Inside this series
On March 1, two 11-year-old boys were found dead in a snowy field on the east side of Ronan. Frankie Nicolai was dead of alcohol poisoning, his blood-alcohol level at 0.5. His friend, Justin Benoist, died of a combination of alcohol consumption and hypothermia.

Justin Benoist

Frankie Nicolai

The boys’ deaths stunned the Flathead Reservation, a place that already had seen too much death. Justin’s 14-year-old brother, Tyler, had died just three months earlier, passed out drunk in an abandoned trailer that caught fire.

Reservation residents cried out for answers. What had gone wrong? What could be done to make sure it never happened again? As they wrestled with the question, another boy, 15-year-old Joey DuMontier, died after drinking too much.

As part of the search for those answers, the Missoulian sent a reporter and photographer to the reservation for two months. They found a ruinous and deadly story that has unfolded over generations, not just on the Flathead but across America’s Indian reservations. But they also found hope in a battered family trying to pull itself up from the depths of disaster.