The boyfriend of a slain Navajo woman whose case epitomized a movement was convicted of first-degree murder this week in a federal court in Phoenix.
Jamie Yazzie was a 32-year-old mother of three when she went missing from the Navajo Nation in 2019. Despite a high-profile search, she wasn’t located until late 2021, when her remains were found on the neighboring Hopi nation. Tre James, a one-time boyfriend, was later arrested.
Now, James faces a life sentence in January after a jury found him guilty of murder and other federal crimes associated with acts of domestic violence against former intimate and dating partners.
Many of Yazzie’s family members and friends attended all seven days of the trial.
Yazzie’s case gained attention through the grassroots Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, which draws awareness to the high rates of assault, abduction, and murder that face Indigenous women and girls in the U.S. and Canada.
The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs calls it a crisis, and a legacy of “generations of government policies of forced removal, land seizures and violence inflicted on Native peoples.”
