How a Federal Database Failed a Yakama Nation Woman
Before She Disappeared, She Was Fighting to Come Back
Before she became a missing persons case, before she became a case number sitting untouched in a tribal police file, Benita Desiree Long was a woman in the middle of one of the hardest fights a person can take on — the fight to get sober.
She was 40 years old and a member of the Yakama Nation in Washington state. She had struggled with addiction and experienced periods of homelessness. Those are facts about her life, but they are not the sum of it. Benita was also writing letters to her sponsor — letters about generational trauma, about the weight of what had been passed down to her, about wanting to break the cycle. She was doing the slow, unglamorous, deeply personal work of trying to become a different version of herself.
Her cousin Loni Long knew a version of Benita that predated all of that. When Loni was 14 — shy to the point of silence, scarred by years of abuse and foster care — Benita walked into her life like a force of nature. She was a year younger than Loni but carried herself like she had already figured the world out. Bold, outgoing, impossible to ignore. She folded Loni into her family and taught her something no one else had managed to: how to speak up, how to take up space, how to stop disappearing into the background.
“She showed me how to stick up for myself, kind of be strong,” Loni remembers.
It is a detail that will matter later — the voice Benita gave her cousin is now the voice Loni uses to search for her.
The Last Day Anyone Saw Benita Long
On March 26, 2022, a family member dropped Benita off at the El Corral Motel in Toppenish, Washington — a small town that sits along U.S. Highway 97, just beyond the boundary of the Yakama Nation reservation. She was wearing gray sweatpants and a black hoodie. She had a black backpack with her.
The El Corral was not a place people ended up because they had better options. It sat on a stretch of road with a reputation, in a town where vulnerable people cycled through and where violence had a way of arriving without warning. The motel would go on to become the site of staggering tragedy: in June 2024, two years after Benita was last seen there, three people died at the El Corral in a single week. Two Yakama Nation members were found dead in a vehicle in the parking lot. Days later, a 41-year-old woman died at the motel from a suspected overdose. In the year before that, the property had been the site of two separate homicides and an assault. By the time it finally closed, the El Corral had become a grim landmark — a place the community associated not with shelter, but with harm.
This is where Benita’s family last saw her alive.
After being dropped off, Benita made one more contact. She called her sister and said she was in the Yakima area, roughly 20 miles north of Toppenish. That phone call is the last known communication anyone has had with Benita Long. What happened between that call and the silence that followed — where she went, who she was with, whether anyone saw her — remains completely unknown.
In the weeks that followed, Benita’s family grew increasingly alarmed. No phone calls. No messages. No sign of her anywhere. Then came the detail that confirmed their worst fears: Benita’s monthly payments from the Yakama Nation — money she depended on for survival, money she never let sit untouched — had gone uncollected for two months straight. Benita would not have left that money. Something had happened to her.
A Police Department That Didn’t Take It Seriously
When Benita’s family walked into the Yakama Nation police department to report her missing, they came looking for urgency. What they found was indifference.
Her aunt, Georgette Long Abrahamson, said the officers didn’t treat the report like a crisis. There was no immediate mobilization. No search organized. No alerts issued. Instead, there was an assumption — one that families of missing Indigenous women across this country have heard in countless variations — that Benita was simply somewhere sleeping it off. That a woman who struggled with addiction wasn’t really missing, just temporarily out of sight.
“They just figured she was, I don’t know, passed out somewhere,” Georgette told reporters. “But they didn’t really take it serious.”
The case was assigned a number: 22-004079. And then, for all practical purposes, it stopped moving.
There were no press conferences. No public appeals for information. No coordinated effort between tribal, local, state, and federal law enforcement. There is no indication that anyone followed up on the phone call Benita made to her sister from the Yakima area — a call that could have been traced, a location that could have been canvassed, a lead that could have been pursued while the trail was still warm. The Yakama Nation police have not responded to multiple media inquiries about the status of Benita’s investigation. To this day, no one outside the department knows what investigative steps, if any, were taken after the case was filed.
This is a pattern that extends far beyond one case. The assumption that addiction, poverty, or homelessness makes a person less worth finding — that these struggles disqualify someone from the urgency afforded to other missing people — is one of the most dangerous and pervasive failures in how law enforcement responds to Indigenous disappearances. Benita had struggled. She was also a woman with a family that loved her, a woman actively working toward recovery, a woman whose prolonged silence was a screaming alarm to everyone who knew her. None of that mattered enough to trigger the kind of response that might have made a difference.
