LoginFamily of missing St. Croix Tribe member says police brushed them off
The family of Kenneth Taylor says the city of Black River Falls and its police department brushed off their concerns when he was reported missing and in the years since his death. (Graphic by Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner, Photos courtesy of City of Black River Falls, U.S. Geological Survey, Joy Taylor)
On the night of Sept. 9, 2022, 20-year-old Kenneth Taylor called his aunt, Cheyenne Taylor, asking if she could drive three hours south from Hayward to Black River Falls to pick him up — something she says happened regularly.
Cheyenne’s boyfriend answered the phone and he said they could come down to get him in the morning from the motel where he was staying. Kenneth, a member of the St. Croix Chippewa tribe, had spent the night hanging out with his girlfriend, who told police they’d been drinking. That night, he posted on Facebook asking for help with his depression.
The couple left Hayward around 8 a.m. but, Cheyenne says, as they got on I-94 near Eau Claire, she got a “sick feeling” in her stomach because her nephew wasn’t answering his phone.
Cheyenne spent much of the day driving the unfamiliar streets of Black River Falls looking for him. Soon, other members of the family got involved in the search.
During the first day Kenneth was missing, multiple family members turned to the police for help. But Cheyenne and Kenneth’s stepmother, Joy Taylor, say they were told by an officer that “maybe he didn’t want to be found,” and that as an adult he had the right to choose to disappear.
As the family got more desperate, a police report notes that officers weren’t concerned.
“Kenneth was not entered as missing due to there being little to no evidence to support that he was in immediate danger to himself at that point in time,” the report, filed by Black River Falls Police Officer Charles Smart, states.
Eventually, the family turned to resources offered by the state’s missing and murdered indigenous people (MMIP) task force. With that help, Kenneth was finally officially reported missing and search and rescue teams were on the ground in Black River Falls by the morning of Sept. 11 — two days after his aunt last heard from him.
Around 4:30 p.m. on the same day the search began, Kenneth was found dead, hanging from a tree by his backpack strap in a small patch of woods in Black River Falls.
For family members and advocates for missing and murdered indigenous people, the official response in Kenneth’s case once he went missing and during the investigation into his death exemplify the ways in which a bureaucratic system dismisses the concerns of Native American families even as Wisconsin works to improve its response to these types of cases.
“Families are in a process of grief, taking care of their loved ones, in a state of traumatic shock, they are navigating through a system that is not being supportive of their needs,” says Rene Ann Goodrich, a Bad River tribal member who serves on the Wisconsin MMIW Task Force.
In the years since Kenneth’s death, his family has tried to process the grief and trauma while continuing to search for answers about what happened — without much help from local officials.
Several members of the family remain unconvinced that Kenneth’s death was a suicide, saying they believe there was “foul play” involved. Other family members believe the coroner wasn’t entirely thorough in her assessment of the scene where his body was found. They also have questions about the results of the autopsy, which was conducted by a lab in Minnesota. Aside from their questions about the conclusions made in Kenneth’s case, family members told the Wisconsin Examiner they feel as if they’ve been “brushed off” by city officials.
Contemporaneous notes taken by MMIP advocates and complaints filed by family members alleging their rights as victims have been violated highlight the family’s numerous unsuccessful attempts to speak with Black River Falls officials. The state Department of Justice dismissed the family’s complaints against the city because Kenneth’s death was ruled a suicide and therefore his relatives do not qualify as crime victims.
“Throughout the death of my son, Black River Falls Police Department has shown little regard for what happened to my son based on the investigation and unwillingness to speak with the family,” Kenneth Taylor Sr. wrote in a 2023 letter to the Wisconsin Crime Victims’ Rights Board. “[We] have tried constantly to get answers and meetings. There are many discrepancies in the information the family has received from involved agencies.”
According to several members of the Taylor family, they were told by multiple Black River Falls law enforcement and city officials that they’d been advised by the city attorney not to speak with them.
“No one would ever talk to us,” Joy Taylor says. “They would cancel the appointments. I even went as far as calling the mayor, and he stated that no one was going to talk to me about this case, that they have been advised not to talk to anyone. Why, on a suicide case, would you not talk to someone if it was so cut and dried? Why wouldn’t you talk to me?”
Black River Falls officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
Black River Falls settles with Wisconsin Examiner in open records lawsuit
In the process of reporting this story, the Wisconsin Examiner filed an open records request with the city of Black River Falls seeking the email communications of several city government and police department officials about the case and the Taylor family.
