Brandon Ecoffey

A note from the editor’s desk
By Brandon Ecoffey
Lakota Country Times Editor
www.lakotacountrytimes.com

When the story about the GearUp program broke with the announcement of one of the most horrific murders in the modern history of this state all eyes turned towards the business dealings of the accused.

According to state law enforcement officials Scott Westerhuis -- the owner and founder of Mid Central Educational Cooperative -- murdered his family and then turned the gun on himself prior to burning his home to the ground.

Most news reports in the state have repeated the same narrative that Westerhuis committed the crimes in an attempt to escape the inevitable criminal charges he was set to face for his role in the mismanagement of millions of federal dollars intended to be spent on improving access to higher education for Native students.

Mid-Central was the link between the state of South Dakota and GearUp. The cooperative was responsible for administrating the millions of federal and state dollars intended for the GearUp program. GearUp was a program that was intended to improve access to education for Native students across the South Dakota. The success of the program is disputed but it did send hundreds of native kids to the campus of the South Dakota School of Mines each summer.

Stacy Phelps, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, is one of three people charged in connection with the theft of $1 million GEAR UP, a federal program that is designed to help Indian and low-income students. The indictment against him does not accuse him of stealing any funds from the program and is instead based on backdating contracts. Photo from Lakota Country Times

The investigation of the murder was completed by state investigators within 7 days but did not look further in to some strange facts of the case including the peculiarity that Westerhuis apparently placed his sons in the wrong bed prior to shooting them. Each son had his own bed and his own room. To me it seems really strange that for whatever reason they ended up in the other brother's bed.

Nor was there an explanation offered for why Westerhuis instructed his son's girlfriend to get the contents of his safe out of the state if something would happen to him in the coming days. The contents of the safe he mentioned were reportedly consumed by the fire despite the fact that his home safe was designed to survive such an occurrence. Strange but explainable.

Maybe I have grown paranoid as I have gotten older but much of what surrounds this GearUp mess just seems a bit odd. Over two years ago South Dakota Secretary of State Melody Schop was made aware of accounting irregularities with the GearUp funds but she failed to correct them at the time. Why? Who benefits from allowing a program for Native children to run itself in to the ground? By default it would be somebody other than Native people.

Although not all evidence in this crime has been made publicly available the narrative that has been circulated amongst South Dakota media outlets is that the administrators of the GearUp funds were all equally guilty of stealing funds from the kids. Ironically, the charges levied against Stacey Phelps do not include a theft charge. If there is no evidence of him benefiting from the "conspiracy" he is allegedly involved in, what exactly is his motive?

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What Phelps is guilty of is backdating employment logs that were presented to him by Westerhuis. There is no money trail leading to Stacey Phelps. There is no evidence of lavish spending. What there was evidence of was of thousands of our kids receiving an authentic college experience that was built and maintained by Phelps.

Now I could possibly be wrong about all of this. Maybe our people's past experiences of dealing with the state have made me less trusting of state government. It is hard to forget that this is the state that institutionalized the taking of native children for profit and placed monumental barriers in the path of our people on their path to voting. It is very difficult to ignore the fact that AG Marty Jackley has a prosecutorial record soaked in misconduct and a reputation for employing prosecutors with less than favorable views of Native people.

But then again maybe I'm just paranoid.

(Brandon Ecoffey is the current editor of LCT and the former managing editor of Native Sun News. His work has earned him more than thirty state and national journalism awards.)

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Lakota Country Times: Stacy Phelps appears in court in theft case (3/28)

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