Navajo Police Confirm Several Missing Adults Found Safe in Recent Days

The Navajo Police Department confirmed Natasha Yazzie was found safe in the Shiprock District on April 6, one of five adults recovered in recent days as the department continues to confront one of the most persistent missing persons crises in Indian Country.

Justin Lance Berry was also confirmed safe, alongside three earlier recoveries: Paula Marie Keams, Robert Salt III, and Virginia Nez. Together, the five resolutions represent a meaningful stretch of positive outcomes for a unit that has handled more than 100 investigations since the NPD's Missing Person Unit launched in October 2021.

The recoveries arrive against sustained urgency. Sixty-seven individuals remain listed as missing across the Navajo Nation's seven police districts: 16 females and 51 males spread across Window Rock (14 individuals), Dilkon (11), Tuba City (10), Shiprock (9), Chinle (9), Crownpoint (8), and Kayenta (6). Some of those cases date to the 1970s, a detail that underscores both the scope and the age of the crisis. In 2023, the NPD's missing persons poster listed approximately 82 individuals; the reduction since then reflects cases closed through recovery or resolution, not a shrinking problem.

At a House Appropriations Committee oversight hearing on November 20, 2024, Eugenia Charles-Newton, the Navajo Nation Council's law and order committee chair, testified that 75 people were then known missing from the Navajo Nation. "It's unaccounted for because we lack the manpower to track those cases properly," she told the committee, pointing to the gap between documented cases and the true number.

The scale of the challenge is compounded by geography. The Navajo Nation stretches across approximately 27,000 square miles of southeast Utah, northeast Arizona, and northwest New Mexico. Apache County alone contains more land designated as Indian reservation than any other county in the United States, with the Apache and Navajo Indian reservations covering roughly 66 percent of the county's 11,218 square miles. Coordinating searches across that terrain, with seven districts and chronically limited staffing, remains a structural barrier the NPD has repeatedly flagged to federal lawmakers.

The National Indigenous Women's Resource Center has documented that on some reservations, Native women face murder rates more than ten times the national average, with disappearances frequently tied to domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and sex trafficking. Twenty-two of the Navajo Nation's missing are women, a figure Charles-Newton brought directly to Congress.

Families with information on missing relatives can contact the NPD tip line at 928-686-8563. The Navajo Nation Missing Persons Updates, a volunteer grassroots group with more than 21,500 Facebook followers, amplifies active cases and connects families with resources in real time. At the institutional level, the Navajo Nation Council's Missing and Murder Diné Relative Task Force is partnering with Navajo Technical University to establish what would be the nation's first Indigenous data institute, aimed at preserving community knowledge and building a more complete accounting of cases that agencies currently lack the capacity to track.

Each name confirmed safe in recent days represents a family that got an answer. Sixty-seven families are still waiting.