Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many
Author:
Genres: Biographies & Memoirs, History, Nonfiction
Book Type: Hardcover
Author:
Genres: Biographies & Memoirs, History, Nonfiction
Book Type: Hardcover
The primary substance of this book recounts a shocking crime which occurred in North Dakota in August, 2017. The secondary purpose is to highlight the tragic phenomenon of missing and murdered Native women, but this unimaginable crime was beyond the pale even for that terrible trend. In an all-too-common occurrence, 22-year-old, eight-month-pregnant nurse's aide and Spirit Lake Nation tribal member Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind was first reported missing by her family after stopping by a neighbor's one afternoon, reportedly to help her with some sewing.
Considering it another commonplace disappearance of a Native woman, police performed only a cursory search of the neighbor's apartment after Savanna was reported missing, as it was the last place she was seen alive, but reportedly found nothing. Family members blanketed the area with fliers, and dozens of volunteers began combing the area for her, to no avail.
A week later, Savanna's mutilated body was found by kayakers in the Red River, heavily wrapped in plastic trash bags with duct tape. Items found at an abandoned farmstead led to the discovery of her body a short distance away in the river. The most horrifying realization came when it was discovered that Savanna apparently had been the victim of a "womb-raider" crime (I don't like this term, as it's so disrespectful to the victims, but it's becoming a commonly-used one, and it's the one used in the book), whereby a pregnant woman is murdered and her fetus cut from her body by unimaginably sick, twisted killers for the purpose of stealing the baby.
Savanna's preemie daughter was found in the apartment of the two killers a few days after she was reported missing, and before her body was found. The infant was gravely ill, jaundiced from the premature birth, and in need of immediate medical treatment. She almost certainly would have died had police not found the little girl when they did. The sick freak who cut her out of her still-alive mother then attempted to lie to police about how she came by the baby, initially claiming that Savanna had left her apartment, but then returned a few days later, gave her the newborn, and disappeared again.
The truth, of course, was that she had mercilessly slaughtered the pregnant 22-year-old to steal her child to raise as her own, along with her boyfriend, who disposed of Savanna's mutilated body like trash, dumping her in a river in the hopes that she would never be found.
The twisted freak who killed a woman to steal her baby was a delusional 38-year-old wack job who had already lost custody of SEVEN CHILDREN by at least FIVE different men. So, she had already lost more than a six-pack of kids before she decided to murder an innocent woman to steal hers. She had engaged in a short custody battle with the sire of two of them, who fortunately was awarded physical custody, because mommie dearest apparently had the frequent habit of abandoning subsequent kids to run like cheap mascara to avoid child support payments - to as far as Australia, on one occasion, which wisely booted her useless, deranged butt out, denying her a work visa.
After wacko returned to the US, she shacked up with another worthless abuser, who had previously been convicted five years earlier of child abuse for fracturing the skull of his three-month-old son. Why this child beater wasn't charged with attempted murder and locked up for decades is beyond me, and we all see the result of being soft on crime and child-abusing criminals: the death of an innocent girl, one with her whole life ahead of her, who had her baby cut from her body, while she was apparently still alive.
He then reportedly strangled her with a piece of rope to make sure she was dead, after she had been violated in every way a person can be violated, even though she may have possibly survived had he immediately called for help if he had indeed just walked in on wacko cleaning up blood on the floor. Instead, he chose to participate in the crime, possibly ultimately causing Savanna's death, and certainly disposing of her body to avoid detection.
He pathetically claimed, of course, that he had nothing to do with the crime, and came home the day of the killing to find wacko cleaning up a pool of blood in their bathroom with Savanna's bleeding body lying on the floor. The baby had apparently been laid out on a towel in the bathtub like afterthought, with her dead or dying mother still on the bathroom floor while the killer was trying to clean up the crime scene to avoid detection.
Enough said about these two pathetic worms. I won't even use their names, as they don't deserve to be remembered. They deserve to die in cages. Hopefully they will, as wacko was sentenced to the maximum term of life without parole (unfortunately, North Dakota doesn't have the death penalty). Her f*** buddy was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to kidnap the baby, to which he had pleaded guilty, along with providing false information to police. Unfortunately, he wasn't convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, but was sentenced to life anyway for the kidnapping charge.
