When 14-year-old Leanne went missing, police labelled her a runaway. Her family say it’s because she is Native American

On the evening of 18 March 1999, Alan Artale, stepfather to Leanne Marie Hausberg, a 14-year-old biracial Native American girl, did what every American is told to do when their child goes missing. He immediately reported Hausberg’s disappearance to the New York City police department. But 26 years later, speaking at the family’s neighbourhood park in Brooklyn, New York, he says their response at the time “felt dismissive”. “She’ll be back in a day or two,” Artale says an NYPD officer told him, refusing to file a report until the next day. Instead of classifying Hausberg as a missing person, the NYPD labelled her a “runaway” – a tag that stuck for years until her case was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) in 2010. Until earlier this year, her race in NamUs data was classified as Caucasian – a phenomenon all too common for missing Native American people, frequently mislabelled as white or Hispanic. Hausberg remains missing to this day. The experience of Hausberg’s family reflects a nationwide pattern of erasure and dismissal of urban cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP), say campaigners, which disproportionately affects girls and women. Mak Mars, who runs the Justice for Native People blog – one of the only publicly accessible MMIP databases in the country – says that missing Native Americans are disproportionately labelled runaways compared with non-Native counterparts. “The authorities have this flippant idea of, ‘Oh, they’ll come back,’ or ‘They’re just out having fun.’ There is no law enforcement out there actually looking for these people.” According to FBI figures from 2017, Native Americans disappear at twice the per capita rate of white Americans, despite comprising a far smaller population. There is also a misconception that the problem of Native Americans and MMIP cases is primarily confined to reservations, despite about two-thirds of Native Americans living off-reservation. Analysis by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) found that 92% of missing Native American children cases originate off-reservation, with a report from 2018 identifying more than 5,000 MMIP cases involving Native American children across 71 US cities. Sutton King, co-founder of NYC-based nonprofit Urban Indigenous Collective, says New York is home to at least 180,000 Indigenous people. “Most people you ask in New York City don’t even know that there is a federally recognised tribe on Long Island. People don’t even know that New York City has one of the largest populations of urban Indigenous peoples. How could they possibly care [about an MMIP crisis in the city]?” A 2023 study analysing NamUs revealed that a majority of unidentified murdered Indigenous women are found in urban areas, particularly in New York state. It found that Native women are 135% more likely to remain unidentified after death than other racial groups. Lead investigators are mothers, fathers, cousins, sisters … they’re leading the charge for justice Abigail Echo-Hawk, Urban Indian Health Institute Linda Rodriguez, a former New York state resident with Taos Pueblo heritage, says that when her 21-year-old daughter Jordan Novak went missing from the NY state town of Mexico in December 2023, she immediately went to the state police. “They told me that my daughter had run away. But that did not make sense to me. She had worked so hard to just move into her own home. Why would my child run away?” Less than four weeks later, on 29 December, she says Novak’s body was found submerged in a creek in Mexico in a state of decomposition. The state police reportedly said in a statement that homicide was ruled out in Novak’s case, and her cause of death was accidental drowning. The Onondaga county medical examiner’s report, seen by the Guardian, went into detail about Novak’s mental health issues and claimed that she regularly abused drugs and alcohol. It added that there was only a negligible trace of water in her lungs and 26 bruises all over her body. “Every time a blond woman with blue eyes goes missing, they send out all their resources and the national media to look for her. She is not judged, regardless of what kind of a person she is. But they ignored my baby girl because she was brown,” says Linda. “How can my daughter’s death be an accident, when there is clear evidence suggesting foul play?” Families of missing Native Americans often take on investigative roles on their own due to law enforcement inaction, says Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIC). “Lead investigators are mothers, fathers, cousins, sisters. They’re never given the opportunity to heal because they’re leading the charge for justice.” Chris Ely, a friend of the Artales’ who has been helping them try to solve Hausberg’s disappearance, accuses the NYPD of a “complete dereliction of duty” in responding to and investigating Hausberg’s case, “simply because she was young and Native American”. The NYPD’s continued silence over 26 years feels like “pure torture”, says Artale. “It’s a loss – every aching moment – thinking, what can I do to find her?” Related: ‘They shouldn’t have to fight alone’: the families on the frontline of the Navajo Nation missing people crisis – photo essay The family has joined campaigners in calling for an overhaul in the NYPD’s collection policy and standards. “We need consistent, accurate, race-based data collection. We need culturally competent investigative protocols, and we need survivor-led accountability structures. I think without this, we will continue to see the disappearances of Indigenous people go unrecorded and unaddressed,” says King. In a statement, the NYPD says Hausberg’s case remains an “active an ongoing investigation by the NYPD’s missing persons squad”.