Nick Estes, Melanie K. Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale and David Correia
176 pages, softcover: $17.95
PM Press, 2021.
In June 2017, a store owner in Omaha, Nebraska, called the cops on Zachary Bearheels, a young Rosebud Sioux man, who was acting erratically in the street. Bearheels, who had been traveling to visit his mother, ended up on the side of the highway after he was kicked off a Greyhound bus, without medication for his bipolar and schizoaffective disorders. After walking all day, he was met by four police officers. The scene quickly escalated; officers cuffed Bearheels and placed him in a police cruiser, then let him out after calling his mother, who had filed a missing person’s report. Bearheels fled and was chased by police, who beat and tased him repeatedly. When it was all over, Bearheels, hands still cuffed behind his back, lay dead on the ground. According to news sources, the coroner’s report stated he had died of “excited delirium syndrome,” a non-medical, junk-science euphemism police use when suspects die from tasers or chokeholds.