Unlike his insignificant-other co-conspirator, he may not actually die in a cage, but at least the sentence should keep him locked up for decades. He will also have to run the gauntlet of parole board hearings for the rest of his life, although that's no guarantee of anything, now that a septuagenarian Tate/LaBianca hippie cult murderer is apparently walking free after a half-century behind bars.
When are We the American People going to grow the spine we need to put these monsters down like the rabid dogs they are? I volunteer as Tribute, and I'd do it for free; euthanasia's too good for them, but it is effective and "humane," and not all that difficult to perform, which is more than they deserve.
That said, I also wonder why this crime in particular garnered so much public attention, when so many others don't even earn a passing mention by the local, let alone national press. News coverage resulting in many volunteers working tirelessly to bring Savanna home was probably the reason why she was found so quickly, and maybe even at all. Perhaps it was the shocking savagery and horror of this particular crime, which sadly lends well to mainstream news coverage with its "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality. However, hundreds of Native women have gone missing or have been found murdered over the last several decades, with very little attention given to finding them, to the degree that there's now a national movement to bring awareness to the issue.
In 2017, US Senators Steve Daines and Jon Tester from Montana introduced a resolution recognizing May 5 as a National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls (the acronym MMIW - Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women - was created by Indigenous journalist Sheila North Wilson in 2012), primarily in response to the murder of Hanna Harris on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.
May 5 has now become the official MMIW Day. Marchers wear red, most prominently a red dress and a hand print painted across the mouth, and attend marches and rallies and host fundraisers to raise awareness. Likewise the color red has become a de facto symbol of the movement. Artist Jaime Black even made red dresses a part of an ongoing art series, entitled "The REDress Project."
One of the primary problems is under-reporting: the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) states that in 2016 there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, but the US Department of Justice's federal missing person database, NamUs, only logged 116 cases. Worse, the Urban Indian Health Institute reports that murder is now the third leading cause of death for Native women aged TEN to 24, with the youngest MMIW victim a baby less than a year old and the oldest an 83-year-old.
According to the DOJ, Native women are victims of murder more than 10 times the national average. This is a shocking statistic, as Native people comprise less than two percent of the US population. Worse, a Canadian government National Inquiry found that Indigenous women are seven times more likely to be murdered by serial killers. (!!)
So: I'm glad that this book is bringing attention to this very pressing issue, one which has not received its due by mainstream media or government agencies. Despite its great potential to shed some much-needed light on a very tragic phenomenon among Native communities, one which has gone overlooked for far too long, I was unfortunately sorely disappointed by its quality, or lack thereof. In short, it's just very badly written. Thus, the three-star rating is primarily for the organization and writing, NOT the content, which does at least bring some much-needed attention to a highly pressing issue. This book is one of the most badly-organized and poorly-proofed non-fiction books I've ever read - at least, one that was issued by a professional publisher, in this case, Simon & Schuster/Atria books, so there's no excuse for the poor quality. In short, it just needed a capable editor to clean things up.
First, It's HIGHLY repetitive, to the point that some of the passages are repeated nearly verbatim throughout the text. Example: the author cites the infuriating statistic regarding the Crime Victims Fund, which, "amounting to billions of dollars, stems from fines and penalties incurred by offenders. But tribes have to fight for their share.... state governments passed only 0.5 percent of the available funds to programs serving tribal victims..." This passage, nearly word-for-word, appears in the prologue, and then again 70 pages later. I may not have the best memory these days, for a number of reasons, but even I remembered something I read scarcely 70 pages ago. That's only one example; there are multiple others.
Additional organizational problems: some "chapters" are little more than a page long. The book constantly jumps back and forth in time, from the present to the past crime, making the whole very disjointed and difficult to follow. There are multiple typos and misspellings throughout, which is really inexcusable in a book issued by a reputable publisher... and for one they want to charge $28.99 for.
