6 years after her son’s homicide, a Navajo mother still searches for answers

On
a summer evening in 2019, a man living in a hilltop house in the Navajo
community of Nenahnezad called 911 to report a body in the dirt road in
front of his home.

“The guy is not breathing, nothing,” he told the operator.

The person he discovered was Kyle Jackson, a 31-year-old citizen of the Navajo Nation. 

Kyle
had fought with another man at a nearby house hours before his body was
found, according to witness interviews by law enforcement. Severely
injured, Kyle was kicked out of the house. It’s unclear how long he lay
in the road before dying, but at least one other person passed by
without stopping to help him, about six hours before the call to police.

In
the following weeks, his mother, Colleen Harrison Jackson, visited the
spot where his body was found and spoke with the 911 caller, along with
some of his friends who had been with him in the days leading up to his
death. 

She put her faith in the Navajo Department of Criminal
Investigations and the FBI — one of the agencies on the case because
Kyle’s body was found on the reservation. Over the next few years, she
called investigators from both agencies for updates. They would get back
to her sometimes, but not always. She also reached out to an FBI victim
specialist, who would tell her the investigators were still working on
the case, so she remained hopeful they would eventually make an arrest. 

Then she got the letter. 

The FBI had closed its investigation, the specialist wrote to Colleen in March 2022.

The letter provided a nine-word explanation: The United States Attorney’s Office had declined to prosecute. 

Standing in front of the post office, Colleen cried as she read those words. 

“No
one called me and said, ‘We’re going to close this case, this is why.’
No one called me,” she said. “I just get this letter, and I was very
upset because I didn’t know what happened. I really just broke down.” 

To this day, no one has been tried for killing Kyle.

Colleen isn’t alone. She’s one of thousands who have lost loved ones
to a national crisis of Indigenous people disproportionately dying of
homicide or going missing. 

Infrequent updates from law
enforcement, many affected families say, have intensified the pain
they’re already feeling. That was one of the key findings of the federal
Not Invisible Act Commission, which, in a 2023 report, made numerous recommendations aimed at police and prosecutors improving the way they communicate with families.

In
an interview with New Mexico In Depth last year, former U.S. Attorney
for the District of New Mexico Alexander Uballez and two prosecutors in
the office’s Indian Country Crimes section acknowledged the harm done to
families when the federal government delivers difficult news about
their loved ones’ cases through the mail. 

During his tenure,
which began in May 2022, the office established a policy of updating
families in person when possible, according to Uballez. 

A Not Invisible Act Commission member says that’s a step in the right direction. 

But Uballez, who announced his run for Albuquerque mayor in April, has since resigned at the request of President Donald Trump. 

The
new U.S. attorney for the district, Ryan Ellison, didn’t answer a
question about whether the policy Uballez described will remain, but
said in an email that prosecutors working closely with families is
important.

Growing up in northwestern New Mexico, Kyle spent time playing along
the San Juan River, fishing at a nearby dam with his grandpa, and
helping take care of his siblings and cousins. He was an avid reader and
enjoyed working on science projects for school fairs. 

His
childhood love of the outdoors continued into adulthood, and he often
went on hikes and camping trips. In 2016, he graduated from San Juan
College with an associate of applied science degree in the college’s
industrial maintenance mechanic program.

Kyle “never let things
get him down,” Colleen said, and looked out for others. As a teenager,
he urged his mom to let friends who had unstable home lives stay with
their family, she said.

A former girlfriend, Christa Perez, first
met Kyle when they were in high school. They reconnected over a decade
later and started dating. Perez is a single mom with three kids and was
struggling at the time, she said. 

“If it wasn’t for Kyle, I think I’d still be drinking. I’d still be lost,” Perez said. “He was there for me no matter what.”

He
taught her kids how to play a card game, and to this day, Perez said,
they ask, “Are we going to play Kyle’s cards or regular cards?” 

They broke up about a year before his death but kept in touch, up until the week he died.

A violent evening

Colleen shared with New
Mexico In Depth a Shiprock police incident report, the letter she
received from the FBI in 2022, and a report of findings from the
University of New Mexico’s Office of the Medical Investigator, which
found Kyle had died of blunt head trauma. The news organization obtained
the recording of the 911 call and dispatch log from San Juan County,
along with records maintained by the FBI, primarily summaries of witness
interviews from which names have been redacted.

