Rights of U.S. Indians Tested at Murder Trial

A Florida Indian accused of drowning his two young sons in a case that tested Native Americans’ sovereign rights broke down Thursday as he testified that he did not know his boys were in the back seat of their mother’s car when he rolled it into a canal.

Kirk Billie, 32, faces possible execution if convicted on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his sons, Keith, 3, and Kurt, 5, who drowned when he pushed the sport-utility vehicle into the water June 27, 1997.

Prosecutors allege Billie, a Miccosukee Indian, was trying to punish the mother, ex-girlfriend Sheila Tiger, for defying his instructions to stay home and care for the children.

Billie has acknowledged he pushed the vehicle into the canal because he was angry at Tiger. Tribal elders ruled the deaths an accident.

In a day of testimony in which Billie appeared overcome by emotion several times, he described for jurors how he had taken Tiger’s Chevrolet Tahoe from her friend, Melody Osceola, and then drove it to a canal outside the Miccosukee reservation near Miami to get rid of it.

“I put the truck on the edge . . . took my foot off the brake and it rolled in,” Billie said.

“Did you hear anything, in any way, shape or form, that indicated to you that your two little boys were in the back of that truck?” his attorney Ed O’Donnell asked.

“No,” Billie said softly. Prosecutors have suggested that Billie would have heard the boys screaming as he left the scene.

Billie stood teary and sniffling beside a video monitor as his defense team displayed a tape of Billie in a holding cell after his arrest the day his children died.

He said he thought the boys were at their grandmother’s home until his father and a police officer asked him if he knew they were in the back seat of the SUV.

After the drownings, Florida prosecutors ran up against a wall as they built a case that became a battlefield over America’s historic treatment of its native peoples, the sovereign nation rights of Indian reservations and tribal justice.

The Miccosukee, a tribe of about 500 people on a reservation in the Everglades west of Miami, have used the sovereign status awarded by Congress to build successful tourism and gambling businesses.

The deaths of Keith and Kurt happened just outside the boundaries of the reservation. But because it happened on “historic” Indian lands, the Miccosukees accused state prosecutors of treading on their sovereignty and refused access to the reservation to serve subpoenas to witnesses.

Tribal elders said they resolved the case “Indian to Indian,” deciding the deaths were a tragic accident and forgiving Billie.

The Miccosukees, in a lawsuit filed in federal court, said the historic mistreatment of Native Americans had led to a deep distrust of “white man’s justice.”