While police idle, family search for answers in disappearance of Navajo man

RED MESA, Ariz. — Rising more than 100 feet in dusty red sandstone, from this mesa you can see the entirety of the Four Corners region stretching out past the horizon. Yet a group of men — armed with walking sticks, shovels and two-by-fours — kept their eyes steadfastly down.

It would be beautiful, many of them remarked, if it wasn’t a graveyard.

Poking through tumbleweeds, dry rotted coolers and unraveling carpets, the group had one goal — find Duane Thomas, or whatever remained of him. Thomas was a Western dancer by practice and a boilermaker by trade. The eldest son by a mere 14 minutes, he and his twin brother, Dorwin Thomas, could communicate without speaking.

Always sharply dressed, with a snap shirt, boots and a roping glove, Duane Thomas was the image of a gentleman cowboy. Spiritual and joyful by nature, Thomas’ family thinks of him every time they hear peyote music or go out dancing. His son, Jeremiah, remembers him as “the best dad in the world.”

Thomas went missing March 4, 2011, on the Navajo Nation near Red Mesa, and 14 years later his family has more questions than they do answers. In April, investigators with the Navajo Nation Police Department recovered human remains and a pair of cowboy boots just over a cliffside. In text messages obtained by the Journal, investigators told the family they would return to recover the rest, but “not anytime soon.”

With tribal police stretched thin, federal agencies bound up in treaty law and months before the bones are identified by forensics, the family said they’re done waiting around. Alongside a volunteer search and rescuer, the family set out to scour miles of rugged canyonland by themselves.

The not-so-long arm of the law

There are 78 people missing from the Navajo Nation going back to 1972, according to a January social media post by the Navajo Nation Police Department. Ella Mae Begay, Julius Largo and Pepita Redhair are just a few.

Speaking their names evokes a grim nationwide reality: Native Americans are disproportionately killed, assaulted and raped. Native women, in particular, experience violence at a rate 10 times higher than the national average in some rural counties. This epidemic of violence against Native Americans has been dubbed the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis.

A common thread in cases of MMIP is a lack of communication between local investigators, federal agencies and the community, a reality complicated by federal law, short-staffed police departments and the remoteness of reservations like the Navajo Nation.

Only cases that have been declared homicides can be investigated by the federal government, leaving some grieving families in limbo. The Major Crimes Act of 1885 gives the federal government jurisdiction to investigate murder, and many other felonies, committed by a Native American on tribal land.

Though the family has long suspected foul play in Thomas’ disappearance, Navajo Nation police never declared the case a homicide because of a lack of evidence, the family said, meaning the FBI never got involved. The FBI was unaware of Duane Thomas’ case, Kevin Smith, a spokesperson for the agency’s Phoenix Field Office, told the Journal.

“In order for the FBI to get involved, there would have to be some evidence that a crime had occurred,” Smith said. “Regarding missing persons, the FBI does not investigate adult missing person cases.”

To get FBI reinforcement requires evidence, but without resources and personnel, even the hottest leads can go cold. On and on goes this two-step dance between the Thomas family and law enforcement, with the case always ending up right where it started.

“All they can tell you is: it’s not a crime to go missing,” said Darrick Thomas, Duane Thomas’ youngest brother. “It’s not a crime to walk off. It’s not a crime to go somewhere else. But it is a crime if someone murders you, right?”

A hot lead

After years of feeling discarded, the Thomas family thought the investigation would pick up after a woman came forward with a tip and coordinates.

As far as the family knew, Thomas had been heading to a dance in Kayenta with his girlfriend the night he disappeared. However, according to the tipster, she, her boyfriend and Thomas’ girlfriend’s brother were also there that night.

According to information shared with the family by police, the woman guided investigators several miles down a dirt road to a dump site littered with debris and bones. This was the last place the woman said she had seen Thomas, as he walked off into the night with the two men.

There, investigators found human remains and cowboy boots that the family believes belong to Thomas. The remains are being tested by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque to confirm their identity, a process that “can take several months,” according to spokesperson Chris Ramirez. OMI would not say what kind or how many human bones were found at the site.

Though the discovery was new, the information wasn’t.