On the night of
Friday, June 21, at about 9 p.m., Kyle and two other people went to a
nearby store to pick up alcohol. Later that night, he ended up at a
house in Nenahnezad, where, according to the witness interviews, he and
another man fought.

Kyle “may have been struck with a hammer,”
according to the report of findings. He then “moved about the home,
bleeding on various surfaces, before being kicked out” early Saturday
morning with facial and skull fractures. 

At about noon on
Saturday, a man driving to visit a friend in the area saw Kyle lying in
the road, he later told a Navajo criminal investigator. The man believed
Kyle, who appeared to have been “beaten badly,” was dead. He continued
up the road and saw busted windows on the house he intended to visit. 
Not wanting to get involved, he turned around. 

When he drove past
Kyle again to leave the area, he was “moving around a little bit.” The
man “was afraid the guy might get up and turn on him,” so he drove off
just as it began to rain. 

Trying to make sense of why the man
didn’t help Kyle, Colleen said she thinks people in her community are
hesitant to call law enforcement because they’re skeptical arrests will
come out of it, and there are fears about retaliation.

The 911 call didn’t come in until about 6:30 p.m. that day.

The caller told the operator he had just arrived home from Farmington when he found Kyle’s body in the road out front.

“Does he look to be beyond any help?” the operator asked.

“Nope,
nope, not even breathing, nothing,” the caller said. “He looks—he got
hit or something. There’s a hole in the side of his temple.”

Emergency
medical services and then officers with the Navajo Nation’s Shiprock
Police District arrived over the next 40 minutes. Several other people
later arrived at the scene, a police officer wrote in his report,
including Kyle’s grandmother, who asked to see his body. 

At about
the same time, Colleen was a few miles away, hosting a birthday party
for her daughter. She learned about her son’s death later that night
from his grandmother.

“I knew something was wrong already. I could
feel it,” Colleen said. “And when she told me, I don’t even know what
happened after that. I couldn’t even breathe.”

The letter

Early
on in the investigation, the family was told there was a suspect, and
the suspect’s arrest might be on the news in another week, Colleen
said.  

Weeks turned into months, though, and that never happened.
But when Colleen would call for updates, an FBI victim specialist would
sometimes get back to her and say investigators were still working on
the case. 

So the letter — dated March 17, 2022, nearly three years after Kyle’s death — came as a shock. 

The
FBI had closed its investigation because the U.S. Attorney’s Office had
declined to prosecute, the victim specialist wrote. The decision didn’t
“lessen the important contribution” Colleen made to the investigation,
the letter reads, and her “assistance and cooperation were greatly
appreciated.”

Colleen called the Navajo criminal investigator and asked him to explain.

The
investigator arranged a meeting with the FBI agent. During that
sit-down, which Colleen remembers happening about four months after she
received the letter, they told her there wasn’t enough evidence to
prosecute. 

They said the case could be reopened if another witness came forward, Colleen said.

That was almost three years ago. There have been no updates since.

In a late February interview, Uballez, the former U.S. attorney,
wouldn’t talk about Kyle’s case, saying the office typically doesn’t
comment on investigations, whether they’re open or closed. But he spoke
more generally about how a federal prosecutor decides whether to file
charges. (Uballez was sworn into office in May 2022, two months after
Colleen received the letter from the FBI.)

FBI agents assigned to a
case, Uballez said, can “procedurally, look at it themselves” and
decide to not refer it for prosecution. Or “they could look at it and
say, either, ‘We’re sort of on the fence and we want you guys to make
the call,’ or, ‘We think there’s a charge there,’” Uballez said. 

Federal
prosecutors then evaluate whether there were any constitutional rights
violations and whether they think a case could be proven to a jury, he
said. 

“It’s a different calculus,” Uballez said. “Even though we
may agree we know who did this, what happened, it doesn’t mean that we
should charge.”

In the dark

In 2023, the federal Not Invisible Act Commission
heard testimony from at least 260 people who have lost loved ones to
the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people or survived human
trafficking. The commission visited seven cities, including Albuquerque. 

One
of the major themes from the hearings, the commission wrote in a report
published in October that year, was that “authorities at all levels
must improve communications with family members, who are too often left
in the dark for days, weeks, or months about the investigation.”

“Tragically,
a case may be declared ‘cold’ without a family receiving any
information about the investigation,” the report reads.

Asked what
has stuck with her most from the hearings, Amber Kanazbah Crotty, a
commission member and Navajo Nation Council delegate, said families’
disappointment with law enforcement either communicating with them
infrequently or in ways that don’t feel compassionate. 

