Sgt. Alan Two Crow

Lakota family unsatisfied with Army probe of death

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FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2003

The family of a Lakota man whose death at West Point Military Academy in New York was ruled an accident still wants an independent investigation into the suspicious incident.

According to the Army, Alan Two Crow, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, fell to his death last summer. But family members say there are unanswered questions about how the death and how investigation was handled.

Search teams failed to find Two Crow for 10 weeks. Three civilians acting on their own located his body within hours.

Family leaves Army meeting unconvinced

Argus Leader

published: 4/4/2003

Two Crow father says investigation fell short

EAGLE BUTTE - The father of a Lakota soldier, whose body was found on the grounds at West Point more than two months after he was last seen alive, left a five-hour meeting with top Army investigators saying he remains unconvinced his son died from a fall.

Don Two Crow said the meeting left him "satisfied these investigators have good hearts and are sincere" but still believing the truth about his son's death hasn't been discovered yet.

"I still would have liked a separate investigation not by the Army, and I'm not real comfortable with the theories and speculation and all of that stuff," Two Crow said Thursday morning. "These are just speculations of how he might have fallen. It just doesn't seem right yet. I still think there's more to be learned."

The head of operations for the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command and a senior investigator met Wednesday evening in Eagle Butte with tribal members and the family of Sgt. Alan Two Crow. Two Crow's body was found in a wooded area of the U.S. Military Academy grounds 10 weeks after he was last seen in mid-July. He was a military policeman and a 1993 graduate of Eagle Butte High School.

While some family members have said they believe Two Crow was killed, the Army investigation concluded that the evidence points to accidental death, most likely a fall. Don Two Crow said he isn't ready to accept that explanation, but he said he isn't sure how to ensure that the case will continue to draw attention.

"I think with West Point's reputation and all that, they never wanted anybody to dig into this very far," he said. "These people who came to the reservation, they finally just admitted that a lot of mistakes were made at West Point in dealing with this. That's a start, maybe."

Col. Robert Abernathy, director of operations for Army CID, and Special Agent Angela Birt, who led a re-examination of evidence, witnesses and other aspects of the case in December and January, explained their findings in a meeting with about 35 family and tribal members. The meeting at an Eagle Butte motel conference room began shortly before 7 p.m. and ended well after midnight. Several people who were in the room said the Army representatives were peppered with questions for much of the session.

Tribal Chairman Harold Fraser left the meeting frustrated and unsatisfied with the conclusions.

"I respect that these people came out here and met with the family and the tribe face-to-face to explain and answer the questions, but I can't feel that this is over," Fraser said. "It's frustrating to have been asking all this time for an independent investigation and not get it. I still think the FBI should come in and take a completely separate look at the case, remove it from the Army's hands for one good look."

The visitors to Eagle Butte on Wednesday said they provided that independent investigation. The Army CID - which retains the initials that stand for Criminal Investigation Division even though the official title has changed to Criminal Investigation Command - operates independent of the rest of the military in its investigations, said Marc Raimondi, director of public affairs for CID.

"They go where the investigation and evidence take them, and their credibility is in their independence," he said.

Birt, who had the task of interpreting much of the 700-page report to the tribal members on Wednesday, agreed.

"I don't care if it leads to a general's daughter or whatever," she said. "We are to investigate to the best of our ability and to answer the questions that are raised by a case."

In this case, that's not been done completely, even Birt agrees.

"We don't have all the answers here, and we probably never will," she said in an interview after the meeting. "And, you know, if it were my family, I'd have the exact same questions. He was a soldier, and I'm a soldier, and so he is a part of my family. It's disappointing to not have all of the answers they want."

Two key issues

While the family and the tribe are unsettled by many aspects of the case, two key issues seem to draw the greatest number of questions.

First, they can't understand how more than 80 soldiers and New York State Police, using trained dogs, could fail to find the body when two months later a trio of weekend searchers discovered it in less than two hours.

"They say now that the search was mishandled from the start, so that's at least the start of admitting there was a lot of things done wrong and all that," Don Two Crow said.

Second, the father, tribal lawyer Tom Van Norman and others struggle with the fact that while the conclusion is that a fall most likely killed the soldier, the autopsy showed a severely twisted neck but few other marks or broken bones that might have been expected in a serious fall.

Van Norman said after Wednesday's briefing that he continues to suspect that Alan Two Crow was killed by someone trained in the military-style of snapping the neck.

"If you walk the terrain, look at the photos and read the reports, there just doesn't seem any way this could have been done in a fall that caused so little other damage," he said.

Search poorly handled

Investigator Birt said the two issues - the search and the inability to say with certainty that the neck injury was from a fall - are linked. An unsuccessful search and the delay in finding the body contributed to the loss of evidence and the deterioration of the body, making exact forensics findings difficult. And she offers no defense for the failed initial search.

"The search was poorly conducted and poorly documented, and there is no acceptable excuse for that," Birt said. "If we had found the body the next day, there would have been a much greater chance" of answering the questions.

Birt and two other senior CID investigators started their second look at the case from scratch, interviewing each witness and searcher, listening to tapes of calls involving the missing soldier, reading aloud each report and document related to the case. They walked the area where the body was found and conducted a number of re-enactments of possible falls, using an emergency- services training dummy and simulating falls, pushes and other possible ways Two Crow's body could have ended up where it did.

In the end, the CID team reached conclusions that Birt says she can't guarantee are the truth but that are most likely to have been what happened, based on the evidence available. The search created gaps in evidence, she said. The time delay left a body vulnerable to animals and weather and made it difficult to examine the soft tissue of the neck area. That would have been an important examination, she said.

"The physical evidence was most likely supportive of an accident," Birt said, adding, "it's more likely than not" what happened.

She said there were marks on the soldier's jeans that could have been consistent with sliding down the hillside.

The re-enactments were done from different vantage points along the ridge, and one of those tests produced a fall consistent with where the body was found, she said. She also said she understands that "more likely than not" isn't the final answer a family wants to hear.

Questions remain

Don Two Crow said he was impressed with the effort the CID team put into its work, but he still has questions. The re-enactment, for example, was done with a 165-pound figure. His son weighed 200 pounds.

"I believe Angela Birt has an open mind about this, and I hope she will continue to think about the evidence and all of that in the case," he said.

Van Norman said he believes the tribe and the family will continue to pressure the Army for answers.

"They've had to come out and say mistakes were made, and they were forced to renew the investigation," Van Norman said. "Without pressure from the tribal council and from Senator Tim Johnson's office, I don't think that would have happened. I think there's pressure not to drop it yet, even though they said the case is essentially closed. Why close it? Why not leave it open and keep the pressure up? I think we moved a little closer to the truth during this meeting, but we aren't there yet."

Don Two Crow said he plans to read the case report several times in coming days and talk with Van Norman and tribal leaders before deciding what other steps he might take.

Reach Terry Woster at 605-224-2760 or twoster@midco.net.