This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight.

John Hult
South Dakota Searchlight

The people who loved Acey Morrison spent nearly as much time waiting for justice as her killer is likely to spend locked up.

It doesn’t feel like much, her family said. But at this point, nearly any measure of justice is welcome. 

A judge this month sentenced 55-year-old Gregory Edward Landers to seven years in prison for fatally shooting Morrison in 2022. South Dakota lawmakers passed a truth in sentencing bill in 2024 that requires people serving time for violent crimes to serve all or most of their prison terms, but the law wasn’t retroactive. With credit for the two years he’s served in jail, Landers could be eligible for parole within a few years.

Landers pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter in November 2024. In exchange, prosecutors dropped first-degree manslaughter and a weapons charge, and agreed to ask for a sentence of no more than 10 years in prison, with three suspended. 

“It was about the best outcome that we could hope for,” said Stevie Cross Dog, Morrison’s brother. “It should have been longer than seven years, but that’s what we agreed to.”

Given Landers’ unsuccessful assertions of self-defense before the plea and his repeated attempts to withdraw the plea in the months that followed, there were times Stevie, his twin sister Raena Cross Dog and their mother, Edelyn Catches, wondered if the sentencing date would ever come.

Catches is glad it did, but the wait and the knowledge that Landers may be eligible for parole in a few years dull the feeling of justice for her daughter, she said. 

Meanwhile, the family is still waiting for justice in the killing of Daniel Freeman, who was fatally stabbed in Pine Ridge 14 months after Morrison died.

Freeman is a biological nephew raised by Catches from infancy. She’s all but given up hope that his killer or killers will face justice.

She’s struggled to sleep for four years. Thus far, she told South Dakota Searchlight, the sentence for Landers hasn’t changed that.

“After all this time, you lose a lot of faith in the system,” said Catches, who’s now raising Freeman’s two children.

Self-defense claim stalls prosecution

Morrison was a 30-year-old transgender woman and citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, recognized in the tribe’s traditions as a “Two-Spirit.” She’d cry about getting haircuts that made her “look like a boy,” her mother remembers, and wanted to wear girls’ clothes from a young age. 

“I always knew she was Two-Spirit,” Catches said.

Stevie and Raena, who are six years younger than Morrison, always knew her as an older sister. She often worked three jobs at a time, Raena said, and struggled to deal with “verbal and mental abuse” she’d experienced growing up transgender and Native American while going to school in Oehlrichs, a town in Fall River County about a dozen miles from Pine Ridge Reservation borders, and while living in Rapid City as an adult.

By mid-2022, though, Raena and Stevie both said Morrison seemed to have turned a corner after struggles with substance abuse and low-wage work. Instead of three jobs, she had one, as a hotel manager, and was “in the process” of adopting Freeman’s young son. The boy was living with Morrison and Stevie at their Rapid City apartment.

“It broke me,” Raena said of Morrison’s killing, “because of all the progress she’d made in the past 10 years.”

Morrison met Landers through a dating app called Grindr. The altercation that ended her life took place the morning after she arrived at his trailer on Aug. 20, 2022. 

Landers told police the two drank alcohol, but hadn’t slept together. Morrison attacked him when he asked her to leave in the morning, Landers argued throughout court proceedings. They struggled over a shotgun, he said, which Landers said he’d fired during the struggle to protect himself.

After a self-defense immunity hearing in 2024, though, Judge Heidi Linngren ruled “clear and convincing evidence” suggested that Landers hadn’t acted in self-defense. The ruling allowed the prosecution to proceed.

There were too many inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his story, the judge wrote, to dismiss the manslaughter charges without a trial. The area of the bedroom where the altercation allegedly happened was largely undisturbed. Landers had accused Morrison of factory resetting his phone, but later admitted that he’d scrubbed the phone himself. He said Morrison showed up without a phone, but also that she’d asked Siri, an iPhone voice assistant, to call the police.

Even so, convincing a jury that Landers had committed manslaughter beyond a reasonable doubt wouldn’t have been easy, Pennington County State’s Attorney Lara Roetzel told South Dakota Searchlight. 

