Drowning of 2 Sons Pits Tribe, Government

Kirk Billie raced along the two-lane road into the darkness of the Everglades, clenching the wheel of his girlfriend’s pickup, still stinging from their breakup hours earlier. He stopped just outside the Miccosukee Indian Reservation. He aimed the truck toward a canal, then stood aside to watch it plunge to the bottom.

The couple’s sons, Kurt, 5, and Keith, 3, asleep in the back seat, drowned.

As Billie’s death penalty trial approaches, a legal war has erupted here because fellow tribal members are refusing to testify against him.

The Indians say that the boys’ 1997 deaths were a tragic accident and that they have forgiven Billie. “The tribal members believe they have handled the issues, Indian to Indian,” Miccosukee Chairman Billy Cypress wrote in a letter to Florida’s state attorney.

Billie says he did not know his children were in the truck that night. But prosecutors allege he acted with coldblooded deliberation to kill the boys as vengeance against their mother, Sheila Tiger, the girlfriend who dumped Billie.

They accuse the tribe of protecting a killer and say their case is in jeopardy without the testimony of at least seven crucial witnesses, including Tiger, who is also a tribal member. She has never commented publicly on the death of her sons.

The standoff is a complex legal battle that pits one of the smallest, most reclusive of the nation’s 562 Indian tribes against the combined authority of the U.S. and Florida governments. At issue are questions of jurisdiction and sovereignty.

After a tense confrontation on Indian lands, the Miccosukee police force last month turned away armed federal marshals and Miami-Dade County officers who tried to serve subpoenas at the reservation about 40 miles west of Miami.

When a flurry of legal maneuvering in federal court failed to break the impasse, state and federal prosecutors agreed to an unprecedented appearance Friday before the Miccosukee court to plead for cooperation. The two Indian judges presiding promised to make a decision soon, a spokesman for the state attorney said.

The legal wrangling is infused with deeper issues of culture, tradition and the insular world view of a 400-member tribe that has never signed a peace treaty with the United States. The tribe sees the prosecution of Billie, 31, as an imposition of what Cypress calls “white man’s justice.”

“The Indian community is different from other communities--they deal with matters in a different way,” Cypress wrote State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle of Miami-Dade County. “The tribe has put this unfortunate accident to rest,” he said, and any effort to pursue it “inflicts a hardship on the tribe’s healing process.”

The Billie case has raised unprecedented procedural questions because the Miccosukees “have no written laws and seem very wary of white people,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Tamen, who is helping state prosecutors.

The appearance of Tamen and state prosecutor Reid Rubin before the Miccosukee court Friday was a cross-cultural first for South Florida and came about after U.S. District Judge Paul Huck asked the Indians and prosecutors to work out a solution.

In a court filing, the government contends that tribe lawyer Dexter Lehtinen--a former U.S. attorney here--has invoked “the long and often bitter history between Indians and non-Indians” in an effort to thwart the prosecution and use the concept of sovereignty to turn the reservation into “a safe haven for murderers.”

Experts on Indian law see broader issues. “This is a riveting case, testing the dominant society’s tolerance for diversity,” said Robert Laurence, a law professor at the University of Arkansas. “This is about cross-cultural differences and points out in the starkest way what it means to live side by side with Indian tribes, which are protected by the federal government to make their own laws.”

Anywhere else, the tragic events of that hot summer night in 1997 might have begun to fade. But not here. And especially not now.

A History of Violence

In the small, close-knit Miccosukee village, a five-mile-long strip of houses and tourist shops adjacent to Everglades National Park, everyone knows everyone. And everyone knew Kirk Billie as a man with a history of violence, especially against women.

According to Miccosukee police records, since 1993, Billie has used fists, broomsticks and baseball bats to beat his ex-wife; his ex-wife’s 9-year-old daughter; Sheila Tiger, with whom he had Kurt, Keith and a third son; and Marie Jim, Tiger’s mother. In March 1997, he was charged with felony battery on a police officer who tried to break up a fight with another man.

On June 26, 1997, authorities say, Billie became enraged when Sheila Tiger told him they were through. “Don’t think the kids will ever stop me,” he warned in a note he left at her home.

That night, just after midnight, Billie spotted her Chevrolet Tahoe pickup on the reservation. At the wheel was Melody Osceola, a friend of Tiger’s, and in the truck were Billie and Tiger’s three children. When Osceola stopped in front of her uncle’s house, taking the couple’s 1-year-old son with her, Billie jumped in the Tahoe and raced off the reservation, according to prosecutors. The two older boys were sleeping in the back seat.

Within minutes, Billie had driven onto Tamiami Trail, a main state highway across the Everglades. A few hundred yards from the reservation, he pulled off the road, pointed the truck toward a canal, jumped out and put the vehicle in gear.

After the truck settled 13 feet to the bottom of the canal, he walked home, according to police.

The tribe’s police force arrested Billie hours later. He was in handcuffs when Miccosukee Police Chief Anthony Zecca drove him off the reservation and handed him over to Miami-Dade County police. A grand jury indicted Billie on first-degree murder charges.

Case Reminiscent of Susan Smith’s

To some, the case was reminiscent of Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother convicted two years earlier in 1995 of drowning her two young sons by strapping them into her car and driving it into a lake. Smith is serving a life sentence.

Billie has been in custody awaiting trial for more than three years. During that time, he has been convicted in state court of assault charges stemming from a different 1997 incident. In January he also was tried in federal court on a 1994 charge of battery against Marie Jim, a case that prosecutors initially had let languish. A jury found Billie guilty of a misdemeanor assault.

Prosecutors said the old assault cases were tried because Billie is a violent man who, for too long, has escaped justice.

The tribe, however, contends that the federal government revived the charges “because the state needed aggravating factors to support the imposition of the death penalty.”

Tribal leaders have asked that Billie be returned to the reservation. Cypress has made clear that his aim is to save him from execution.

“The tribal clans . . . shook hands and determined that forgiveness was appropriate and that ‘giving life is more rewarding than taking life,’ ” Cypress wrote.

Case Has Further Heightened Tensions

It is also clear the Billie case has further heightened tensions between the Miccosukees and government agencies, which have been squabbling for years over Everglades water quality and park boundaries. Particularly galling, Cypress said, is the way that “non-Indian courts and [the] justice system . . . have systematically failed to consider Native American dispute resolution customs and traditions which have formed the basis for tribal self-government and self-determination for centuries.”

Although the tribe originally handed over Billie to the state, the tribal elders later met “and determined that they would help the young man . . . ,” Cypress said.

But in court papers, federal prosecutors respond that, in the Billie case, tribal ways have failed.

“It is a devastating and tragic understatement that the tribe, knowing Kirk Billie’s violent criminal record, failed to protect Keith and Kurt Billie,” prosecutors said. “Indeed, the tribe’s obstinance after the fact is equally chilling.”

Newly wealthy, thanks to a thriving casino and hotel operation, and deeply offended by what they see as a lack of respect, the Miccosukees say they are determined to make the state and the federal governments “recognize tribal tradition and tribal laws.”

“The public should be outraged by the government’s attempt to bully the Miccosukee tribe,” Cypress said in a statement. “The government tried to use the same tactic it used with Elian Gonzalez, and it did not work.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.