I really wanted to like this book, whose content is of critical and timely import. I incidentally came across it while browsing new books at the library recently, having read the superb "Killers of the Flower Moon" a few months ago, which is now a major motion picture. Perhaps I was expecting something of that caliber, but this one unfortunately missed the mark. It's too bad, really, because as much light and attention as possible is needed regarding the sheer volume of missing and murdered Native women in the US, whose treatment of indigenous peoples, now in the THIRD decade of the 21st century, still remains a national disgrace.
Considering it another commonplace disappearance of a Native woman, police performed only a cursory search of the neighbor's apartment after Savanna was reported missing, as it was the last place she was seen alive, but reportedly found nothing. Family members blanketed the area with fliers, and dozens of volunteers began combing the area for her, to no avail.
A week later, Savanna's mutilated body was found by kayakers in the Red River, heavily wrapped in plastic trash bags with duct tape. Items found at an abandoned farmstead led to the discovery of her body a short distance away in the river. The most horrifying realization came when it was discovered that Savanna apparently had been the victim of a "womb-raider" crime (I don't like this term, as it's so disrespectful to the victims, but it's becoming a commonly-used one, and it's the one used in the book), whereby a pregnant woman is murdered and her fetus cut from her body by unimaginably sick, twisted killers for the purpose of stealing the baby.
Savanna's preemie daughter was found in the apartment of the two killers a few days after she was reported missing, and before her body was found. The infant was gravely ill, jaundiced from the premature birth, and in need of immediate medical treatment. She almost certainly would have died had police not found the little girl when they did. The sick freak who cut her out of her still-alive mother then attempted to lie to police about how she came by the baby, initially claiming that Savanna had left her apartment, but then returned a few days later, gave her the newborn, and disappeared again.
The truth, of course, was that she had mercilessly slaughtered the pregnant 22-year-old to steal her child to raise as her own, along with her boyfriend, who disposed of Savanna's mutilated body like trash, dumping her in a river in the hopes that she would never be found.
The twisted freak who killed a woman to steal her baby was a delusional 38-year-old wack job who had already lost custody of SEVEN CHILDREN by at least FIVE different men. So, she had already lost more than a six-pack of kids before she decided to murder an innocent woman to steal hers. She had engaged in a short custody battle with the sire of two of them, who fortunately was awarded physical custody, because mommie dearest apparently had the frequent habit of abandoning subsequent kids to run like cheap mascara to avoid child support payments - to as far as Australia, on one occasion, which wisely booted her useless, deranged butt out, denying her a work visa.
After wacko returned to the US, she shacked up with another worthless abuser, who had previously been convicted five years earlier of child abuse for fracturing the skull of his three-month-old son. Why this child beater wasn't charged with attempted murder and locked up for decades is beyond me, and we all see the result of being soft on crime and child-abusing criminals: the death of an innocent girl, one with her whole life ahead of her, who had her baby cut from her body, while she was apparently still alive.
He then reportedly strangled her with a piece of rope to make sure she was dead, after she had been violated in every way a person can be violated, even though she may have possibly survived had he immediately called for help if he had indeed just walked in on wacko cleaning up blood on the floor. Instead, he chose to participate in the crime, possibly ultimately causing Savanna's death, and certainly disposing of her body to avoid detection.
He pathetically claimed, of course, that he had nothing to do with the crime, and came home the day of the killing to find wacko cleaning up a pool of blood in their bathroom with Savanna's bleeding body lying on the floor. The baby had apparently been laid out on a towel in the bathtub like afterthought, with her dead or dying mother still on the bathroom floor while the killer was trying to clean up the crime scene to avoid detection.
Enough said about these two pathetic worms. I won't even use their names, as they don't deserve to be remembered. They deserve to die in cages. Hopefully they will, as wacko was sentenced to the maximum term of life without parole (unfortunately, North Dakota doesn't have the death penalty). Her f*** buddy was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to kidnap the baby, to which he had pleaded guilty, along with providing false information to police. Unfortunately, he wasn't convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, but was sentenced to life anyway for the kidnapping charge.
Unlike his insignificant-other co-conspirator, he may not actually die in a cage, but at least the sentence should keep him locked up for decades. He will also have to run the gauntlet of parole board hearings for the rest of his life, although that's no guarantee of anything, now that a septuagenarian Tate/LaBianca hippie cult murderer is apparently walking free after a half-century behind bars.
