The Murder That Forced America to Say Savanna’s Name
On August 19, 2017, Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind sent her mother a text message. She was going upstairs to help a neighbor with a sewing project.
She was 22 years old, eight months pregnant, and living in a Fargo, North Dakota apartment complex with her family. She never came back down.
By 4:30 that afternoon, her mother had called police. What happened next became one of the ugliest crimes in North Dakota history, and it eventually put a woman’s name on a federal law.
Savanna was a member of the Spirit Lake Nation. Her death became the case that finally forced the country to reckon with a crisis Native families had been naming for decades: missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW).
What the Police Found
Officers searched the apartment building three separate times in the first two days. They found nothing.
Upstairs, one floor above where Savanna lived, her neighbor Brooke Crews and Crews’s boyfriend William Hoehn were hiding a newborn baby they had not given birth to. The break came five days later.
Hoehn had bought diapers at Walmart and told coworkers he and Crews had a new baby. On August 24, police got a search warrant and found a healthy infant girl inside the apartment.
They arrested Crews on the spot. Hoehn was arrested at work.
Three days after that, kayakers on the Red River spotted something wrapped in plastic snagged on a fallen log. It was Savanna’s body.
What the Trial Actually Showed
Here is where the case gets complicated in ways most retellings skip. Crews pleaded guilty in December 2017 to conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit kidnapping, and lying to police.
A judge sentenced her to life without parole in February 2018. Hoehn’s case went to trial, and the outcome surprised a lot of people who’d followed it.
At trial, Crews testified that Savanna’s death began with a fight over a cat, that Savanna hit her head and lost consciousness, and that she alone cut the baby from Savanna’s body while Savanna was still alive. Jurors weighed that account against a jailhouse partner’s obvious incentive to shade the story.
In September 2018, they acquitted Hoehn of conspiracy to commit murder. He pleaded guilty instead to conspiracy to commit kidnapping and providing false information to police.
A judge initially handed him life in prison anyway, a sentence that exceeded what the kidnapping charge legally allowed. The North Dakota Supreme Court threw it out.
In October 2019, Hoehn was resentenced to 20 years. That’s a different ending than the one that usually gets told online: not two life sentences, but one, plus a 20-year term for a man a jury did not believe was part of a murder plot.
It doesn’t make the crime any less horrific. It does mean the story deserves to be told accurately, especially in a case where the facts already carry enough weight on their own.
Savanna’s daughter survived. She’s known as Haisley Jo, and she went to live with her father, Ashton Matheny, Savanna’s longtime partner.
A three-year-old in Fargo raised over a thousand dollars for the family with a lemonade stand. Strangers gave more than $24,000 through a GoFundMe.
Grief turned into something the community could hold onto, even as the worst of it stayed unfixable.
A Pattern, Not an Outlier
What made Savanna’s case different wasn’t the crime. It was that it got solved, and got national attention, at all.
Indigenous women in the United States are murdered at roughly three times the rate of white women nationally, according to research cited by the National Congress of American Indians. In some counties, that gap widens dramatically.
Eleven counties show murder rates for American Indian and Alaska Native women more than ten times the national average. One South Dakota county reported a rate over 100 times higher.
The numbers on violence more broadly are just as stark. More than 84 percent of Native women report experiencing violence in their lifetime.
More than half report sexual violence, and more than half report intimate partner violence. Advocates and researchers have pointed to a tangle of reasons cases like these fall apart before they’re ever solved.
Jurisdiction is one of the biggest. A crime on tribal land can trigger a confusing overlap of tribal, state, and federal authority, and cases have stalled for years while agencies argue over who’s responsible for investigating.
Tribal police departments are chronically underfunded and understaffed relative to the size of the land and population they cover. Databases used by different agencies often don’t talk to each other, so a missing person reported to tribal police may never reach state or federal systems at all.
And Indigenous victims have historically received a fraction of the media coverage that non-Native victims do, a gap researchers sometimes call “missing white woman syndrome” when it runs the other direction.
The Law That Carries Her Name
Savanna’s death led directly to legislation. A bill named for her was introduced in Congress in 2017, the same year she died.
It took three more years and two reintroductions to become law. President Trump signed Savanna’s Act on October 10, 2020.
The law directs the Department of Justice to develop and update law enforcement protocols specifically for missing and murdered Native American cases. It also pushes agencies to improve data collection on those cases and clarify which one is responsible for what when tribal, state, and federal jurisdictions overlap.
Congress passed a companion bill the same day, the Not Invisible Act. It created a standing commission of tribal leaders, survivors, and law enforcement officials to recommend how the federal government should fight violent crime and human trafficking in Native communities.
That commission delivered its formal recommendations to Congress in November 2023. Worth noting: despite widespread claims that North Dakota passed its own state-level “Savanna’s Act” back in 2018, there’s no clear record of a distinct state law by that name.
What passed was federal legislation, introduced the year Savanna died and signed four years later. North Dakota has since taken its own steps, including a 2025 bill establishing a “Feather Alert” system to notify the public when an Indigenous person goes missing.
Where It Stands Now
Laws don’t investigate cases. People do, and the underlying problems Savanna’s Act was written to fix, chronic underfunding, jurisdictional gaps, databases that still don’t sync, haven’t disappeared just because a bill passed.
Tribal advocates have continued pushing Congress for follow-through, including a 2024 letter from lawmakers to the Justice Department asking for an update on how the law is actually being implemented. Savanna’s family turned their loss into public advocacy.
Fargo has marked her memory with an annual walk and an official city day in her name. Haisley Jo is growing up in North Dakota with her father, a living reminder of what her mother’s family fought to keep.
The crisis didn’t start in 2017, and it hasn’t ended. What changed is that there’s now a name, a law, and a paper trail.
Whether that adds up to justice for the next family depends on funding and follow-through that no single case, however well-known, can guarantee on its own.
Reporting based on InForum, MPR News, Fox News, KVRR Local News, NIWRC, NCAI, U.S. Department of Justice, and Oxygen.