When Aaron Mark Bradley, a 68-year-old citizen of the Navajo Nation, went missing one day last summer in northern Arizona, there were alarming signs at his home about what might have happened to him. His front door was open, a window was broken, and essential items were left behind.
Bradley was last seen at a convenience store he frequented in the small reservation town of Shonto on Sept. 6.
His daughter, Kayla Benally, an Albuquerque resident, drove about an hour to Acoma Pueblo for a Friday meeting of the New Mexico Department of Justice’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Task Force to raise awareness about her father’s disappearance.
This story originally published on New Mexico In Depth.
Native people have the highest average missing persons rate in New Mexico, according to a National Institute of Justice-funded study published last year.
Benally also made the trip to share what’s been helpful to her. She got in touch, she said, with the Navajo Nation’s task force and a Diné coalition. They connected her with counseling services and a search and rescue workshop, among other resources that have “given our family a circle of support so we don’t feel as alone as we did before,” Benally said…