From sexual assault response to missing person protocols: How systems failed Emily Pike

Yahoo

16-05-2025

A memorial honoring San Carlos Apache teen Emily Pike can be seen at the intersection of Mesa Drive and McKellips Road in Mesa, the location where she was last seen in January. Photo by Shondiin Silversmith | Arizona Mirror
Emily Pike's mother found out that her 14-year-old daughter had been murdered when she saw photos of garbage bags containing human remains posted on social media.
Police didn't call Stephanie Dosela; she called them after viewing the photos that had been leaked from the Gila County Sheriff's Department. Emily, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, had been missing for 18 days after running away from a group home in Mesa.
'A mother should not find out on social media about her daughter's dismembered body,' Dosela said in a written statement to Arizona state legislators on May 14.
The unthinkable way that Dosela said she found out about her daughter's murder is emblematic of the poor communication and failures of the individual pieces of the tribal, county and state systems — first, to keep Emily safe, and then to find her after she went missing.
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During a Joint Legislative Oversight Committee hearing on May 14, Arizona lawmakers heard from law enforcement officials, leaders of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, Emily's family and the Arizona Department of Child Safety about the failures of the system and ways to prevent what happened to Emily from happening again. Police, legislators and Emily's family members alike could be seen quietly sobbing at various points during the nearly three-hour-long hearing.
Emily went missing from the Mesa group home on Jan. 27. Her remains were found near Globe, just outside of the reservation where her family lives, on Feb. 14.
But the systemic deficiencies that led her to disable the alarm on her bedroom window and to run away from the Mesa group home date back years.
In 2023, a 911 call was made from a remote area of the San Carlos reservation near Emily's home, to report that she had been sexually assaulted. But instead of a San Carlos Apache police officer trained in dealing with sexual assaults, the tribe's fish and game department responded.
San Carlos Apache Police Chief Elliot Sneezy couldn't tell legislators specifically why fish and game responded instead of one of his officers, but said that fish and game are the experts in finding people in extremely rural areas of the reservation and that police were 'busy' that day.
At that time, Sneezy said, there were only 22 police officers on staff to cover the entire 1.8 million acre reservation.
The family member who Emily accused of assaulting her was arrested, but was soon released without being charged. Emily, meanwhile, was taken into the custody of San Carlos Apache social services for her own safety and sent to the Mesa group home.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs previously told the Arizona Republic that it dropped the sexual assault case due to insufficient evidence, but other agencies disputed that claim.
'My niece was a victim, but yet she was punished and removed from her home,' Emily's uncle, Allred Pike Jr., told legislators. 'That's how justice failed her. The person that she accused of hurting her got to go home. How is that justice? It's just backwards.'
Terry Ross, director of tribal social services, told the committee that it's often difficult to prosecute such cases when family members decide to protect the accused.
'What I experience with our tribe is that all the families will support the perpetrator, and we can't do anything but to remove the child (for their safety),' Ross said.
After tribal social services removed Emily from her home and sent her to Mesa, more than 100 miles away, she attempted suicide and ran away multiple times.
She was placed in a residential mental health treatment facility for more than a year before being released back to the Mesa group home.
In a statement read by family spokesperson Gail Pechuli, Dosela said that Emily experienced culture shock when she was taken from her rural home near the tiny town of Peridot and placed in Mesa, a city of more than 500,000 people in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
'My Emily was far from home, she was alone and homesick,' Dosela said, adding that she told her grandmother that she missed home-cooked traditional foods like acorn soup and tortillas.
Emily lived on the reservation with her mother and other family members. Her father is currently in prison for an arson-related conviction. In her statement, Dosela said that she suffers from addiction issues and lives in poverty, but said she believed Emily was safe in the group home where she was sent.
Sen. Carine Werner, co-chair of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on the Department of Child Safety, said that the group home was not given background information on why Emily was there, something that she said was vital to her caregivers' understanding of her behavior.
While Emily was living in a facility that is licensed by DCS when she went missing, she was not in the department's custody — she was in the custody of the tribe, which contracts with the group home for placements. The San Carlos tribe has only one tiny group home on the reservation and must place children in other locations when it's full.
Because Emily was in the custody of the tribe — a sovereign nation — certain reporting requirements outlined in Arizona law when a child in DCS custody goes missing didn't apply to her.