The Yakama Reservation: A Generational Crisis
Benita’s disappearance did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in one of the most dangerous regions in the country for Indigenous women.
Toppenish sits at the edge of the Yakama Reservation, a 1.3-million-acre expanse spanning Yakima and Klickitat counties in central Washington. The reservation has seen an alarming and sustained pattern of Indigenous people — overwhelmingly women — going missing, turning up dead, or dying under circumstances that are never adequately investigated. This is not a recent development. It is generational.
The Yakima Herald-Republic has maintained an ongoing investigative series called The Vanished, documenting case after case from the area. The list they have compiled stretches back more than five decades. Janice Hannigan was 15 years old when she went missing from Wapato in 1971. Her sister Trudi Lee-Clark has never stopped looking for her — she has spent decades posting flyers, scanning faces in crowds, hoping to recognize her sister in a stranger. Shari Dee Sampson Elwell’s sexually mutilated body was found by hunters in a remote area of the reservation in 1992. Linda Dave’s body was discovered in 2017 in the water beneath a Highway 97 bridge near Toppenish with a gunshot wound. Destiny Lloyd was 23 when she was reported missing on Christmas Day 2017 and found dead four days later.
In the 1980s and 1990s alone, at least 14 Native women were murdered in cases that remain unsolved, or died under mysterious circumstances on the reservation. Some were found in remote areas within closed portions of the reservation, their deaths attributed to strangulation or hypothermia. Several of those cases have never been solved.
The Yakima Herald’s list is not complete. The paper openly asks families to contact reporter Tammy Ayer if they want to add a loved one — so long as a law enforcement report has been filed. That a newspaper has had to crowdsource the record of the missing and murdered tells you everything about who else is keeping track.
Of the 110 people on the Washington State Patrol’s list of missing Indigenous people, 28 have ties to the Yakama Nation or the Yakima area. Many of those cases have gone cold. The challenges compound one another: the reservation’s vast size includes hard-to-access, rugged terrain; jurisdiction over criminal cases is fractured between tribal police, county sheriffs, and the FBI; tribal police handle missing person cases but do not investigate homicides. The result is a system in which no single entity has full ownership of a case, and cases routinely fall through the gaps between agencies.
Benita Long is one name on a very long list. But her case reveals something that most of those other cases do not — a systemic failure that reaches beyond the reservation, beyond the state, and into the architecture of how the United States tracks its missing people.
NamUs: The Database That Didn’t Know Her Name
In 2007, the federal government launched the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System — NamUs. The concept was straightforward and, on paper, powerful: create a centralized, publicly accessible database where missing persons profiles could be cross-referenced against unidentified remains found anywhere in the country. A mother in Washington could be matched to a Jane Doe in Oregon. A set of bones recovered from a riverbank could finally get a name.
NamUs is funded by the National Institute of Justice and managed through a cooperative agreement with the University of North Texas Health Science Center. It offers free forensic services — DNA analysis, fingerprint examination, forensic odontology, and forensic anthropology. It is searchable by law enforcement, medical examiners, and the general public. The Department of Justice has credited it with helping resolve nearly 47,000 cases since its creation. When it works, NamUs is one of the most effective tools in the country for bringing the missing home — even when “home” means a grave with the right name on it.
Benita Long’s profile was never entered into NamUs.
For three years — while her family searched, organized vigils, handed out flyers, and called a police department that never called back — Benita existed in no federal system designed to find her. If her remains had been recovered in another jurisdiction, across a county line, in another state, along a highway median, there would have been no way to connect them to the woman last seen outside a motel in Toppenish. She would have become a case file with no name attached. A Jane Doe in an evidence room.
Her family did not know this. They found out in March 2025, when NPR published an investigation into NamUs compliance and discovered that Benita was among thousands of missing people who had simply never been logged.
The scope of the problem is staggering. Washington is one of only a handful of states that legally requires missing persons cases to be submitted to NamUs. And yet, as of August 2024, 65 percent of the state’s 2,349 missing people were not in the database. Among the 127 Indigenous people listed as missing by Washington State Patrol, fewer than half — just 55 — appeared in NamUs. Benita was one of the missing names. So were Julie Miller, 64, missing since 1989. Earl Patrick, 43, missing since 2015. Janessa Villa, 17, missing since 2023. Name after name, falling through a gap that was never supposed to exist.
