A woman beat to death a one-year-old girl under her care on a rural Montana Indian reservation, threw the baby’s body into a dumpster and reported her missing before confessing to the crime a day later, a federal investigator testified on Friday.
Janelle Red Dog, 42, admitted striking Kenzley Olson on three occasions on Tuesday, but it’s uncertain if that’s what killed her, her lawyer said. Red Dog got scared after the baby died, so she disposed of the body in a trash container several blocks from her house in the town of Poplar, attorney Mary Zemyan said. She later reported the girl missing.
Red Dog appeared in tribal court on the Fort Peck Reservation on Friday, about 20 miles from the U.S.-Canada border, and was ordered back into custody without bond, court officials said. Tribal prosecutors are expected to charge her by Tuesday when she is scheduled for another hearing. It was the second major event in recent weeks to rattle the sparsely populated reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.
In late February, a man allegedly abducted and sexually assaulted a four-year-old girl from a park in the reservation town of Wolf Point. The girl was found alive several days later. Fort Peck Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure said Kenzley’s death and the recent kidnapping stemmed from a rising drug epidemic that the reservation must address.
‘What it’s coming down to is our society is basically allowing this to be the norm,’ he said. ‘We are allowing this to happen by not speaking out.’ Investigators haven’t publicly linked either case to drugs, but Azure told The Associated Press the use of methamphetamine was at the root of both crimes.