Congress trying to find out why Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lawmakers in Washington are focusing on a shocking statistic: Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. That stunning revelation comes from a federal study and it's driving a new effort on Capitol Hill to find out why thousands of Native American women have mysteriously been killed or vanished.

Ten years ago, Alyssa McLemore called 911 and said she needed help. Moments later, the line went dead. No one's heard from her since. Police in Kent, Washington still have an open investigation, but clues are scarce.

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The mystery of what happened to the Native American woman has tortured her family, and there are countless other unsolved cases like this across the country. It is an invisible crisis, Native American women murdered or missing with few answers and little attention. In some places, Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, according to one federally funded study. One estimate, based on national crime data, pegs the number of missing native women and girls at more than 5,700 in 2016 alone, though reliable data is nearly impossible to come by.

"What are we missing here? What is happening with our native women that they are being victimized to the extent and the level that they are?" asked Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski is now pushing two bipartisan bills, one of which aims to improve data collection on missing and murdered native women.

Activists like Roxanne White are trying to raise awareness of missing women like McLemore and her own cousin, Rosenda Strong, who disappeared from the Yakama Reservation in Washington last October. Her family thinks she was killed, but there have still been no arrests. "The tribes are like the wild, wild west. And we, we essentially don't have any protection," said White. Tribal police have declined to comment.

Murkowski says many women disappear from remote reservations, some which lack even a single police officer. Other times, cases get lost in a confusing web of jurisdictional conflicts between tribal, local and state police. She also worries that some victims are simply discounted by police because of their race or involvement in prostitution. "Which makes no sense whatsoever and it doesn't mean that that we should give up or that the system should not work to investigate, to find out where that woman has gone," said Murkowski.

That is what the McLemore family believes happened to Alyssa. At 21, she was caring for a 2-year-old daughter and a dying mother. A year before she disappeared, she was picked up by police for prostitution. "I just kind of feel like they just wrote her off as a prostitute and they probably think that, you know, she didn't have family," said Tina Russell, her aunt. Kent police say they don't discriminate.

A new law may not help McLemore, but it might finally help solve the crisis of missing and murdered native women and bring some much needed closure to their families. "We're not going to stop looking for her. We're not going to say give up," said Russell.

CNN