Pulling together enough evidence to make that possible was part of the reason more than a year passed between the killing and Landers’ indictment, she said.

“Really, every expert was saying ‘We don’t really have any idea what happened in that room,’” said Roetzel, who also noted that her office was in a leadership transition after the departure of former state’s attorney Mark Vargo, who was a few months into his interim stint as South Dakota’s attorney general when the homicide took place.

Morrison was taller and heavier than Landers. They’d both been drinking. Landers was injured when police arrived, with a fractured hand and bruised ribs.

“In the end, it was all the lying and the inconsistencies,” Roetzel said, that led her to conclude that Landers had been the aggressor, even though “a lot of prosecutors wouldn’t have even charged this case.”

He pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, which under South Dakota law constitutes the “reckless killing of one human being” by another.

“I stand by my decision to charge it,” said Roetzel. “I believe beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed Acey, certainly in the manner of the charge he pleaded to.”

Delays, hearings

At his plea hearing in late 2024, Linngren asked Landers if he was satisfied with the advice of his court-appointed lawyer and if he was making the plea of his own free will, without undue pressure. Linngren informed him of his rights he’d be giving up with his plea and asked him if he was prepared to give them up.

All the answers were “yes.”

Normally, a sentencing hearing would happen within a month or so of such a plea. But within weeks, Landers moved to fire his attorney. He was appointed a new one, who needed time to review the case. Then Landers moved to take back his plea, which led to multiple hearings and another ruling from Linngren, this time saying that his plea had been knowing and voluntary. 

“Reasserting the same claims after his guilty plea is not a persuasive reason to allow withdrawal” of a plea, she wrote.

In letters to the judge, Landers said the case was political because of Morrison’s transgender and Native American identities, and that the prosecution had been malicious. He was defending himself, he said, and needed to “get home” to his aging parents in Indiana.

Landers’ mother sent South Dakota Searchlight messages in 2025 and again in 2026 saying her son acted in self-defense. His mother did not reply to messages seeking comment after the sentencing.

Landers also unsuccessfully attempted, through a handwritten motion, to get the state Supreme Court to intervene. 

For Stevie Cross Dog, his sister and his mother, it felt like Landers was doing everything he could to delay his sentencing.

“The letter of the law has to be followed, but I think he signed the plea deal and he admitted guilt,” Stevie said. “I don’t think he should’ve gotten so much time to keep the process going. It’s been two and a half years of continuances and delays.”

Family tragedy mirrors national issues

Catches and her surviving children have all but given up waiting for an arrest in Freeman’s murder. It’s been classified a “cold case,” Catches said.

“Nothing has happened,” she said. “Nobody’s been arrested.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of South Dakota, which would be the prosecuting agency for a homicide on the Pine Ridge Reservation, told South Dakota Searchlight there was nothing to share on the Freeman case. A different spokesperson gave the same response in 2024.

The family’s experience since 2022 stands as a stark reflection of a reality shared by Native American families across South Dakota and the U.S. Homicide is the fourth-leading cause of death for Native American men and sixth-leading cause for Native American women, according to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

Transgender people, meanwhile, are four times more likely to be victims of violent crimes, according to the Williams Institute. The figures are more disproportionate still for Two-Spirit people, according to a 2025 report from the Human Rights Campaign that found four in five experience violence in their lifetime.

Raena Cross Dog said the loss of two relatives, the wait for closure and other struggles since Morrison’s death have been a lot to take, especially in such rapid succession. 

She “went numb” after Freeman’s death. Stevie said it felt “like starting all over again.”

Their mother’s health problems, often attended to by Morrison, have worsened since then. Catches has withdrawn from family and friends, she said, who are “tired of me crying.”

About a year after Freeman’s death, Raena lost a child to miscarriage. 

“We’re very broken, if I’m being honest. We’re a broken family,” Raena said. “We’re trying to cope.”

Trying to cope is the first step, Stevie said. At least with the sentencing, he sees some possibility for closure and healing. 

Like his mother, though, he doesn’t feel it yet. He’s not sure when he will.

“It’s just surviving first,” Stevie said.