The family said they’d been aware of the tip and the woman’s willingness to talk to investigators for more than 10 years. The police didn’t listen, said Duane Thomas’ sister, Devena Thomas. When the woman first came forward, Devena Thomas rushed to the police department to share the development with officers but was never taken seriously, she said.

“‘I have all these names — I’m bursting with information,’” Devena Thomas said, recounting what she told police at the time. “But (the officer) was just like, nope, I’m not giving you the time of day. And that was it.”

The Navajo Nation Police Department did not respond for comment after numerous phone calls, emails and an in-person visit to the Office of the Chief of Police in Window Rock.

Discouraged after years of what she perceived as apathy, Devena Thomas said her mother eventually shut down and stopped cooperating with police, leaving the responsibility on her and her siblings’ shoulders.

Julia Thomas died a year ago, leaving the world without answers about her son’s disappearance. Her youngest son, Darrick Thomas, who stayed home to care for his aging parents, believes that her grief “slowly killed her.”

The mother held out hope until the day she died that she would see her son again. Her other children said they didn’t have the strength to tell her otherwise.

“If it is him, I’ll feel that we accomplished something on her behalf,” Danlaine Thomas, Duane’s sister-in-law and the family’s spokesperson, said of the recently uncovered remains.

The search

There are no trails, no markers and no anchors for climbing routes on the mesa. That didn’t impede Ray Kieyoani, who traversed up and down the 100-foot cliff as easily as the ravens circling overhead took to the skies. Kieyoani is the team leader of Dzil Yi Jiin Rescue, a search and rescue group based out of Pinon on the Navajo Nation.

The family enlisted Kieyoani to lead their search in the absence of police investigators, which is not unusual in his line of work. Kieyoani “fills the gap” between police, firefighters and emergency medical teams as a volunteer first responder, he said. Since he founded the group in 2021, Kieyoani has done it all, from rescuing tourists in Canyon de Chelly to rappelling down cliffs to save lost sheepdogs. He pays for rescues out of his own pocket, including gas mileage and climbing equipment, not asking for a penny in return.

The Navajo Nation spans 27,425 square miles of desert across Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Many people live in remote areas, down bumpy dirt roads in homesteads without formal addresses. Depending on where you live, Kieyoani said, it can take hours for police to arrive, time that people in emergency situations don’t have.

“I hated just standing there watching people’s houses burn down, but that’s just the way it goes, because the fire truck is 40, 50 miles away,” Kieyoani said.

The Navajo Nation police barely have the manpower to investigate and respond to crimes and emergencies happening in the moment, Kieyoani said, let alone missing persons cases from years and decades past.

“When people step back, I have to step up,” he said.

Even with Kieyoani’s help, there’s only so much the family can do. Under the sun’s watchful eye, 11 family members scoured the mesa, placing dozens of orange flags where they found bones, hoping that investigators will return to recover them.

Sun-bleached, brittle and often broken into pieces, it takes a trained eye to tell what’s man or animal.

“Coyote, canine and human can all look similar out here,” Kieyoani said.

The men scrambled up the cliffside past rattlesnakes and over silty orange sand toward the coordinates where investigators found the boots and human remains. The group switched effortlessly between Navajo and English as they work, undeterred by sweat dripping down their backs. Systematically, they overturned couch frames, tires and 5-foot-tall walls of tumbleweeds.

They talked of others gone missing, like Begay and Kieyoani’s own nephew, while hoping to be one of the lucky ones to finally put their relative to rest. The men hung up their hats after a full day of searching, with little to show. They found dozens of bones, uncertain if any were Duane Thomas’.

“I know my dad wouldn’t leave me on purpose,” Jeremiah Thomas said in a soft-spoken but certain voice.

Again and again, the group returned to search the canyon. Beneath trash and tumbleweeds, mere yards from where they’d been relentlessly searching in days past, the men pulled a human skull from the desert. The surface was fractured but intact.

It will take months for a forensic analysis to determine whether the skull is that of Duane Thomas. Though Navajo Nation Police Department investigators eventually returned to recover the skull, that day the family had no choice but to leave it behind in the desert, marked only with a thin flag.