Kathryn Ptak, director of the Arizona Department of Child Safety, explained that an amended state law signed last year in response to a surge in runaways from DCS group homes didn't pertain to Emily because she wasn't in the DCS system.
The law requires family, friends and the school of the missing child to be contacted within 24 hours of their disappearance to obtain any information about where they might be. It also stipulates that the child's family and tribe must be contacted by phone and in writing to inform them that the child is missing.
Therein lies one of the major issues identified by numerous people who spoke to the committee: Tribal sovereignty means that the state generally doesn't have the power to pass laws that control tribes.
DCS has memorandums of understanding with four of Arizona's tribes, but not currently with San Carlos Apache.
'When a child is living on tribal land and either eligible for enrollment or enrolled in a tribe, the tribe has exclusive jurisdiction,' Ptak said. 'The state can't come in and tell them what to do with their children.'
She added that, because Emily was never in DCS custody, the department didn't have access to information necessary to contact her family and friends.
Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, a Democrat from Coal Mine Mesa and a member of the Navajo Nation, argued that, no matter their race or tribal affiliation, all missing children should be treated the same.
'Emily Pike was born in the state of Arizona, resided in Arizona all of her life, regardless of what tribe she's a member of,' Hatathlie said.
The senator added that DCS should not just sit by and refuse to help because of jurisdictional issues.
The group home reported Emily missing to police on Jan. 27, and the tribe was informed the next day. But her tribal case worker did not immediately consider her disappearance an emergency, San Carlos Attorney General Alex Ritchie explained, since she had run away and returned several times before.
San Carlos Apache Social Services didn't inform Emily's family that she was missing until she'd been gone for a week.
After Emily's body was found, the San Carlos Apache tribe called for an investigation into group home licensing, and also agreed to investigate how her sexual assault report was handled.
Several of the speakers on May 14, including Ritchie, recommended that every child who goes missing from a group home be immediately considered missing instead of labeled as a 'runaway.'
'Our recommendation is that every child, the moment they're not accounted for, they are missing,' Ritchie said. 'That way the level of scrutiny is heightened. Of course, there will be folks who don't agree with that, but these are children. They are the most defenseless and the most in need of folks looking out for them.'
But because teens will regularly run away from group homes for the weekend, only to show back up the following Monday, Ptak recommended that reporting requirements be loosened so that group homes wouldn't be required to report a child missing if they're told they can't go somewhere and they leave anyway, especially if caretakers know where they're headed.
Nearly all of the speakers agreed that better communication between all the entities involved was vital to any attempts to prevent another tragedy like Emily's death from happening in the future.
Suggestions included better sharing of background information about children in their custody between tribal social services and group homes, that group homes have pertinent information ready to provide to police when they report a child missing and that the tribes enter into agreements with DCS for information sharing about children in the group homes that they license.
Emily's mother asked that the Gila County Sheriff's Office look into how it handles the sharing of sensitive information on social media, and that the San Carlos Apache Tribe open a larger group home, with better mental health services, on the reservation.
Sneezy told legislators that group homes that house Native children should be better informed about their cultures, and that law enforcement entities should work on better communication, especially since local law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction on tribal land.
'What I've heard today is the failure of agencies, our departments, our jurisdictional issues, federal, state, tribal,' Allred Pike said. 'We need to stop working in silos. We need to start sharing information. We need to start working together so this won't happen again.'
The committee plans to host multiple stakeholder meetings in the coming months to figure out workable solutions, with plans to recommend changes in law during the next legislative session in 2026.
'This jurisdictional thing sounds easy but I know it's not, but I commit, and I'm sure the whole legislature commits to finding solutions to make sure that this never happens again,' said Sen. Hildy Angius, R-Bullhead City.
The Gila County Sheriff's Office, along with the San Carlos Apache Tribal Police Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI are collaborating in the ongoing investigation into Emily's murder.
Earlier this week, Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a new law that would create a Turquoise Alert, a new kind of alert that can be issued by the Department of Public Safety when a Native person goes missing. The legislation was introduced before Emily went missing but was renamed 'Emily's Law' after her body was found.
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