When are We the American People going to grow the spine we need to put these monsters down like the rabid dogs they are? I volunteer as Tribute, and I'd do it for free; euthanasia's too good for them, but it is effective and "humane," and not all that difficult to perform, which is more than they deserve.
That said, I also wonder why this crime in particular garnered so much public attention, when so many others don't even earn a passing mention by the local, let alone national press. News coverage resulting in many volunteers working tirelessly to bring Savanna home was probably the reason why she was found so quickly, and maybe even at all. Perhaps it was the shocking savagery and horror of this particular crime, which sadly lends well to mainstream news coverage with its "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality. However, hundreds of Native women have gone missing or have been found murdered over the last several decades, with very little attention given to finding them, to the degree that there's now a national movement to bring awareness to the issue.
In 2017, US Senators Steve Daines and Jon Tester from Montana introduced a resolution recognizing May 5 as a National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls (the acronym MMIW - Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women - was created by Indigenous journalist Sheila North Wilson in 2012), primarily in response to the murder of Hanna Harris on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.
May 5 has now become the official MMIW Day. Marchers wear red, most prominently a red dress and a hand print painted across the mouth, and attend marches and rallies and host fundraisers to raise awareness. Likewise the color red has become a de facto symbol of the movement. Artist Jaime Black even made red dresses a part of an ongoing art series, entitled "The REDress Project."
One of the primary problems is under-reporting: the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) states that in 2016 there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, but the US Department of Justice's federal missing person database, NamUs, only logged 116 cases. Worse, the Urban Indian Health Institute reports that murder is now the third leading cause of death for Native women aged TEN to 24, with the youngest MMIW victim a baby less than a year old and the oldest an 83-year-old.
According to the DOJ, Native women are victims of murder more than 10 times the national average. This is a shocking statistic, as Native people comprise less than two percent of the US population. Worse, a Canadian government National Inquiry found that Indigenous women are seven times more likely to be murdered by serial killers. (!!)
So: I'm glad that this book is bringing attention to this very pressing issue, one which has not received its due by mainstream media or government agencies. Despite its great potential to shed some much-needed light on a very tragic phenomenon among Native communities, one which has gone overlooked for far too long, I was unfortunately sorely disappointed by its quality, or lack thereof. In short, it's just very badly written. Thus, the three-star rating is primarily for the organization and writing, NOT the content, which does at least bring some much-needed attention to a highly pressing issue. This book is one of the most badly-organized and poorly-proofed non-fiction books I've ever read - at least, one that was issued by a professional publisher, in this case, Simon & Schuster/Atria books, so there's no excuse for the poor quality. In short, it just needed a capable editor to clean things up.
First, It's HIGHLY repetitive, to the point that some of the passages are repeated nearly verbatim throughout the text. Example: the author cites the infuriating statistic regarding the Crime Victims Fund, which, "amounting to billions of dollars, stems from fines and penalties incurred by offenders. But tribes have to fight for their share.... state governments passed only 0.5 percent of the available funds to programs serving tribal victims..." This passage, nearly word-for-word, appears in the prologue, and then again 70 pages later. I may not have the best memory these days, for a number of reasons, but even I remembered something I read scarcely 70 pages ago. That's only one example; there are multiple others.
Additional organizational problems: some "chapters" are little more than a page long. The book constantly jumps back and forth in time, from the present to the past crime, making the whole very disjointed and difficult to follow. There are multiple typos and misspellings throughout, which is really inexcusable in a book issued by a reputable publisher... and for one they want to charge $28.99 for.
I really wanted to like this book, whose content is of critical and timely import. I incidentally came across it while browsing new books at the library recently, having read the superb "Killers of the Flower Moon" a few months ago, which is now a major motion picture. Perhaps I was expecting something of that caliber, but this one unfortunately missed the mark. It's too bad, really, because as much light and attention as possible is needed regarding the sheer volume of missing and murdered Native women in the US, whose treatment of indigenous peoples, now in the THIRD decade of the 21st century, still remains a national disgrace.
