Sisseton community asks why girl left in field for nine hours?
by Jon Walker
Sisseton, South Dakota (AP/Argus Leader)
A courtroom someday will clear up details of the cold night that 16-year-old Kristy Owen spent in a field after she was beaten up and abandoned by her companions.
But facts in a trial will do little to melt the chill for a community regretting what happened outside town the night of Feb. 7-8. While one Sisseton teenager calls the trail of crimes a case of rowdiness gone bad, adults see a level of cruelty unlike any they have encountered before.
Still, the outcome would have been worse except for a farmer who heard his dogs in the night and the next morning followed a hunch to a desolate piece of rural countryside. There he found a pair of shoes and a bloody sweatshirt neatly arranged on a gravel road and then, glancing around, saw a girl lying in a field. His discovery led to a 911 call, a woolen blanket and for Kristy Owen, a trip to a Twin Cities hospital to recover from nine hours exposed to the cold.
Word that Owen had been beaten up fanned through Sisseton, a city of 2,594 residents in South Dakota’s hilly northeast corner. And with the news came disbelief that the accused perpetrators – two teenage girls and three young adults – kept the deed to themselves even after they were arrested for other offenses in the evening’s crime spree.
“People are quite appalled,” said Marcia Peterson, who works at the Roberts County Farm Mutual Insurance Co. in Sisseton’s downtown.
There’s nothing unique about South Dakota assaults appearing brutal on a personal level. Recently in Canton, two men used a blunt object to beat two others as they slept in their beds.
And there’s nothing new about high-profile misery in the Sisseton area. One city resident has been indicted in a stabbing death at a house party in Peever. In 2003, a man lost his wife and four children in a traffic accident that killed six people near Waubay. Kristy Owen’s mother, Kelly Owen, lost her parents, grandmother and aunt in a mid-1980s house fire, said police chief Lloyd LaBelle Jr., whose own father died recently.
“It’s crazy. For a little town, there’s so much drama going on,” said Dawnelle Eagle, 16, who’s known Owen since third grade.
The distinction in this case is that the victim was left to spend the night, dressed in jeans, tank top and a pair of socks, as the temperature fell to zero.
“It’s just the cold-heartedness of it, that young people would do something like that,” said Frank Karst, the town’s mayor since 2003. “It makes you nervous.”
The morning of Feb. 7, Kristy Owen was a girl in transition. She had been living with her grandmother, Juanita Owen, in nearby Agency Village. But two to three months ago, she moved in with her mother on Main Avenue in Sisseton, said Derek Bagola, a family member in Agency Village. She was not a student anywhere but soon was to enroll in the alternative program at Tiospa Zina, a tribal school at Agency Village, seven miles southwest of Sisseton.
Children in the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe are “like a large extended family,” said Ron Campbell, in his sixth year as principal at Tiospa Zina. “Lots of kids stay with aunts and uncles, then are back with their parents again. It’s kind of a cultural thing.”
Consequently, bad news spreads wide and is personal to many. News of Owen’s beating brought another reaction, however, as students tried to picture the victim. “That’s what we’re all struggling with,” said Campbell. “Just who was Kristy?”
Many teenagers in town knew exactly who she was. Many asked about her at Sisseton High School, where principal Gary Evjen found an address for students to use to send get-well messages. Others, interviewed on Veterans Avenue, the main street through Sisseton’s business district, offered their own theories of what happened.
Lana LaBelle, 15, an eighth-grader in middle school, is sure the victim knew her assailants, based on a conversation the day of the crime. “Kristy told me she was going to go with them,” said LaBelle, whose father is police chief. “She asked me to go.”
The crime spree that night involved a stolen Jeep, an escape from a traffic stop and a police officer wrestling to the ground a man making a misguided run toward freedom on tribal land. Somewhere in that sequence, Owen was dropped at a T-intersection of two gravel roads.
The spot is four miles northwest of Sisseton, where 115th Street runs into 456th Avenue. In the February daylight, the corner is an echo chamber of winter silences stretching for miles across rolling slopes that reach toward snow-covered buttes on the west horizon.
Night is a different story. Then the corner is a favorite haunt for youthful mischief.
“We patrol it as much as we can,” said Rick Moen, the Roberts County sheriff. “We can’t be there 24 hours a day. Ninety percent of the time we go out there, nobody’s there.”
Left alone at the “T” and evidently unable to stand, Owen began to roll uphill and away from the road.
“She was just disoriented, didn’t know where she was at,” Moen said. “She might have been rolling around just trying to stay warm. After nine hours she could have rolled quite a ways. From what we understand, she was right by the road to start with.”
