In the stacks of thick folders that cover Jonnie Bray's desk, there are tales of monsters.
The one in her hand starts on a winter night in 2003, when Ronnie Tom tries to rape the 12-year-old sister of his live-in girlfriend on the Colville Indian Reservation in eastern Washington. When she manages to escape, he moves on to his girlfriend's 7-year-old daughter who is nearby, and here he succeeds.

Bray, a Colville Indian and one of the tribe's prosecutors, said an expert forensics interviewer found the 7-year-old's testimony recounting the rape clear and credible. And a sexual-predator profile of Tom warned that he should never be allowed to be alone with children, including his own, or live "near places designed for children, such as schools, playgrounds (or) swimming pools."

But Tom was never charged with a felony crime. That's because here, as on the majority of the country's nearly 300 Indian reservations, the sole authority to prosecute felony crime lies with the federal government. One hundred fifty miles away in Spokane, an assistant U.S. attorney - faced with a distant case and a 7-year-old witness - simply declined to prosecute, something that crime data show they do in 65 percent of all reservation cases.

Now Ronnie Tom is out of jail, freed after serving less than two years on the equivalent of misdemeanor charges Bray cobbled together in tribal court, including a separate incident involving the 12-year-old discovered later. Bray said he is again living with his girlfriend and their new child - a girl.

"He is a danger to our community and to any community," Bray said. "I was just disgusted. I don't think I've ever spoken to that U.S. attorney again."

Already some of the most violent and impoverished places in America, facing a steep rise in meth-fueled crime, the country's Indian reservations are also plagued by a systematic breakdown in the delivery of justice, a six-month investigation by The Denver Post found.

U.S. attorneys and FBI investigators face huge challenges fighting crime on reservations: They are viewed as outsiders who shouldn't be trusted; locations are remote; the high levels of alcohol use among victims, suspects and witnesses that accompany many serious crimes can also make them very difficult to prove, several U.S. attorneys said.

"We have the obligation before proceeding to a grand jury to make sure we have a prosecutable case," said James A. McDevitt, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, who said he could speak only generally and couldn't comment on why his assistants rejected the Tom case. "We're not in the business of taking cases we're going to lose."

But the system is also badly dysfunctional, insiders say, burdened by competing federal priorities such as immigration and terrorism and undermined by institutional resistance to using the high-powered federal judicial machine to prosecute run-of-the-mill violent crime.

"I've had (assistant U.S. attorneys) look right at me and say, 'I did not sign up for this,"' said Margaret Chiara, who until March was the U.S. attorney for western Michigan, with jurisdiction over several reservations. "They want to do big drug cases, white-collar crime and conspiracy.

"And I'll tell you, the vast majority of the judges feel the same way. They will look at these Indian Country cases and say, 'What is this doing here? I could have stayed in state court if I wanted this stuff,"' she said.

"It's a terrible indifference, which is dangerous because lives are involved."
Most cases rejected
A review by The Post of dozens of criminal cases on more than 20 reservations substantiates widely held concerns among American Indians that the system as it now stands functions poorly, including investigations that are chronically delayed or dropped, and serious crimes never prosecuted as felonies.

On the Fort Peck reservation in Montana, a man recently assaulted his girlfriend and broke her jaw, a result that didn't count as "serious bodily injury," according to the U.S. attorney, who therefore declined the case. According to the tribal prosecutor, who was forced to charge the suspect in tribal court, the same man has since committed several other crimes, "literally wreaking havoc here," she said.

On the Blackfeet reservation on a remote stretch of the Canadian border, a 41-year-old mentally handicapped woman named Maria Kennerly allegedly was raped by a neighbor more than a year ago. With no word yet on the progress of the investigation and with the neighbor still living next door, Kennerly's mother said she now keeps her daughter under constant supervision, virtually a prisoner in her own home.

And on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, federal prosecutors recently declined to prosecute the rape and incest case of a man who had sex with his 23-year-old daughter after she had passed out following a family party. The federal prosecutor cited lack of a viable DNA sample on the condom used by the father, Larry Nez. Faced with the testimony of the victim, Nez pleaded guilty in tribal court but served just 60 days in a Navajo jail.

With prosecutors and investigators exercising wide discretion, the effectiveness of justice on reservations varies widely, swayed by personal relationships, the commitment of individual agents or prosecutors, even such vagaries as distance. A General Accounting Office report in the 1980s found that the farther a reservation was from an FBI field office, the higher the percentage of felony prosecutions that were declined.

The sometimes inconsistent politics of tribal sovereignty haven't helped, some American Indians concede. A decades-long effort to shift more police powers to the tribes hasn't necessarily been matched by tribal governments' willingness to fully pay for and professionalize those ranks. A primary reason so many cases are rejected, federal prosecutors complain, is botched crime scenes or poorly prepared cases by tribal investigators who aid the FBI.

