Norma Fox, Justin's mother, had lost another son, Tyler, just three months before, and the death of a second boy was almost more than she could handle. Fox nearly died in early April after drinking and taking too many pills but, unlike her boys, she was found in time to be saved.
In today's story, the sixth in an eight-day series, people have started to think about the future while grieving the past. April has passed and no more children have died. Then comes the first day of May and a 15-year-old boy is found dead in a secluded house between Pablo and Ronan.
For the third time in five months, Lake County sheriff's deputies and Confederated Salish and Kootenai police officers begin sifting through another tragedy.
Eight weeks passed after the deaths of the 11-year-old boys, Frankie Nicolai and Justin Benoist, and not one child drank himself to death. That ought not be cause for celebration, but people on the Flathead Reservation cautiously breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Then came Saturday, May 1. Saturdays find Lake County sheriff's Detective Andy Cannon in the office. On this Saturday, he pulled his regular shift in the office, then headed home about 6:30 p.m.
Cannon, a big man who moves with a limp from an old on-the-job injury, had dinner with his wife of 36 years, and watched a little television. About 9:30 p.m., as the Cannons were getting ready for bed, the phone rang.
Lake County dispatch told Cannon that a man had returned to a Ronan-area home where he was house-sitting to find another young man not breathing. Cannon said goodnight to his wife and piled back into his black Yukon SUV.
The house was on North Crow Road, which cuts east off old Highway 93 between Pablo and Ronan. The road bisects farmland that rises slowly to the towering Mission Mountains; there's the occasional trailer house along the road, but many of the houses are well kept and solidly middle class.
Cannon turned into the driveway at 2202 North Crow, a gray-green ranch house with a deck that overlooks a postage-stamp pond. Two sheriff's deputies were already there - Deputy Dan Duryee, who would work the case as a deputy coroner, and Sgt. Dave Alexander.
An ambulance crew already had come and gone, taking away a teenage boy with no vital signs.
Two other men were also there - 21-year-old Richard Lopez, whose mother lived at the home with her husband, and Jeremy Cajune, a friend of Lopez's. Cannon was briefed by his colleagues and briefly talked with Lopez and Cajune.
The officers found some beer cans scattered around the house, and a fifth of Southern Comfort whiskey on a coffee table next to a large recliner. For a detective from Lake County, the scene looked crushingly familiar - young people and booze.
The deputies collected some empty cans of Bud Ice and took the Southern Comfort bottle into evidence, carefully preserving it for the possibility of both fingerprints and DNA. They also took brief statements from Cajune and Lopez.
The stories were strikingly similar - Lopez said he'd awakened that morning to find a teenager he didn't know passed out in the recliner. He thought the boy might be a friend of his younger sister, who lived at the house. Lopez said he and Cajune headed off on a fishing trip later in the morning and returned to find the boy sprawled on the floor next to the chair. They tried to rouse him, but he was motionless. They called the cops.
Cajune's story differed a bit on the timeline, but hewed closely to Lopez's. The officers told the men they'd need to speak to them more extensively in the next few days, then headed for St. Luke Hospital in Ronan, where the ambulance had taken the still unknown boy.
Both the ambulance crew and hospital workers tried to revive the boy, but he was gone before they ever had a chance.
He had no identification. He wore baggy, black denim jeans, a red pullover shirt and old-timey black Converse All-Stars. Standard issue, Cannon thought, except for the shoes; boys usually wore the latest in basketball sneakers.
The boy had a trucker's wallet, a big leather billfold with a silver chain. It had no ID inside, but Cannon did find three $1 bills.
"You never know what might turn a case."
"Basically, at that point, you are looking for red flags," Cannon said. "Obviously, we had some concerns, with the liquor involved."
Blaring bright and red was this: the boy's blood-alcohol content was 0.394. A teenager might survive that amount of alcohol, but it's just as likely to be fatal.
Tribal Officer Bill Dupuis arrived to help identify the boy. He thought the teen looked like a DuMontier, a well-known and prominent family on the reservation.
Dupuis came up with a tribal ID card that seemed to match, but the picture was maybe five years old. Still, the picture looked like Joey DuMontier, a 15-year-old student at the Two Eagle River School in Pablo. The match became certain when the officers compared their information with some medical records the hospital had.
The boy's mother, Bernadette, wasn't home in Ronan, but his father, Bud, was home in Dixon and came up to the hospital to identify his son. He also helped the officers track down Bernadette in Hot Springs, where she was visiting for the weekend.
By 2:30 a.m., Joey DuMontier was on his way to the State Crime Lab in Missoula. His parents wandered into the night, alone with their tragedy.
Andy Cannon headed home, again.
This time, though, instead of dinner with his wife, he sat alone at the kitchen table with a glass of water.
"With cases like this, I just can't let it go for a while," he said. "I sat there and thought over what we had, and I made some notes in my head about all the things I would need to do."
For the third time in five months, a Lake County detective went to bed with the toxic alloy of teens, alcohol and death settling into his mind.
