Special Agent Describes Work in New Mexico for Operation Not Forgotten

Special Agent Hailey Evans describes her 30-day deployment to New Mexico in support of Operation Not Forgotten, a four-month surge of FBI resources to Indian country to help investigate crimes against Tribal women and children.


Video Transcript

My name is Hailey Evans. I am a special agent. My normal job is working national security cyber investigations. Right now, I am out in Farmington, New Mexico, for Operation Not Forgotten.

Slide: In Operation Not Forgotten, the FBI detailed special agents to remote offices to help work cases involving violent crimes against Native American women and children.

Most of the cases that I've been involved in out here since early August have been homicides.

One of the cases that myself and previous TDY agents that were that were here before me have been focusing on is a cold case homicide that occurred approximately four years ago. We have been going back through the case file, looking at the physical evidence, sending that off to the lab for processing. Also doing follow up interviews.

I just hope that myself being out here and the other TDYers, that, yeah, we do bring that sense of fresh eyes to a case, because I know that the agents here—and after speaking with the criminal investigators—that they are just swamped.

Slide: The FBI deployed 51 agents to 10 field offices for 30 days at a time to comb through difficult cases and unearth new leads and pathways for investigations.

Today, we're going to go out to the site of where the victim was found. The victim was reported missing by family members. His body was found about four days later in a field.

This will be the first time that I've had a chance to actually go out to the site where his body was found. The belief was that the body may have been dumped in the field and that he may have been killed elsewhere. And so we're going to go and look for anything else that could be out in the field in case he was actually killed there.

One of the things that I've been working on is kind of a timeline of the last day of his life. Reviewing, you know, his text messages and who did he talk to.

When you work something like this, you feel like you get to know the individual. You get to know them on that kind of personal level. It just it really makes you want to find justice for them. Find that resolution for, you know, a victim who clearly did not deserve what happened to him.

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