Police officers, hardened by years of investigating life's most dismal incidents, found themselves on the edge of tears as they pieced together what had happened to the sixth- graders.
But the reservation, a place where alcohol-related death is a far too-frequent visitor, came to life with a powerful message: No more dead children.
Today's story, the fifth in an eight-day series, follows Norma as she struggles to survive, and revisits the November day 14-year-old Tyler Benoist died.
April 2 and Norma Fox is having trouble finding her feet. Her children are reason enough to live, but damn, it's hard to go on. She wakes to grief for her sons every day, for Tyler, for Justin. She never quite finds a way to grieve for herself, to come to terms with her broken-down life.
She's been trying to hold it all together since Justin was found dead, to assemble something that might look like a normal life to the outside world. She is deathly afraid that the tribe will take away 13-year-old Leah, her daughter, and Chris, her 16-year-old son, who has been undergoing chemical-dependency counseling in Kalispell.
It's occurred to her to take Leah and leave town, just run.
Today, the most important thing she'll do is make sure Leah gets to school and comes home alive.
That and don't drink.
When trouble comes, Norma usually defaults to alcohol. It soothes, it conceals, it takes the world away. Today, a day with a mottled, gauzy sky hanging over the Missions, the bottle beckons.
And why wouldn't it?
Justin's room is empty. Tyler didn't even have a room when he died; he spent his last days as an interloper, moving from house to house.
Leah is doing poorly at school, getting in fights and snapping at her mom, and some believe she's been drinking. She held up pretty well after Justin's death; somebody had to be strong. But lately she's gone to pieces.
Chris is in rehab, and his older brother, Phillip, ought to be. Phillip has been drinking and huffing for far too long. He wants to hang out at his mom's house, but he's got a handful of tribal warrants out for his arrest, so he moves constantly, a transient in his own homeland.
So it's another bad day, just like the one before. But on this one, somebody says something that hits Norma wrong. She doesn't remember exactly what, but it moves her to the darker side of her boundless sadness.
"I said, 'I think I'm gonna have a beer,' " she remembered later. "I hadn't had a drink in eight or nine months. I had one and it just went on from there."
It went on from booze to pills, at least three prescriptions from the "shit-pile of pills" she has at home. It didn't matter what they were for, because she wasn't taking them to fend off illness, or get over some medical condition. She took them to escape.
Norma bristles at the idea she meant to take her own life, although her friends and a handful of tribal officials seem to think that was her intent.
"I just took a few too many pills," she says, without saying why she took them in the first place. "I know it was wrong."
Her brother found her passed out, and when he couldn't make her throw up, he called the ambulance. Norma wound up at St. Luke Hospital in Ronan, where she recovered from her overdose and, briefly, refused a tribal entreaty to enter chemical dependency treatment.
For Norma, April 2 made a certain sort of dreadful sense, like a portended plot development playing itself out in a tragedy.
This family dies. It's what we do.
Exactly a year before Norma was hospitalized, she asked the tribes to take her children from her. Just for a little while. The family didn't have a house and everybody was on edge.
Because of privacy issues, the tribes can't comment on actions they took regarding Norma's family, but the children were not removed.
"They told me that the kids weren't being neglected, so they couldn't do nothing," Norma recalled.
The family had been living in a trailer on a leased tribal lot, but the lease wasn't renewed because of sanitation and health issues. Norma's brother had another trailer, and Norma herself had a lease lot to put it on, but that didn't begin to solve the family's problems.
Norma described the trailer as rough; Roxana Colman-Herak, who works as a mentor for the tribes through the housing and human resources departments, said it was "beyond substandard."
"The thought of children living in there was very disturbing," said Colman-Herak, who met Norma last June. "It was beyond my comprehension."
But as summer came on, the family lived in the trailer anyway. The buff-colored house sat in a forlorn field of long grass and weeds a couple of miles west of Ronan. It had no electricity or running water, and there was no way to keep food fresh. Anything cold stayed in a cooler, and almost all the family's meals were taken at the city park in Ronan.
"There were seven of us in that place," Norma said. "It was hard to be a very good family. We didn't have hardly anything. Sometimes, we could buy gas, but we just used that to get to the park. We did have food stamps, so we always had food at least."
According to paperwork Norma showed to the Missoulian, Tyler and Justin spent time in the Second Circle group house during that summer. Norma also failed to attend scheduled appointments for various tribal services.
Colman-Herak said the family's situation was bleak but not uncommon, a circumstance that befalls those who can't quite hold onto a helping hand.
"We have a lot of people who, because of circumstances, just can't quite seem to function within the system," she said. "I would say that we continue trying to extend services, beyond where most government services would go, but the family has to hold up their end of the agreement. Norma's family was having a difficult time through that period."
By fall, with the weather turning and the kids back in school, Colman-Herak advocated for the family to the Salish Kootenai Housing Authority, which provides more than 400 subsidized homes on the reservation.
Housing hadn't had much luck with Norma and her family in the past, but Colman-Herak was able to get a generator for the trailer.
"People were appalled to find out how they were living," Colman-Herak said.
As the fall wore on, the children stayed with friends or family, while Norma and a brother stuck it out in the frigid, dilapidated trailer. When Colman-Herak would drop by to visit, she found Norma with a smile on her face, "even though her lips were blue."
The smile faded in late November. Norma was having a hard time keeping track of the kids; Chris had just spent time at Second Circle, and Tyler had been in trouble for stealing. He denied the theft and his mother believed him, but law officers said the boy was in trouble.
Although officers didn't think Tyler and some of his friends were gang members, they were starting to look the part.
"They were wearing the colors and flashing the signs," Lake County sheriff's Detective Andy Cannon said. "Now, they may have been involved in some individual crimes, too, but they weren't a gang as the state defines it, where they get together for the purpose of committing crimes."
On the night of Nov. 27, 2003, a Thursday, Tyler was out with his friends in Pablo. For a while, a handful of kids gathered and drank at a home across the street from the Community Bank. A woman there, Priscilla Yellowowl, had bought some liquor, most likely vodka, detectives say, and the boys got into it pretty heavily.
The five teens then moved on to an abandoned trailer across the highway in what used to be called the Donna Jones trailer court. About 11:35 p.m., two of the boys went back to the house and arranged to get more alcohol from Yellowowl. This time they drank beer.
The party continued at the trailer over the next few hours, then two teens went home about 3:30 a.m. They were afraid of getting in trouble. That left Tyler and two other boys, who later told officers that Tyler was so drunk they had to drag him into a bedroom.
About 8 a.m., employees of the Community Bank saw smoke coming from the trailer. By the time fire crews arrived, the trailer was a burned-out shell. One person was seen running from the trailer and crossing the highway.
Inside the trailer, however, crews found a body burned beyond recognition: Tyler Benoist, with a blood-alcohol content of 0.23. His friend tried to drag him out of the trailer, but as the fire got worse, the boy cut and ran.
That boy, who authorities won't name, was nearly hit by a driver hauling horses on the highway - the man remembered the boy's face was streaked with ash. Within two days, deputies found the runner; he'd left a smudged handprint on his house when he went inside.
The fire apparently started with a cigarette.
Tyler's death didn't spark any protests across the reservation. There were no marches, no speeches about how reservation residents needed to rise up and vanquish alcohol before it kills another child.
"I know it hit me hard, but we didn't seem to sense as a community that we had this killer in our midst," Lake County Sheriff Bill Barron said recently. "I guess we should have. When you look at what happened later, we certainly should have."
Continued Friday.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or mmoore@missoulian.com
To read previous installments of the "Lost Boys of the Flathead" series, visit http://www.missoulian.com/specials/lostboys/
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