Up 115th Street a quarter-mile to the east is a trailer home not visible from the intersection. Kevin and Diantha Larson, both 38, live there with their four children. Kevin raises cattle, but his day job is maintenance work for the Tekakwitha Indian Mission. Diantha also works in Sisseton, as an addictions counselor at the Human Services Agency. They start out east most mornings to get from home to work. On Feb. 8, they went west.
“I just think the good Lord was watching out that morning,” Diantha said. They were in their silver 2000 Chevy pickup, with Kevin at the wheel. “Usually he’ll drive that way coming back from lunch, but not in the morning.”
Kevin Larson said he was about to start east, then remembered a sound in the night. It was his four dogs – two labs and two blue heelers – who often bark when they hear noise from partiers at the “T.” Larson, as a matter of curiosity, makes a habit of checking the intersection.
“I was turned one way, but I decided I’d better check,” he said.
Near the intersection he saw a pair of black tennis shoes and a gray sweat shirt on the side of the road. They were in an orderly setting, “like somebody set them there,” he said. “The sweat shirt looked like it had blood on it, so I looked out in the field. About 50 feet out, this body was lying there.”
The Larsons drove home and called for help, then returned in “just a minute or so,” Kevin said. By that time, close to 8:30 a.m., Sheriff Moen already had answered the call and was tending to Owen. Diantha Larson put a blanket around the girl, who was on her side and moaning.
“We started talking to her,” she said. “We told her help was on the way and that she was going to be OK.”
An ambulance arrived, and Owen was on her way to the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.
Evelyn Schlenker, professor in the division of basic biomedical sciences at the University of South Dakota Medical School, said the damage cold does to a body varies by situation. There was no snow on the ground that night, and the air was calm – both factors in Owen’s favor. But being lightly dressed was a serious risk. If alcohol was involved, it could have thrown off brain signals that help the body with thermal regulation, shivering and other self-defense measures against the cold.
“Something like that, with so little on, you lose heat fast,” Schlenker said.
Moen would not explain details of evidence or comment on Kevin Larson’s observation about the shoes and sweat shirt.
He said he does not think the assault was gang-related. Nor does he think it was racially motivated in a community that has large blocs of white European descendants and members of the Sisseton Wahpeton. He said he thinks one of the accused is a first cousin to the victim.
“Everybody involved is Native American,” Moen said. “They’re all the same race. There are no race issues whatsoever.”
Police learned of suspicious activity Feb. 7 when Chief LaBelle was told at 8 p.m. that someone had stolen a Jeep 4-by-4 from a housing area, a neighborhood in trust land under tribal authority.
The Jeep owner’s daughter had called in the notice, and the owner himself reported the vehicle stolen at 11 p.m. A bulletin followed. Tribal police spotted the Jeep and took up the chase. When they stopped the vehicle, five people were inside. The driver, identified by LaBelle as Elijah Hard Heart, got out. But one of the four passengers, Stacy LaBlanc, slid into the driver’s seat and drove off toward Sisseton, LaBelle said.
The chase ended near St. Peter’s Church in the northeast corner of town. According to LaBelle, LaBlanc stopped the vehicle, got out and made a dash for the tribal housing area less than 100 yards away.
“One of my officers grabbed him,” LaBelle said. “They started wrestling, got onto the ground, and that’s when a state trooper took him into custody.”
LaBlanc’s effort to reach the tribal enclave might have complicated things, had he succeeded.
“We’ve got good cooperation,” LaBelle said, referring to state and tribal governments. “It works well between us, but it’s hard to get somebody extradited from the tribe or for the tribe to extradite somebody from us. Sometimes it can be two to three years before they face their charges.”
While the two juveniles face attempted murder charges, Hard Heart and LaBlanc face charges of aiding and abetting in kidnapping and aggravated assault. Marita White is charged with concealing a crime.
Greg Garvey, a Sisseton-area lawyer representing White, said that he had “no comment at all.”
Moen said the original traffic stop was three to four miles from where Owen was left. He hopes to hear her side of the story, but noted, “We’re not concerned about interviewing her until she gets better.”
Late one afternoon, teenagers gathered on the sidewalk of Veterans Avenue. They said they enjoy spending time at the teen center the tribe opened downtown and following sports teams at the two high schools.
The talk turned to what happened to Owen. “That’s ruthless,” said Amanda Bucklin, 16, who described herself as a dropout who now baby-sits.
For others in the community, moving on will be difficult.
“At first, it was sort of hard to swallow,” said Joe White, 68, a singer and guitar player who was to perform at a benefit for Owen. “Now it’s over with and we’re just trying to encourage the young lady.”
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Last updated on March 17, 2005