Ten years ago my older brother got off the phone after a quick solemn sounding conversation and turned to me with an ashen color on his face conveying shock, fright, and anger all at once. “He’s dead,” he told me, his voice trying to crack. “They killed him. Austin is dead.”

No. No way. It couldn’t be true. Although he wasn’t a saint, my little brother was a popular guy, and well-loved by anyone who had even a brief conversation with him. Are you sure? Yeah, I heard mom screaming and crying hard in the background. My mom had been sick in the hospital due to a blood disease. The poignant, yet distant way he’d said, “heard mom screaming and crying hard,” was all the hard evidence I needed to convince myself it was true as I braced for the reality and let the fact flood over the levee that was my heart like an unexpected midnight tsunami.

I too would get to hear what my brother had already sampled on the phone as we neared the hospital room where Yellowstone County Sheriff Deputies spoke outside of it with my shaken dad. The sound of a wailing, bereaved mother over the death of her youngest baby son most genuinely captures the meaning of heartfelt pain as the mother who carried and cared so much for her baby that she’d die for them without hesitation only wants to trade places.

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Such haunting recollections are a personal daily occurrence, but they surfaced even more vividly one day as I recently went and spoke with Cletus and Earlene Cole, Native American parents whose son Steven Bearcrane-Cole was killed by a white man named Bobby Holcomb on a ranch on the Crown Indian Reservation in 2005. After what the Cole’s considered an incompetent if not dismissive investigation after Holcomb was never charged with any crime, they brought a lawsuit against the FBI in 2009 alleging they have “a practice of knowingly providing less law enforcement services to Native Americans than non-Native Americans.”

The person who killed my brother said he “accidentally shot him” inside a truck as he removed his rifle for target practice. But the angle he was shot from—and especially the blood trail 20 yards from the truck—didn’t match the story at all. Prosecutors let the shooter’s BS story slide and gave him two years for manslaughter.

Like my own little brother, Steven Bearcrane-Cole happened to be about a year younger than me. Although we hung in different crowds, Steven Bearcrane-Cole would later attend the same Billings Senior High School I did. Always respectful, he loved animals, loved hard work, and “loved the freedom of being a cowboy,” Cletus told me.

Odd memories and private jokes I had with my little brother surface at unexpected times.

Seeing or hearing the word “schnapps,” for instance, sets off memories of him saying, “Business is business and schnapps is schnapps,” a quote stemming from Erich Maria Remarque’s classic WWI novel, All Quiet On the Western Front. We were given our first copy from our late German-descent WWII veteran grandfather. He told us the prose contained all that we needed to know about war when we inquired about his own service. (He was a medic in the Pacific.) Such is the thread of familial experience.

Known as a familial and community matriarch both on and off the Northern Cheyenne reservation, my mother’s life ended a few heartbroken years after my brother’s death as her already shaky health quickly deteriorated. She was the one who had taken in dozens of less fortunate foster kids when I grew up, and the one everyone thought of as a second mom or a sister. To every little kid in her vicinity she was “grandma Jamesey” because she listened intently to their important stories all of the other big people were too busy to hear.

With that in mind, as I approached Steven’s parents one evening to do an interview about their ongoing court case, I could feel nothing but respect for these people that had so selflessly for so long fought on behalf of Native families who had given up on justice via U.S. law. Those who’d believed the proverb of Lady Justice being blind was correct, because obviously she couldn’t see Indians.

After we discussed the technicalities of Steven’s case, I wanted to know some details about him simply as a person. When one recollects memories of a loved one, mixtures of contradicting emotions are expressed beyond words that emanate from body language, voice timbre, to especially the eyes. In the same sentence or even word, glints of pride from having known the deceased can turn to watery grief as if it were a thickening cloud threatening to burst as tears are fought back.

Even to the man who eventually killed him, Bobby Holcomb, Steven Bearcrane-Cole showed a gratuitous heart. Because Bobby lived alone most of the time in a ranch bunkhouse/trailer, would always bring him a plate of home cooked food whenever possible. After Bobby got into a phone call quarrel with a sibling during the holiday season, he dejectedly said he didn’t have any family anymore—they didn’t even want him around. Steven Bearcrane-Cole told him that wasn’t true, because “You’re part of our family now.”

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Always looking out for those that had less—the Indian way.

Steven’s family included a 2-year-old daughter, Precious, who was a month away from being 3 when he died. My brother had a son named Buddy a month away from turning one when he was killed. To most people, my brother and Steven’s deaths are numbers—statistics proving the old adage, “If you want to get away with murder, do it on an Indian reservation.”

As if to make their point somehow more correct, it was reported the Agent in charge of investigating Steven’s death had sordidly said about him, “It’s just another dead Indian.”

The Cole’s resolved themselves against such thoughts, and made it their mission that the families and histories of those victims would be heard louder. After their case made it to the highest courts in the land, people—including my mother—came forth and told them of their own sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters they had lost to violence.

After Steven Bearcrane-Cole died, Precious always carried a picture around of her daddy. I imagine a daughter taking out daddy’s picture, perhaps when she thought no one was looking, and with a prayerful hope they’d cling to it with faith she’d maybe even see him that very day after he was done taking care of the horses. It’s just a bad dream. Watch. And when she saw him, she’d instinctively yell, “Daddy!” and run to him and give him the strongest hug she could.

Older now, I imagine the daughter isn’t waiting for her daddy, but knows he now patiently waits for her. First, she must live a long life that exemplifies the goodness of daddy’s legacy. For now daddy waits on the other side, while this side waits for justice. For little Precious, the one she called Daddy was anything but a statistic, and anything but “just another dead Indian,” he was everything and his life deserves that recognition and accountability from the so-called Department of Justice.

Adrian Jawort is a poet, freelance journalist, writer, and founder of Off the Pass Press LLC which aims to find “true beauty in literature off the beaten path.” Titles from Off the Pass Press include the fiction anthologies Off the Path Vol. I and Off The Path Vol. 2: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers which includes up and coming writers from North America, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia.