Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many

This shocking true crime saga from Gable (Blood Brother) draws attention to the widespread violence against Native American women by zeroing in on a single, gruesome case of it. In 2017, Savanna Lafontaine Greywind, a 22-year-old nurse’s aide and member of the North Dakota Spirit Lake Nation who was eight months pregnant with her first child, disappeared. Her family appealed to the police, who performed only a cursory search of Savanna’s apartment. The next day, Savanna’s corpse was recovered in plastic trash bags from a nearby river, and her baby daughter, alive and well, was found in her upstairs neighbor’s apartment. The neighbor, Brooke Crews, later pleaded guilty to murder, having forcibly removed Savanna’s baby from her body; Savanna died either from blood loss or from being strangled by the cord found around her neck. Gable nimbly links Savanna’s horrific fate and the lax police response to her disappearance to a “hidden epidemic” of similar situations plaguing Native communities across the U.S., punctuating the narrative with statistics and political testimony that bring home the scope and scale of the ongoing tragedy. This devastating account will be an eye-opener for many. Agent: David Halpern, Robbins Office. (Apr.)