Russell Turcotte
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Why No Police Action on North Dakota Murders?
Feb, 22
2003
Author: Hunter Gray
our Native American men - all members of the North
Dakota-based Turtle Mountain Chippewa [Ojibway] Nation
- have been murdered in and around Grand Forks, N.D.,
within the last year and a half. There have been no
arrests. The efforts by various North Dakota law
enforcement and other officials in these tragedies
have been notably laconic, confused, and omissive.
In Sept. 2001, three Turtle Mountain men were murdered
at virtually the same time in the Grand Forks setting
- a town of 50,000 on the Minnesota border. (It's the
hometown of Leonard Peltier.) Robert Belgarde, 40, and
Damian Belgarde, 19, father and son, were shot and
killed near the town. Within the Forks itself, Jerome
Decoteau, 50, who I knew personally, was bludgeoned to
death in his apartment.
In mid-July, 2002, a Turtle Mountain youth, Russell
Turcotte, 19, was hitch-hiking through Grand Forks at
night to his home in Wolf Point, Mont. Last seen at a
gas station on Highway 2 at the western edge of the
Forks, he was reported missing a day or two
thereafter. His partially nude body was eventually
found in early November, just off Highway 2, near
Devils Lake, N.D. - a town about 90 miles west of
Grand Forks.
The response to the Belgarde murders by the Grand
Forks County Sheriff's office was to claim at several
points that they were drug-related in some fashion -
and hence of presumably minimal concern to the general
run of citizenry. (These claims have now stopped, at
least publicly.) There have been leaked hints for
months that arrests in this matter are forthcoming. No
action.
Virtually nothing has been said by the Grand Forks
Police Department in the killing of Jerome Decoteau. A
few months ago, a leaked hint spoke of forthcoming
arrests. No action.
In mid-October, 2001, I wrote an angry statement about
the Belgarde and Decoteau murders, the growing
deterioration and mounting lack of sensitivity within
the GF Police Department, and the general breakdown in
race relations occurring in and around the town
itself. The local newspaper, The Grand Forks Herald,
ran this as an editorial and asked the police chief to
give his response. He refused to do so.
For months after Russell Turcotte's ominous
disappearance at Grand Forks in July 2002, North
Dakota lawmen in the region took the very strange
position that it was officially a matter relating to
his then residence, Wolf Point, in eastern Montana,
and did nothing. When, early on, a convenience store
manager told Forks police that he had a routine
surveillance video that showed Russell Turcotte and
other customers of that evening, the police indicated
they had no interest in it - and the tape was
eventually destroyed in the store's conventional
recycling process.
Over many years and after many tough campaigns, we
gained much ground in Grand Forks and North Dakota on
a wide variety of social justice endeavors - including
anti-racism. But it's obvious that much is now going
downhill very fast. While never any bed of roses by
any means, things are a far cry into the negative side
from where they were when I came to North Dakota in
1981.
The Belgarde and Decoteau killings have strong racist
dimensions. Organized hate groups, like spin-offs from
the old Posse Comitatus, are found throughout this
general region. In addition, the setting is rife with
plenty of "independent" racism. The mounting economic
vicissitudes in North Dakota and adjoining sections -
e.g., unemployment and the collapse of many small
farmers and ranchers - have deeply fueled these
poisonous rivers.
The victims' family members, myself and a number of
Native and non-Native people in the area are
vigorously planning appropriately creative approaches
designed to keep the fires burning on all of these
tragic issues - and to increase the degree and scope
of the constructive heat. Your help is much needed. We
ask for e-mails. Please contact these two State of
North Dakota officials and ask them to lend every
resource at their command to push the murder
investigations of the four Turtle Mountain men and
secure arrests. In addition to the need for justice,
there must be no more of these murders.
Honorable John Hoeven, governor, governor@state.nd.us;
Honorable Wayne Stenehjem, attorney general,
ndag@state.nd.us.
Hunter Gray is a long-time Native activist and social
justice organizer who now lives in Idaho. Originally
from Northern Arizona, Gray lived and taught in Grand
Forks. He was head of the Grand Forks Mayor's
Committee on Police Policy for years and was chair of
the city's Community Relations Committee. For more
information see www.hunterbear.org
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Photograph--Alfred Bone Shirt Sr. wearing a peace medal.