Marline Fulwider is no stranger to grief. As a young woman, she lost her 23-year-old brother; years later, her 25-year-old son-in-law, whom she had previously taken in as a foster child, was killed.
But nothing could have prepared Fulwider for the morning of 16 April, when another teen she had taken in was found beaten to death. Ruby Sky Montelongo was just 16 years old.
“They took everything,” Fulwider said. “Her graduation is next year. Her birthday is in about a month. She would have been 17.”
Fulwider, a descendent of the Yuki tribe, lives in Covelo, an isolated town in northern California with a population of less than 2,000. It’s also home to the Round Valley Reservation; about a third of the residents of Covelo and its surroundings identify as Indigenous American. And in recent years the community has been rocked by violence.
Just weeks before Montelongo’s body was found, 20-year-old Nicholas Whipple was brutally killed. While locals were shocked by the back-to-back murders, they also described the slayings as the most recent chapters of a much longer narrative of violence against young Indigenous people in the area – often by other young Indigenous people – that includes the killing of 34-year-old Kenneth Whipple, Nicholas Whipple’s cousin, in 2021; the slaying of 21-year-old Rosalena Belle Rodriguez in 2014; and the 2018 kidnapping of 23-year-old Khadija Rose Britton, a relative of Montelongo, who is still missing.
“The more I talk to people, the more I realize, it’s not a few people,” said Eileen Russell, a journalist and farmer who moved to Covelo seven years ago. “Every Round Valley Indian Tribal member has been directly impacted by violence more than once in their family.”
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On a corner just outside downtown Covelo, a well-worn tribute to Britton is decorated with lanterns, flowers, photos and an ad for a cash reward for information about her kidnapping. A memorial to Rodriguez – as well as the site where Whipple’s body was found in March – are visible from the same intersection. Britton’s aunt, Laura Betts, who is also a relative of both Montelongo and Whipple describes her niece as “the face of a lot of girls” of Indigenous American descent who are subject to violence.
Betts is referring to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people in the US, particularly women and girls. Experts and activists attribute the crisis to the legacies of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, which have contributed to high rates of intergenerational poverty, untreated mental illness and substance use disorders, and a lack of trust between Tribal communities and outside law enforcement.
These dynamics have also shaped life on the Round Valley Indian Reservation, which is governed by a confederation of seven Indigenous American tribes. One, the Yuki tribe, has ancestral claim to the land. In 1863, at least six others – the Wailacki, Nomlacki, Littlelake, Pit River, Concow, and Pomo tribes – were forcibly resettled in the valley, where they were concentrated on the reservation while white settlers laid claim to most of the surrounding farmland.
The reverberations of that historical displacement are still felt today. “Everybody’s living out these traumas that they didn’t bring upon themselves and that are rooted in colonization,” said Russell.
Betts, a member of Round Valley Indian Tribes, explains that residents have struggled to make ends meet for decades. She points to the closing of the Louisiana-Pacific lumber mill in 1990, which had been a major employer in the region, as a turning point. More than a third of the town’s residents lived under the poverty line in 2021, making its poverty rate more than three times that of the state of California.
Some of these dynamics played out in Montelongo’s own life. Fulwider sketches a picture of a spirited teen who was introspective, fiercely loyal and wickedly funny. Once, on a whim, Montelongo painted her entire bedroom in a single day. Another time, she befriended a suit-wearing businessman whom she sat next to on an hour-long flight.
But behind that sense of humor was a girl who had been forced to grow up too fast. Her mother was in prison when she gave birth to Montelongo. In her teens, Montelongo began to struggle with substance use and anger issues and was known among classmates to have a mean punch. “It’s a two-edged sword,” said Fulwider. “It’s a compliment and it’s devastating, because I know where it comes from. It comes from having to survive and fight for everything you’ve ever had from the day you were born.”
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In 1995, a long standing rivalry between two clans led to the deaths of two tribal members – including Betts’ father, Reginald Eugene Britton – and a Mendocino county sheriff’s deputy. That event, residents say, laid the foundation for the dynamics that have contributed to much of the violence in the years since. “It caused a big rift that was already there between the police department and our Covelo residents, specifically tribal members,” said Fulwider.
According to tribal leaders, crimes against Indigenous people in Covelo get comparatively less attention – and compassion – from authorities. “This valley has never had a trust built with the sheriff’s office,” said Michelle Downy, a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes Tribal Council. “When a Native person is the victim, it isn’t the same response,” she said. She says law enforcement avoids claiming responsibility for crimes committed on tribal land, or in which only tribal members are involved, despite the tribal community recently pushing for more assistance from the sheriff’s office.