"It has been too easy for everybody to fall into role- playing on the federal part of it," said Philip S. Deloria, director of the American Indian Law Center in Albuquerque and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux. "The FBI doesn't care. The U.S. attorneys are unfeeling. And so the Indians pay the price.

"That's not entirely untrue," he said, "but it's not as exhaustive an explanation as it might seem."
Deep sense of anger
But taken together, data and interviews from reservations across the country show vast gaps in justice in Indian Country that have spawned a deeply felt rage over what is seen as the latest in the federal government's string of failures concerning American Indians.

"They've created a lawless land," Vernon Roanhorse, a Navajo tribal prosecutor, said of the federal justice system.
Among The Post's findings:
Between 1997 and 2006, federal prosecutors rejected nearly two-thirds of the reservation cases brought to them by FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs investigators, more than twice the rejection rate for all federally prosecuted crime. As prosecutors and investigators triage scarce resources or focus on new priorities such as terrorism, hundreds of serious cases of aggravated assault, rape and child sexual abuse occurring on reservations are sent instead through tribal misdemeanor courts.

Investigative resources are spread so thin that federal agents are forced to focus only on the highest-priority felonies while letting the investigation of some serious crime languish for years. Long delays in investigations without arrest leave child sexual assault victims vulnerable or suspects free to commit other crimes, including, in two cases The Post found, homicide.

With overwhelmed federal agents unable to complete thousands of investigations or supplement those done by poorly trained tribal police, many low-priority felonies never make it to federal prosecutors in the first place. Of the nearly 5,900 aggravated assaults reported on reservations in fiscal year 2006, only 558 were referred to federal prosecutors, who declined to prosecute 320 of them, according to data from the Interior Department and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University. Of more than 1,000 arson complaints reported last year on Indian reservations, 24 were referred to U.S. attorneys, who declined to prosecute 18 of them.

After decades of complaints, Congress has doubled the amount of money allocated to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for tribal police. But that increase - to $200 million this year - has been largely spent on patrol officers and chasing misdemeanor crimes. Federal investigators and prosecutors have also received sizable boosts in their budgets for work in Indian Country, but those increases have failed to produce a perceptible rise in the number of investigations or prosecutions from reservations.

While some tribal authorities are demanding stepped-up federal enforcement, the debate over sovereignty has complicated a unified cry for reform. Efforts in the 1990s to increase federal agents assigned to Indian Country or place more federal magistrate judges there were opposed by some tribes because they enhanced federal power. And any effort to give tribes more authority over felony crimes would have to be optional, Indian Country experts say, because some tribes - whose resources and commitment to law enforcement vary - wouldn't be willing to pay for it.

Low expectations
Of the many costs of those failures, the worst may be this: Many people on reservations no longer expect justice.
Anna Yellow Owl, a slight 39-year-old woman who lives on Montana's Blackfeet reservation, was trying to protect her 18-year-old son from an angry neighbor three years ago when the man struck her in the face, causing partial loss of use of one eye, surgery and permanent disfigurement.

"Every morning when I'd get up, every time I'd wash my hands, I'd look in the mirror and see my face.
"I know what I used to look like," Yellow Owl said. "I was so angry."
But while the attack took place in midafternoon in front of 14 witnesses, it took nearly two years - until early 2006 - for the FBI to complete its investigation and for the U.S. attorney to decide to prosecute the case. Having recently lost a daughter in an auto accident, Yellow Owl told the FBI agent who finally called that it was too late; she no longer wanted to pursue the matter.

"If they had only acted right away," she said.
"As a woman on a reservation, I've always been treated as a second-class citizen, and I've gotten used to it. I try not to let it get me upset. But justice doesn't happen here."

It's a despair that echoes through Indian Country.
On the Crow reservation in Montana, a 6-year-old girl allegedly was sexually assaulted by a family member, but according to the tribal prosecutor, the case is still under investigation by the FBI nearly three years later. Frustrated by the delay, the Crow prosecutor recently filed charges in tribal misdemeanor court, only to realize that the delay in the case put it beyond the tribe's statute of limitations.

On South Dakota's Cheyenne River reservation, three men broke into a house, stealing several thousand dollars' worth of property. When tribal detectives failed to investigate thoroughly, the victim spent weeks collecting evidence himself. Based on that investigation, the U.S. attorney filed an indictment, and all three pleaded guilty to burglary, the tribe's prosecutor said. It turned out that a key piece of evidence - a plate covered with the thieves' fingerprints and which tribal detectives swore they had sent to a forensics lab - was found months later in the tribe's evidence room.

Straddling old and new
Few places show the system's breakdown so readily as the collection of towns and remote villages tucked in the folds of the country's largest reservation - the land of the Dinè, the Children of God, as the Navajo call themselves.

