Ashley Loring Heavyrunner
Have you seen this woman?
Ashley Loring Heavyrunner was last seen the week of June 13, 2017, in Browning MT on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Ashley attended a party on June 5, 2017, and appeared in videos from the party on the reservation. At first, when her family didn’t hear from her for a few days after, they figured she was with friends or that she had lost her phone. When her dad ended up in the hospital and she didn’t come to visit, they knew something was wrong. A couple weeks after she went missing, a tip came in that the last night she was seen, someone had spotted a young woman running from a vehicle on highway 89 on the reservation. Tribal police and BIA conducted a 3 day search in the area and found nothing. Ashley’s family members searched the same area and found a sweater and a pair of boots with red stains. Believing they were Ashley’s, her family turned the items over to law enforcement, and to this day have never received information about DNA testing conducted on the items- and shared that at one point law enforcement had misplaced the sweater.
Ashley was an environmental science student at Blackfeet Community College and had plans to move in with her sister and attend the University of Montana.
There were promising leads a few weeks after Ashley went missing. Law enforcement learned that she had apparently fallen in with the wrong crowd after she started using drugs following the tragic deaths of several family members. Despite solid evidence that she may have been a victim of foul play, Ashley’s case illustrates many of the issues that indigenous women and especially women on reservations face. Between confusing jurisdiction, limited tribal resources on a vast reservation, and systemic abuse and injustice, indigenous women remain one of the most vulnerable populations in America today.
Ashley is described as 5’2” and around 90 pounds, with dark hair. She has a scar in the shape of a checkmark on the top of one of her hands, and she would be 25 years old right now. Anyone with information on her disappearance is asked to call the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office at 801-579-1400.