The reasons are both bureaucratic and structural. The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs — the agency legally responsible for submitting cases in the state — has acknowledged that NamUs is cumbersome. The system requires 19 data fields and rejects incomplete entries. Their updates over the past four years have been sporadic. Steven Strachan, the agency’s executive director, called the technical barriers unacceptable: “Anything that stands in the way of connecting those dots and finding closure for a family that every single day gets up thinking about their missing family member, to me, is not acceptable.”
But the problem extends far beyond Washington. NamUs program manager Chuck Heurich has pointed to the sheer scale of American law enforcement: more than 18,000 agencies, 80 percent of which employ fewer than 20 people. About half are not even registered in the NamUs system. For small, rural, and tribal police departments, dedicating a single officer to federal data entry is a resource they simply do not have.
And then there is the deeper structural failure: the two largest federal systems for tracking missing people — NamUs and the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) — do not communicate with each other. They are separate databases, maintained by separate agencies, with no automated way to share information. A case entered into one is not cross-referenced with the other. Bridging that gap, according to Heurich, could cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. So they remain siloed, and people fall through the space between them.
Only 16 states have any legislation related to NamUs usage. Even among those, compliance is inconsistent. The result is a national system that is only as good as the willingness of individual agencies to use it — and for many of the communities most affected by the missing persons crisis, that willingness has never materialized.
What the Database Gap Costs: The Case of Daisy Mae Heath
To understand what it actually means when a name doesn’t make it into the system, consider what happened on the Yakama Reservation itself.
In November 2008, skeletal remains were discovered on remote land within the reservation’s boundaries. No identification could be made. The remains were cataloged and the case went cold. For almost 15 years, those bones sat in storage without a name.
It was not until early 2023 that the Yakima County coroner confirmed the remains belonged to Daisy Mae Heath, also known as Daisy Tallman — an Indigenous woman who had been missing since 1987. Her sister Patricia Whitefoot had reported her missing to Yakama Nation tribal police when no one had seen or heard from her for about two months. Before she disappeared, Daisy was in what her sister described as a “very vulnerable state.”
Fifteen years of a family not knowing. Fifteen years of remains lying in storage while the people who loved Daisy waited for a phone call that never came. Relatives later gathered at a ceremony in 2021 to remember Daisy and other lost family members, insisting that their loved ones be remembered as people — not just statistics or case numbers.
That is what a database gap looks like when it has a face. That is the future Benita Long’s family is fighting against every single day her name stays out of the system.
The Families Filling the Void
In the absence of a functioning system, families have become the system.
Abigail Echo-Hawk, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation and a leading voice in the MMIP movement through the Urban Indian Health Institute, has been explicit about what she has witnessed across more than 15 years of this work: the investigations done by families, cousins, aunties, and tribal communities have outnumbered the investigations done by law enforcement. Families print the flyers. Families organize the searches. Families build the social media campaigns, pressure the press, testify before committees, and show up at every vigil wearing red, holding photos of someone they should be holding in their arms.
On the Yakama Reservation, the Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women, People & Families organization has carried much of that weight. They organized a vigil for Benita in Toppenish — starting in the Safeway parking lot, fanning out through the neighborhood to hand flyers to strangers, then gathering again under candlelight to pray for a woman the police had already stopped actively looking for.
Loni Long has been at every event she can reach. She has carried Benita’s case the way Benita once carried her — fiercely, without waiting for permission. But the weight of it is unsustainable, and it was never supposed to be theirs to carry alone.
“We weep in silence and invisibility,” Echo-Hawk has said. And she has been clear about what needs to change: national legislation requiring NamUs use across every jurisdiction, with specific funding allocated to tribal law enforcement and real accountability from the Department of Justice.
What Needs to Change
Benita’s case is not just a tragedy. It is a blueprint for specific, actionable reform. The failures that left her invisible to the system are identifiable, and they are fixable.
Federal NamUs legislation is the most critical step. Currently, only 16 states have any laws related to NamUs usage, and even in those states, compliance is inconsistent at best. National legislation mandating that all law enforcement agencies — tribal, local, state, and federal — submit missing persons cases to NamUs within a defined timeframe would close the most dangerous gap in the system.
Interoperability between NamUs and NCIC must be funded and built. The two largest federal databases for tracking missing people cannot share information with each other. This is a solvable engineering problem that has been allowed to persist for nearly two decades. Congress can appropriate the funding. The Department of Justice can be held accountable for building the bridge.