Navajo society straddles both old and new: The tribe has one of Indian Country's most advanced judicial systems but one of its worst prison systems. Women adorned in sweeping traditional skirts swish through the doors at Wendy's, their faces deeply creased by the desert sun.

A small offshoot set away from the main reservation, the enclave of To'hajiilee (pronounced Toe-hajee-lay) just west of Albuquerque is in many ways typical. At the end of 5 miles of deteriorating road, it dissolves into clusters of villages organized along clan lines and fiercely private.

But the peaceful veneer is deceptive. Alcoholism and drug use are chronic, and from that stems crime that is at once brutal and intimate - often committed by family members, but certainly among people who know each other: Rape. Bloody beatings. The physical and sexual assault of children.

Trying to trace what happens once those crimes are reported is difficult, even for Vernon Roanhorse, To'hajiilee's veteran tribal prosecutor, whose frustration is evident as he flips through a tall stack of recent case files.

Pulling out a blue folder, Roanhorse scans the case of a 4-year-old girl who doctors at a tribal clinic suspect had been molested by her father. Following tribal protocol, they contacted authorities in March 2006, when the girl was brought to the hospital, but neither the Navajo police nor the FBI seems to have investigated the report, and the case remains in limbo, he said.

Grabbing another folder, this one red, Roanhorse scans the file of Ben Francisco. The 45-year-old Navajo man was driving a truck on a muddy road in January 2007 when he slid into another car. The two men inside pulled him from the cab, beating him with a bat so badly that he had to be flown by helicopter to an Albuquerque hospital, where a metal plate was put in his cheek. In seven months, the FBI had never interviewed Francisco, the victim said, and no arrests had been made, though both suspects had been identified.

The FBI office in Albuquerque declined to comment on any Indian Country cases in New Mexico, either closed or ongoing. Capt. Robert Platero, the Navajo head of criminal investigations for the area that includes To'hajiilee, said the FBI is notified of cases his investigators are working on through weekly reports, cooperating with his agents on those most likely to go before federal prosecutors.

But in many cases, the reality is less smooth - and highlights a badly fragmented system in which neither the tribe nor the FBI takes responsibility for ensuring that serious crime is fully investigated.

To begin with, Roanhorse said, the Navajo tribe's own investigator assigned to the community works out of his home 30 minutes away in Albuquerque. On one Tuesday this summer, his office mailbox was full, and the last time Roanhorse or any of his staff had seen him in the office was two months before.

Division of duties
In the case of child sexual assault - to take the example of one crime that seems to plague this reservation - tribal and federal investigators divide the cases by a rough rule of thumb: Federal investigators usually take the lead when the victim is 9 or younger, authorities say; tribal investigators take the lead with older victims. But federal prosecutors often decline those cases precisely because the victim has been interviewed too many times or by investigators who aren't specially trained to handle child sexual assault - as few Navajo investigators are.

One of the files on Roanhorse's desk is for Kim Platero's 12-year-old daughter, who reported to police in October 2006 that she had been sexually molested more than a dozen times by a neighbor beginning at the age of 11.

Over the past year, as the investigation languished, Platero (who is no relation to the Navajo investigator) said her daughter spent most of her time cooped up in a small bedroom, the suspect's house clearly visible through a curtained window. Her sleep habits changed, and her daughter's personality, once outgoing, became dark.

In such a tight-knit community, it's difficult to step forward. But Platero's experience as a sexual assault counselor convinced her it was important.

Platero's daughter told a tribal investigator that she was molested several times while babysitting, the neighbor escalating contact over a period of months. He once lay on top of her and masturbated, the child told police. Another time, he allegedly reached beneath her underpants to touch her vaginal area.

Roanhorse said the FBI apparently is aware of the case but in nearly a year had never contacted Platero, followed up on the tribal police's initial interview of her daughter or, as far as the mother can tell, talked to the suspect, a distant family relative.

The tribe's social services department recently lost the only caseworker who served To'hajiilee. The U.S. attorney's office in Albuquerque wouldn't confirm whether it knew of the case or the status of any federal investigation.

Even if Roanhorse wanted to take the case through misdemeanor tribal court, it hardly merits the effort. Navajo jails are so crowded that the community of To'hajiilee is allocated space for just one prisoner at a time, creating what amounts to a revolving jailhouse door.

To Platero, who occasionally calls authorities for an update, always without luck, it shows how a system with overlapping opportunities for intervention can also fail multiple times.

When two strangers came to the door in July, Platero said her daughter "was really excited because she thought (they) were the FBI," only to be disappointed by a pair of journalists.

Tired of waiting and worried about her daughter's deteriorating emotional state, Platero finally moved off the reservation in September, convinced it was the only way to protect her family.

"It's hard for me to explain to her why nothing is happening," Platero said.
"If this had happened in Albuquerque, something would have been done."
Staff researchers Barbara Hudson and Barry Osborne contributed to this report. Michael Riley: 303-954-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com