Downy says that violence against Indigenous people has been occurring “for decades” without adequate attention from law enforcement. In 2016, only 116 of 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls were logged in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Today, it is estimated that 4,200 cases remain unsolved nationwide.
The Mendocino county sheriff’s Office has jurisdiction over crimes committed on tribal lands in the county, including those that exclusively involve Indigenous Americans. But it’s strapped for resources. With at most six deputies on duty at one time, the department struggles to cover the vast county, which encompasses nearly 4,000 sq miles of rugged terrain. “It’s not enough,” said Sheriff Matt Kendall, who grew up just outside of Covelo. “I feel guilty, because it is the people who raised me.”
Others think the neglect may be willful. Lewis Whipple, a member of the tribal council and a relative of the late Nicholas Whipple, said he has heard law enforcement “call Native-on-Native crimes a two-fer”, meaning one tribal member is killed and another is sent to prison.
Kendall denies any accusations of racism on the part of the sheriff’s department.
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Arrests have been made in connection to the most recent murders – a 15-year-old girl from Covelo was taken into custody shortly after Montelongo’s death, and Lee Anthony Joaquin, a 33-year-old Covelo resident, was arrested for Whipple’s murder after a manhunt that lasted nearly a month.
Still, most residents claim additional perpetrators were involved in both killings, citing the extensive injuries sustained by each victim and that both incidents occurred near groups of young people who were partying and drinking alcohol. They believe that the sheriff’s office, content with a single arrest in each case, is failing to conduct exhaustive investigations.
“All you can do is be numb to it, especially how it happened,” said Mike Gorman, superintendent of the Round Valley unified school district, of the young age of the alleged perpetrator in Montelongo’s killing. “It’s teenagers doing it to other teenagers.”
Whipple is said to have been found steps away from Joaquin’s house, where people had gathered to continue partying after the bars had closed. His body was so disfigured from injuries he sustained that night, that the sheriff’s office didn’t know the 20-year-old had been shot until after the autopsy had been performed.
But witnesses are hard to come by, so the precise circumstances of the killings, as well as the motives of the alleged perpetrators, are hard to pin down. In a town as small as Covelo and in a community that has a fraught relationship with police, residents are often resistant to cooperating with law enforcement.
Perhaps more significant is the fact that among members of the Round Valley Reservation, family ties are as binding as they are extensive. When a crime is committed, explains Downy, the problem isn’t only that witnesses might be acquaintances with the guilty party, but that they might be related to them. “It’s one family against another,” said Downy.
In other cases, like those of Fulwider’s brother and son-in-law, families become torn apart because they are tied to both the killer and the killed. She describes it as a tragedy that is rooted in familial love and loyalty.
“The bigger portion of why nobody speaks up is because they love these people. These people who are doing these things to each other are our brothers, our sisters, our cousins, our daughters, our kids. And you don’t want to hold them accountable. Therefore you don’t say anything,” Fulwider said.
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Soon after Whipple and Montelongo’s murders, the Round Valley Tribal authorities declared a state of emergency, enacting a curfew that barred youth from being out past 10 pm. Teams of residents were charged with monitoring the streets, keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior, and offering safe rides home.
But some residents see the measures as temporary fixes for problems that require structural solutions. In Covelo, parents and community leaders fear that violence is becoming normalized for the town’s youth. “That’s not natural, to have to go to that many funerals in a year,” said Fulwider.
Alarmed by the seeming connection between violence and underage drinking, some community members have pushed for initiatives that would restrict access to alcohol, like stopping its sale on tribal lands or putting a glass case around the bottles at the local grocery store.
For Betts, those precautions – neither of which has been undertaken yet – would save young lives, but the community also needs access to better mental health and family support services. Betts, who is employed by the local housing department, has been behind efforts to expand internship opportunities for local youth. “They want to work,” she said, “but there is no opportunity.”
Gorman says schools also have a responsibility to teach non-violence to their students. Gorman recounted a second grader who was found holding scissors with which they planned to hurt themselves. “She wanted to harm herself to go visit Ruby,” he said. “Kids at a small age are being affected by it.”
At Round Valley high school, emotions were “still very raw” as students and faculty prepared for graduation in early June – an event where, for the first time, sheriff’s deputies were in attendance. “It’s been very traumatic,” said Kelda Britton, the school’s principal.
Russell, who has two small children, expresses concern about keeping her family in Covelo. “I think raising kids in a really small community and knowing that young people were killed in such violent ways, makes it really scary to think about raising my kids here,” she said.
Fulwider, meanwhile, says she reminds her children that they’re “not immortal”, and thinks of how far Montelongo had worked to overcome the challenges that life had dealt her.
“Ruby wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t innocent,” said Fulwider. “But she deserved to come home that night.”