The city said it would cost $4,400, plus $225 per hour spent reviewing the city attorney’s emails, to complete the request, stating that the cost was because the city uses a third party company, Tech Pros, to store its email archives.
The city also told the Examiner it has no contract, written agreement or memorandum of understanding with Tech Pros for outsourcing storage of the archive. In emails obtained by the Examiner between Tech Pros and city staff, the company told officials that in order to complete the search for emails, the company would need to purchase 10 “Microsoft Purview E-Discovery Licenses” at $144 apiece and it would spend 20 hours on the request, billed at $150/hr.
After multiple amendments narrowing the initial request in attempts to bring down the cost, the quoted price to obtain the records was $1,200 plus $450 for searching the city attorney’s emails.
The Examiner filed a lawsuit against the city, arguing that state law only allows governments to charge for the direct costs of searching for records and passing along the cost to have an outside party conduct that search is not “direct.”
In October, the city provided the requested records and in December, the Examiner reached a settlement with the city in which the city agreed to move its email storage to a single cloud-based server which wouldn’t incur the costs associated with outsourcing a third-party to complete the search.
Tom Kamenick, the attorney for the Examiner, says the settlement will prevent anyone seeking records from Black River Falls in the future from being charged unnecessarily high fees.
“This case was not just about getting the records,” Kamenick says. “It was also about making sure that future requesters wouldn’t be overcharged. We would not agree to settle the case until Black River Falls revamped its record storage procedures. We’re very pleased that the city agreed to do that, and they now store their records centrally, on the cloud, so that they can more easily be searched by Black River Falls’ own people instead of an external vendor. Charging exorbitant fees can be just as effective at deterring requests as outright denials. Government records are our records, we can’t tolerate these kinds of obstacles.”
Goodrich, who still has questions about her own daughter’s death, says it’s difficult for families when their relative’s cause of death is identified as a suicide or overdose because from law enforcement’s perspective, that ends the case. Yet families still have questions about what led up to their loved one’s death.
“Families need to feel that they are included and at that table in the investigative process, and right now they are not feeling that support,” Goodrich says. “It doesn’t help assure families that justice will be served when they’re told ‘Well, we can’t talk to you anymore, we can’t share any more information with you, you’re going to have to talk to the county attorney.’ That is closing conversations and the door to families as they are sharing their valid concerns and information. Families really don’t need that type of grief as they’re trying to navigate the system and make sense of what happened. This contributes to and creates more trauma.”
Goodrich adds that what will help state and local governments in Wisconsin better handle MMIP cases is the creation of a new statewide office to help train local law enforcement and coordinate investigations.
Kristen Welch, a member of Wisconsin’s Task Force for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women who worked with the Taylor family, says the government response to Kenneth’s case fits a pattern.
“It’s a patterned response. So what they experienced, like the delay in filing the initial report, is very common,” Welch says, adding that some of that treatment stems from bias against Native Americans but also from a lack of training and standardized practices across law enforcement agencies. “[This] sort of really rude treatment, those are all common responses for family members that are just trying to get case information. I don’t know why they feel that that’s OK, and they could really solve a lot of their own problems if they just sat down with this family, answered questions and shared the case information with them. I think a lot of the frustration would have been put to ease, but it again, is a training and protocol issue within their departments.”
Welch says that in hearings on MMIP issues that have been held across the state and country, this was a common theme.
“That was like the common pattern — treatment of response — and at the federal level too,” she says. “So that was from Alaska all the way to the Midwest. We held hearings, and you heard the same story from our family members, the mistreatment and just lack of compassion and respect for families who are going through an incredible trauma and carry that, and just want someone to show them a little compassion.”
In the years since Kenneth’s death, the family had used the tree where he was found as a makeshift memorial, bringing food, flowers and tobacco to the site. But this year, the whole area was clear cut, adding to the family’s distress.
“It was like where his soul left his body pretty much,” Kenneth’s aunt, Cheyenne, says. “And then they went and cut it down. Why?”
But Cheyenne says she’s trying to keep moving forward for her own children, while trying to remember how cheerful and outgoing Kenneth was and how much he loved his kids — one of whom never got to meet him.
“It took me this long to finally accept that he’s gone and he’s not coming back,” she says. “He was always there for me, just like I was for him. And there was nothing in this world I would never do for him. And he knew it.”
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