In reading this it reminded me that the area is remote and people live off the beaten path, and Navajo officers have to find the place often working alone. Patience is the key to solving some issues, and working through what happened.

This particular one remined me of Priscilla, she was about fifteen years old and used to babysit for us. She had long raven black hair and was quite pretty. She looked older than she was. She used to ride a bike around, an old two wheeler, a Scwhinn and she could be seen just riding around.

She got married to a young guy and had a little boy and they lived next to a high bluff full of cedars. One night she disappeared, the police looked for her but could not find her. She lived in a trailer and her husband was working far off, she was with her mother and new baby at home.

Someone came to the door and came in, talked a little bit and with the baby in her arms, this person reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun and said you have to come with me. She put the baby in her mother's arms and hesitated trying to talk to this person. He raised his arm and shot her mother in the head.  He dragged Priscilla off as she was crying for her mother and child. He took her up the bluff covered with Cedars, it was December, cold and the ground was frozen.

Somehow her mother was able to crawl to a neighbors and say her daughter had been taken. She then collapsed.

I was one of the officers who got there, we looked all over for her and searched every where.  About a mile away on the bluff, near the top, there was a track of where a tire had spun out, creating a rut.
It was at night, we thought to check at the bottom of the ridge and found her...she was shot in the back....we still have pictures of her  holding her baby....

Priscilla was found about 3 in the morning, she had from the evidence at the scene gotten out of the vehicle and started to run over the edge of the bluff and down hill into the darkness to get away. Whoever took her shot her in the back with a rifle, we found her in the cedars, she was eighteen years old.  No one has ever been charged with the crime, the frozen ground offered up no clues, and after an extensive investigation the case is considered still open. She was from Fort Defiance, she had two sisters and her Mom and Dad are quiet unassuming people.

The search for her was extensive, and as she used to bring Christmas treats to the officers at the station everyone came out to look for her, we were just too late.  She was a natural beauty, and someone's daughter and I can still see her riding by the house and waving to me when she went to the post office to check the mail, her pig tails flying every which way...she was an innocent spirit and from time to time my wife and I talk about Priscilla, the young mother from Fort Defiance.