Leanne Marie Hausberg, a 14-year-old biracial Native American girl, disappeared from Brooklyn on March 18, 1999. Her caretaker, Alan Artale, was the one who reported her missing to the New York City police department. Law enforcement first classified her as a “runaway,” not a missing person. This misclassification has shone a light on the alarming pattern of how police respond in cases where the victim is Indigenous. More than twenty years have gone by, and yet Leanne is still missing. Her case sheds light on a larger epidemic that threatens the lives of Native Americans.
Despite her death, Leanne’s family felt disrespected and dismissed by the NYPD’s handling of Leanne’s disappearance. An officer supposedly told Artale, “She’ll be here in a day or two.” The officer did not agree to file a report until the following day. This response is sadly indicative of the systemic neglect often faced by the families of missing Native Americans. According to Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, many families take investigative roles themselves due to law enforcement inaction.
Unfortunately, the link to Leanne’s case did not go into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) until 2010. This delay made the search for her much more difficult. Today, she is still one of over 6000 missing Indigenous peoples. A recent study revealed stark statistics: Native women are 135% more likely to remain unidentified after death than individuals from other racial groups. Additionally, most of these unidentified murdered Indigenous women are found in urban areas—as is especially the case in New York state.
Sutton King, co-founder of the Urban Indigenous Collective, commented on the common omission of Indigenous peoples in urban environments. He stated, “Most people you ask in New York City don’t even know that there is a federally recognized tribe on Long Island.” This failure to recognize all their identities fuels the ongoing crisis of violence against missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP), which has been ignored.
The search for Leanne reveals a disturbing pattern across the country. It’s indicative of how urban cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people more broadly get ignored and written off. Activists point out that girls and women are the majority of these cases. Recent cases, like that of 21-year-old Jordan Novak, who was missing for several days as authorities searched for him, make clear the ongoing nationwide crisis. Novak disappeared from New York state in December 2020. Days later, authorities found her decomposed body underneath multiple feet of water in a nearby creek. The Onondaga county medical examiner’s report listed high psychiatric morbidity and substance abuse as contributing factors.
Families like Leanne’s shouldn’t have to carry the weight of these complicated issues alone. Linda Rodriguez, Leanne’s mother, expressed her anguish over how law enforcement treated her daughter’s case. “Every time a blond woman with blue eyes goes missing, they send out all their resources and the national media to look for her,” Rodriguez lamented. “They ignored my baby girl because she was brown.”
Mak Mars is the creator and curator of the Justice for Native People blog. They pointed out how when Native Americans go missing, they’re often dismissed as runaways, which is not the case with non-Natives. “The authorities have this flippant idea of, ‘Oh, they’ll come back,’ or ‘They’re just out having fun,’” Mars said. This mentality further fuels the apparent lack of urgency to investigate cases of Indigenous people.
Alan Artale said the emotional impact of not knowing what would happen to Leanne would have been “pure torture.” He shared his anger at the NYPD’s failure to speak out all these years. He even went so far as to call it a “complete dereliction of duty.”