective would have it no other way.

Before joining Operation Safe Trails, he was responsible for investigating petty crimes from burglary to vandalism, as well as handling the coroner’s duties. Now he and two other investigators at Window Rock spend all their time trying to put killers, child molesters and gang thugs behind bars.

His first task force investigation went on to become Operation Safe Trails’ first case to go to trial.

The program was barely a month old when Henderson received a report involving a 42-year-old Navajo man who allegedly had abducted a 9-year-old girl, driven her to a remote location in the desert and raped her.

The girl later told her mother that she had traveled with the suspect until his Plymouth sedan broke down on a desolate road and they were forced to spend the night in the car. After consuming several beers, the girl said, the man assaulted her, threatening to kill her if she screamed.

Henderson reasoned that his priority was to corroborate the girl’s story with evidence at the scene. So he called on Navajo criminal investigator Gordon Toadlena and FBI Special Agent James Brown to interview potential witnesses while he concentrated on gathering physical evidence.

He found what he was looking for: empty beer cans stashed beneath bushes near the suspect’s abandoned car, and prints in spongy red dirt matching the soles of the victim’s shoes and the suspect’s boots. The larger prints led to a spot beneath a nearby tree where Henderson discovered two condoms.

“Had I done it all myself, or had the FBI agent done it alone, it would have taken three months to do an investigation that took three days to complete,” Henderson said, “and the suspect’s trail would have gotten colder and colder.”

The man was charged with aggravated sexual abuse of a child. He was tried and convicted in December, 1994, and subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison.

FBI agent Brown said he has no qualms about sharing investigative authority with the Navajos, whose world is as different from his as their language.

“Now, we respond to crimes together,” said Brown, a husky, bearded agent formerly assigned to the FBI’s Chicago office, “like a bank robbery squad would in a big city.”

Barriers to Overcome

A close working relationship between tribal authorities and the FBI is critical. Navajos generally regard Anglo authorities with suspicion, sometimes even active hostility. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that FBI agents rarely serve more than two years on the reservation--hardly enough time to learn tribal courtesies and customs, let alone the native tongue.

Yet, without a clear understanding of the Navajo language, it is all but impossible for FBI agents to flesh out crucial puzzle pieces from witnesses. For example, Brown said, because Navajo culture is based on extended family relationships, victims of child sex abuse may use the word for “mother” when they mean their mother’s sister, or “brother” when they mean their cousin.

As it stands, Brown conceded, “I know how to ask in Navajo where someone lives. Unfortunately, I get the answer in Navajo and I’m lost.”

Then there is the problem of Navajo hexes often hurled at detectives and informants by the targets of a criminal investigation, or by a suspect’s relatives. Some Navajo police even wear turquoise arrowheads behind their badges as a shield against curses.

“It is something we have to take seriously,” Brown said, “because it is part of the culture, and because someone may not tell me what I need to know out of fear they will be cursed.”

The toughest problem confronting the task force is the vast, rugged and sparsely populated terrain it covers. For these cops, a drive of 60 miles to interview an informant living alone in a house trailer on the prairie is considered a short trip.

Elusive ‘Klingon’

A recent search for an elusive federal fugitive whom the investigators have dubbed “the Klingon” led them into the labyrinth of sheer-walled canyons at Canyon de Chelly National Monument.

The suspect’s real name is Phillip Clark, and he escaped from a halfway house in July. Clark was sentenced to the facility after being convicted a year ago on charges of assaulting a Canyon de Chelly park ranger.

Investigators tagged him “the Klingon” because they say his appearance in a fuzzy Polaroid snapshot they keep on file reminds them of the belligerent alien race depicted in the television series “Star Trek.”

Their search began where Clark grew up--on the north rim of a carmine-colored canyon shrouded in pinon pine and juniper. They went first to two of Clark’s brothers, who were not much help.

“I think he’s around here,” one of them said in Navajo. “But he’s like a coyote; he can see you, but you can’t see him. And he can climb these canyon walls like a billy goat.”

The investigators also questioned a group of Navajos who sell jewelry and pocket-size chunks of petrified wood to tourists at a roadside canyon overlook where Clark had recently been seen harassing sightseers.

One of the vendors pointed toward the sculpted sandstone passages below and said, “He’s down there, hiding in the bushes.”

Within minutes the investigators were in their Jeeps and plying the hazardous deep sand of the canyon bottom. They interviewed Anglo hikers and Navajo sheep herders. They visited sheep herder camps, hogans, caves, even 1,100-year-old ruins looking for clues.

But the daylong effort failed to turn up any signs of the suspect--no footprints, warm ashes or candy wrappers. Nothing.

“The damn Klingon has got himself cloaked,” muttered Navajo investigator Louis St. Germaine.

“Yeah,” said Henderson, scanning the walls of the maze-like canyon with binoculars. “But we’ll be back. We’ll get him.”