Telling her story

After what seemed like a non-stop three-hour beating, 24-year-old Krystal Yazzie's face was a bloody mess.

Her nose and forehead required stitches and her scalp was stapled to repair the damage.

Photos show that both eyes were black and blue and large portions of her skin on her lower back, left shoulder and left thigh and buttock were scraped away. Her knees, elbows, hands, lower legs, feet and toes were scraped and bloody.

Her lips were bleeding, bruised and swollen.

The area around her eyes swelled so much that she could not open her eyes for a week.

"My 3-year-old son didn't know I was his mother," Yazzie said.

The attack happened over two months ago.

On Monday, Gallup police finally got an arrest warrant out for Yazzie's accused attacker, Frederick Hudson Jr., 30, of Tsayatoh, N.M., whose current whereabouts are unknown.

Why did it take over two months for police to seek an arrest warrant on brutal attack? It's a question Yazzie still hasn't been able to answer.

"I live this every day," she sobbed in an interview at the Navajo Times conducted before the police acted. "I can't eat, sleep. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs to authorities and they don't care."

According to a Jan. 16 incident report by the McKinley County Sheriff's Department, and the Gallup Police Department affidavit filed March 18, Hudson attacked Yazzie just before midnight on Jan. 15 and the attack continued into the early morning hours of Jan. 16. It began in Gallup, continued in his truck and ended at his parent's home in Tsayatoh.

Yazzie, 23, says she has no idea what provoked Hudson, whom she has known for two years. The two were a couple, and she was planning to move back from Dallas, Texas, to be with him. Yazzie said that during the entire two years she had known Hudson he never showed any sign of violence, verbal or physical.

On Jan. 15 Yazzie was in town for a wedding. The couple was leaving an unrelated reception at about 11:45 p.m. when all of a sudden Hudson, whom she said "was always so sweet and a gentleman," started calling her a whore and hit the back of her head so hard it almost knocked her unconscious. Hudson dragged her into his vehicle and continued to beat her, threatening her with a knife as he drove back to his parents' house in Tsayatoh.

Once there, she awakened his parents and told them she needed help. They dropped her off at Gallup Indian Medical Center, she said, and the emergency room personnel called the police.

Sideways

From that point things went sideways.

The responding officer, Betty Thompson, took only two photos, both of Yazzie's face. She did not photograph the gash on the back of Yazzie's head or her other injuries, and did not collect any of the clothing Yazzie had been wearing at the time of the attack.

Thompson called Gallup Police Detective Victor Rodriguez after interviewing Yazzie and he told her to fill out an arrest warrant application. Thompson told Rodriguez she had not been trained on that procedure so he told her to get assistance from her supervisor.

According to Rodriquez's Jan. 16 report on the incident, Thompson said she would do so. She did not apply for an arrest warrant, however.

Yazzie, troubled by the sense that Thompson viewed her as acting out of spite, collected what evidence she could. She had her sister photograph her injuries while she was still in the emergency room and made sure her clothes were kept untouched.

After her discharge from the emergency room the following morning, Yazzie called the sheriff's department to help her retrieve her luggage from the Hudson place.

According to the sheriff's log, a deputy placed two calls to the Navajo Nation Police asking for tribal police to take over the case because the Hudsons live on Navajo land, but no Navajo police responded.

So a sheriff's deputy accompanied Yazzie to retrieve her things, noting in his report that Hudson's vehicle looked as if it had been recently cleaned, but that there was still blood visible.

Yazzie heard nothing more from the Gallup police and, terrified that Hudson would hurt her further, filed for an emergency protection order, learning that no arrest warrant had been issued.

Complaint filed

After 10 days, on Jan. 26, Yazzie was able to get Thompson's incident report. She was appalled at what she found. There were no photos of her injuries and the report itself was riddled with inaccuracies, she said.

In was so far below par that, coupled with Thompson's failure to seek an arrest warrant, Yazzie filed a complaint Jan. 28 with the police department accusing Thompson of being unprofessional, incompetent and callous.

She said Thompson had acted as if she was the bad guy, asking irrelevant questions and inferring that she was just out for revenge. Yazzie said Thompson did not even give her a copy of the standard GPD Domestic Violence Packet that tells victims what to do.

"I felt like she didn't care about taking a good report so that a criminal case could be filed and she appeared to be more concerned about getting off work than doing her job," Yazzie said. "She even got the details of my statement wrong and wrote that I reported that I was raped when I did not say that."

The Navajo Times went to the Gallup Police Department but was told that Officer Thompson was not available. A message was left for Thompson but the Times received no response as of press time Wednesday.

No one from the police department interviewed Yazzie about her complaint, but on March 1, Deputy Police Chief John Allen notified her in a letter that GPD Internal Affairs had conducted a "thorough investigation" and found that Thompson did nothing wrong.

Yazzie, however, pressed on, saying that Hudson is a dangerous man. After learning at her protective order hearing that no arrest warrant had been issued, she contacted Gertrude Lee, assistant trial attorney in the McKinley County district attorney's office.

She talked to GPD Detective Rodriguez about the inaccuracies in Thompson's report. She spent more than a hundred dollars to reproduce documentation about her case, including the photos by her sister, her protection order and law enforcement reports. She sent them to the district attorney, the Gallup police, and most recently, the Navajo Nation Police and prosecutor's office.

Yazzie, who has a 14-hour drive from her home in Dallas to attend hearings, doesn't know how much she's spent on gas.

She said she became her own advocate to show other domestic violence victims how to get justice.

"If the Gallup police are doing this to me, how many others have they done this to?" she asked.

On Friday, GPD Detective Anthony Seciwa showed Yazzie a warrant for Hudson's arrest that he was filing in Gallup Magistrate Court, and she broke down in tears of relief. Judge Cynthia Sanders signed the warrant Monday, setting a $10,000 "cash only" bail bond.

Hudson is charged with kidnapping to inflict death, physical injury or a sexual offense on the victim, aggravated assault against a household member with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery against a household member, and interference with communications or obstructing the sending of a message.

On Monday, McKinley County District Attorney Karl Gillson credited the warrant to Yazzie's tenacity, courage, and endurance.

Gillson said his office often expends an enormous amount of staff and time on a domestic violence case only to have the victim become uncooperative, recant her testimony, and reconcile with her perpetrator. Not in this case.

"Krystal ... will go to any extent to come to court to testify. She deserves a lot of credit and rightly so," he said. "That woman was beaten - just look at those photos."

On Tuesday, Deputy Police Chief Allen said the Gallup police lack jurisdiction to arrest Hudson because he lives on the reservation.

As for Officer Thompson's handling of Yazzie's case, Allen said department policy prevented him from talking about internal investigations. He said the police department took more than two months to file an arrest warrant for Hudson because a major homicide case took precedence and not because of Thompson's police report.

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