One thing that has come out of this wave of child deaths is a renewed commitment to arrest and prosecute adults who buy alcohol for children. Cannon had that on his mind as he drove to work Sunday morning.
"I knew at worst I had a negligent homicide on my hands and at best an endangerment case," he recalled.
He was bothered by the stories Lopez and Cajune told, bothered that someone else had made it possible for a kid to drink himself to death.
Richard Lopez came in for a second interview on Sunday. Lake County Sheriff Bill Barron was in the office that day, and he helped Cannon with the Lopez interview.
Again, Lopez maintained that Joey was passed out when he and Cajune headed for Dixon on Saturday morning. Lopez did acknowledge that he'd seen Joey on Friday night, and that he knew the boy was his sister's boyfriend.
Joey's mom had dropped him off at the house on Friday afternoon, knowing that he was spending the night at the house. Cannon said she believed there were responsible adults at the home, although the Calderons, who own the home, had left town the day before and left the 21-year-old Lopez in charge of the house.
Lopez also said he'd bought beer and pizza on Friday night, but claimed he drank the beer. He said he didn't know where the whiskey came from on Saturday, and that it hadn't been there when he and Cajune left on the fishing expedition.
Cajune stuck to his story, as well, and Sunday yielded little new information. Dr. Gary Dale, the state medical examiner, called to say that he'd found no external injuries on Joey, and that at least initially, it appeared the boy died from drinking too much.
On Monday, Cannon learned that a third man had been involved in the fishing trip. That man, Sterling Barnaby, was present when the men left the house to go fishing, and present when Lopez called the police on Saturday night.
Barnaby left before the cops came because he was on probation and worried he might somehow get in trouble for his connection to the incident. When Barnaby finally talked to the detectives, he told a story quite different than the one told by Lopez and Cajune.
Cannon also traveled with Lopez to the Flathead River site where the men fished, and Cannon found evidence enough to make him believe at least that part of Lopez's story.
A new case involving two rapes brought the investigation to a halt for a few days midweek, but by Thursday the case was again Cannon's top priority.
Using something Cajune had said, Detective Dan Yonkin went to the Wal-Mart in Polson and reviewed hours of videotape and cash register tape. Cajune said he and his girlfriend had bought some fishing equipment before the trip. Like Lopez, though, he maintained that the trip began in the morning.
Yonkin eventually found a tape that showed Cajune and Sterling Barnaby at the store. They checked out at 4:41 p.m.
The cops then checked the drive time from the Wal-Mart to North Crow Road. Even speeding, they couldn't get there faster than 22 minutes.
"That meant that they couldn't possibly have left on this fishing trip before 5 p.m.," Cannon said. "That changed everything."
Barnaby's statement confirmed that Cajune and Lopez were lying about the timing of the trip. He told Cannon that Joey was passed out about 5 p.m., when he and Cajune stopped by to pick up Lopez. Even more damning, Barnaby said the Southern Comfort bottle was on the table next to Joey, with about an inch left in the bottom.
"That's exactly how we found it," Cannon said. "We had major red flags then."
Detectives also had the department's reserves going to every liquor dealer in the county from Polson south.
"What they found was that there is one distributor from Missoula that provides all the hard liquor sold up here," Cannon said. "They had delivered 13 bottles of Southern Comfort to the Ronan Liquor Store on Friday.
All but one of those bottles was sold to a local bar. The 13th was sold to someone on Saturday afternoon at 3:20. The liquor store personnel recognized as familiar a picture of Lopez, but couldn't be sure he'd bought the bottle.
Even so, Cannon felt he had enough to arrest Lopez. He was picked up at his girlfriend's house in Pablo and eventually gave another statement to detectives.
"This time he came clean and told us the name of the person who bought it," Cannon said. "He told us how the whole thing went down."
Lopez said that DuMontier arrived on Friday - his mom dropped him off and left as Joey's girlfriend waved from a window. The girl left the house about 11 a.m. Saturday to baby-sit for her older sister, leaving Joey and Lopez at the house. Lopez had planned the fishing trip, so he wanted to drop Joey back at his family home in Ronan before heading out.
However, Bernadette had locked the house when she went to Hot Springs, and Joey couldn't get in. So he talked Lopez into letting him come back to North Crow.
"Joey then asked Lopez if he could come up with some whiskey," Cannon said.
Lopez's ID, from an Arizona reservation, had some problems, so he stopped at the house of a friend, who agreed to come to the liquor store and buy the whiskey. Joey gave the man a $20 bill he'd earned from mowing lawns. With it, he got the store's 13th bottle of Southern Comfort and $3.65 in change.
Those three dollar bills were the ones the cops found in his wallet at the hospital.
The man Lopez recruited to buy the whiskey is out of the state, but Cannon said there's a warrant out for his arrest for violating a probationary sentence on a previous charge.
"We'll pick him up on that, and then we'll look at our options on the alcohol thing," said Cannon, who declined to name the suspect.
In the meantime, Lopez remains charged with criminal endangerment.
Joey DuMontier was buried on Thursday, May 6. The man who got him the liquor that killed him was on the move that day, somewhere in Kansas.
--Continued Saturday.
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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