‘Good thing that we picked him up’

Couple’s chance meeting with a little boy leads to the unveiling of a tragedy

SAN JUAN CHAPTER, N.M.

If time had a rewind key, Bennie Yazzie and his wife Ella Crosby, both from Many Farms, would gladly turn it back to May 2, 2016, at 6:45 p.m., Mountain Standard Time.

It was around then they spotted a young child, who would turn out to be Ian Mike, the younger brother of the late Ashlynne Mike, running along the fence on Navajo Route 13, which runs east to west, connecting Lukachukai, Arizona, to U.S. Highway 491 south of Shiprock.

The couple had planned to go for a drive and get something to eat in Shiprock when they spotted Ian. As they’ve done countless times for people hitch-hiking, they stopped and offered him a ride.

Crosby said she turned around to take a better look at their little passenger. She found it curious why a “little girl” was running along the fence in the middle of nowhere. She thought Ian was girl because of his long hair.

Crosby said the boy’s hair was bushy and full of stickers. He was wearing shortcuts and carried a backpack. As soon as he got in he started crying, saying he was scared, she said.

“He started crying saying, ‘My sister’ and he kept looking back,” Crosby remembered. “(We asked) ‘What about your sister?’ So he said, ‘My sister in maroon van’. That’s what he was saying.”
They continued on Route 13 and when they tried to talk to him, he cried again.

Finally he asked her what the time was and she told him it was 10 minutes to seven. The boy said his father worked at Diné College in Shiprock and got off work at seven. He asked Crosby and Yazzie if they could drop him off there.

But based on his emotional state and disheveled appearance, the couple decided to take him straight to a Navajo police officer instead.

The trio made their way to Shiprock to find a police officer. They found Officer Benally (they couldn’t remember his first name) and handed Ian over to him.

Yazzie remembered the officer did not ask many questions about how they found Ian. They didn’t know that he and his sister had been abducted and taken near the Shiprock pinnacle.
The officer took their phone number and license plate and a description of their car.

“And then he said, ‘OK, I’ll take over from here,'” Crosby recalled. “He didn’t say anything about Amber Alert.”

The couple decided to head to Cortez instead to get something to eat.

While en route, Crosby said her phone rang so they stopped on top of a hill to answer it. It was the officer who they had just met with earlier.

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