“They’re
dealing with their missing relative, or there may have been violence, a
homicide or a criminal element to their case, but with the lack of
communication from law enforcement, it just adds on another layer of,
they don’t feel that their relatives mattered,” Crotty said in an April
interview.

Instead of mailing a family a piece of paper informing them their
relative’s case has been closed, she said, the commission recommended “a
warm hand off.”

“It’s not the U.S. attorney themselves, but at
least a victim advocate to be there to answer any questions they have,
and they’re then referring them or connecting them to community
resources like behavioral health, mental health support groups, so
they’re not feeling like this is only happening to them and nobody cares
about their relatives,” Crotty said.

Improving communication

The
Justice Department since 2010 has required every U.S. Attorney’s Office
with tribal lands in its district to develop an operational plan for
addressing public safety in Indian country.

“A trauma-informed
approach both considers the emotional impact on victims and their
families and is culturally sensitive,” reads the New Mexico office’s
plan, last updated in 2024. “The relationship between Tribal communities
and the federal government is a fraught one. [Assistant U.S. attorneys]
and law enforcement need to acknowledge this history and work hard to
gain the trust of Tribal members who may have reasons to distrust the
federal government and law enforcement based on past experiences and
long histories.”

While the office can’t share all the details of
an investigation or why it made a particular decision, staff have been
working to do a better job of communicating with affected families,
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eliot Neal said during an interview last year.
Neal was hired in 2023 as part of the Justice Department’s Missing or
Murdered Indigenous Persons Regional Outreach Program. 

One
“challenge” the office identified in recent years, Neal said, was
families not hearing from law enforcement for long periods of time and
then receiving letters — like the one Colleen got — “out of the blue.”

In
response, the office instituted a policy of giving families case
updates in person when possible, Indian Country Crimes Section
Supervisor Elisa Dimas said during last year’s interview. 

“We’ve
made it a real priority to understand the emotional impact that these
cases have on families, to make sure that we go out and deliver this
news in person, if we can, along with the victim advocate,” Dimas said.
“Because even though we might not be pursuing a criminal case at our
office, we know that there are still resources and support that we can
provide, either through the victim advocates or community resources, to
these families.”

That practice “came naturally to a lot of us”
based on prior experience working with crime victims and their families,
Uballez said in the February interview.

“What we did was expand
the responsibility to include this more victim-centric,
community-centric—you know, to build in time for people to build those
relationships. And of course, if resources get drawn down there, either
in personnel, or priorities elsewhere get expanded, that could change,”
Uballez said, referring to Trump administration directives. 

Asked
if the in-person-when-possible policy will remain, Ellison, who was
sworn in as New Mexico’s U.S. attorney on April 18, said in an email
sent by spokesperson Tessa DuBerry that he understands “the importance
of working with families of violent crimes to ensure there is justice
for what they have suffered.” 

“I encourage the prosecutors
working with victims of violent crimes, including those in Indian
Country, to work closely with these families as their cases proceed
through federal court,” Ellison wrote.

‘All for Kyle’

In the spring before his death, Kyle gave his mother a packet of flower seeds. 

Colleen enjoyed gardening, but she hadn’t done it in a long time, and the packet ended up in a drawer somewhere.

A few years ago, she was cleaning up around her house when she came across it.

“I
just broke down. I remembered him giving that to me, and I said, ‘I’m
going to make a garden.’ So I put flowers all over my front yard, and
I’m starting on the back. Trees, flowers, and it’s growing,” she said.
“It’s all for Kyle.”

Colleen has worked doggedly to find answers and get Kyle’s case reopened since receiving the letter in 2022.

She’s
attended events, sometimes as far away as three hours south in
Albuquerque, to ask for help from federal and tribal officials. She’s
created posters with photos of her son and information about his death
to take to rallies and gotten to know other Indigenous families with
relatives who have been killed or gone missing. And she has repeatedly
followed up with the investigators and filed records requests to try to
learn more about their efforts. 

She has her own theories about
what happened to Kyle, but she worries she’ll never know definitively
who killed her son or why they did it, let alone that they’ll face
criminal charges.

“It’s a nightmare, and my family is not the
same,” Colleen said. “And I don’t know how—you never come back from
this. You don’t come back from it. You can adjust to it, but my life is
different now, it’s just so different.”