Dedicated funding for tribal law enforcement is essential. Many tribal police departments lack the staff, training, and technical infrastructure to use systems like NamUs. This is not a reflection of their commitment — it is a reflection of chronic federal underfunding of tribal sovereignty. Targeted grants for tribal agencies to hire and train personnel specifically for missing persons data entry and case management would have an immediate and measurable impact.
Accountability for existing mandates must be enforced. Washington state already requires NamUs submission. It is not happening. When a legal requirement is ignored and the result is that 65 percent of missing people in the state are invisible to the federal system, someone must answer for it. Community members can contact their state representatives and demand oversight hearings, compliance timelines, and consequences for agencies that fail to meet them.
These are not abstract policy wishes. They are the specific mechanisms that would have put Benita Long’s name into the one system designed to bring her home.
A Ceremony for the Wandering
There is a moment in Loni Long’s story that sits apart from the databases and the jurisdictions and the policy failures. It does not belong to the system at all. It belongs to her.
In the Yakama tradition, there is a ceremony for when a person dies — a way of ensuring the spirit finds its way to family on the other side, so it is not left wandering in this world. After six months with no answers, no leads, and no body, Loni found herself caught between two unbearable possibilities. Benita might still be alive somewhere, beyond reach. Or she might be gone, her spirit unmoored, with no one to guide her home.
Loni turned to her husband, Israel Scott Rehaume, who is a sun dancer — a participant in one of the most sacred ceremonies practiced by some Indigenous communities, a space of deep prayer and spiritual connection. She asked him to bring Benita’s name into that space. To call out to Benita’s mother, who had already passed, and ask her to find her daughter wherever she was — and take her home, so she would not be left here wandering.
“That’s the last thing that I could do to love her in this world,” Loni said.
It should not have been the last thing. There should have been an investigation that matched the urgency of a family’s grief. There should have been a database entry that kept Benita’s name circulating through every morgue and every crime lab in the country. There should have been a system that treated her disappearance as what it was — an emergency.
Instead, there was a cousin, a prayer, and a ceremony asking the spirit world to do what the justice system would not.
Benita Long Is Still Missing
Benita Desiree Long has short brown hair, brown eyes, and a scar on her chin. She is 5’3″ with the letters “NLP” tattooed on her forearm, “BORN” across the knuckles of one hand, and “SINR” across the knuckles of the other. She has a large burn scar on one leg. She was last seen on March 26, 2022, at the El Corral Motel in Toppenish, Washington, and last heard from in the Yakima, Washington area.
If you have any information about Benita Long, please contact the Yakama Nation Police Department at 509-865-2933. Reference case number 22-004079. You can also reach the Washington State Patrol Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit at 1-800-543-5678 or MUPU@wsp.wa.gov.
Say her name. Write it down. Make sure the system knows she exists.
Vanished Voices is dedicated to amplifying the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and holding the systems meant to protect them accountable. If this episode moved you, share Benita’s story. Contact your representatives about federal NamUs legislation. And if you or someone you know has information about any missing person, please do not stay silent. Listen to Benita’s story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts!
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Resources:
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Bureau of Indian Affairs. (n.d.). National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). U.S. Department of the Interior. National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) | Indian Affairs
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National Congress of American Indians. (n.d.). Policy priorities: Missing and murdered Indigenous women. NCAI Policy Priorities
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National Institute of Justice. (n.d.). National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. National Missing and Unidentified Persons System
National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. (n.d.-a). About NamUs. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. About | NamUs
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Not Invisible Act of 2019, Pub. L. No. 116-166, 134 Stat. 766 (2020). S.982 – Not Invisible Act of 2019 116th Congress (2019-2020)
NPR. (2025, March). Missing persons, Indigenous, MMIW, NamUs, police database [Investigation into NamUs compliance failures in Washington state]. NPR
Savanna’s Act, Pub. L. No. 116-165, 134 Stat. 760 (2020). S.227 – Savanna’s Act 116th Congress (2019-2020)
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Yakima Herald-Republic. (n.d.-a). The Vanished: List of Indigenous people who are missing and murdered with Yakama Reservation connections. The Vanished | yakimaherald.com
Yakima Herald-Republic. (n.d.-b). The Vanished: Mapping decades of missing and murdered on Yakama Reservation[Interactive map]. The Vanished: Mapping decades of missing and murdered on Yakama Reservation
Yakima Herald-Republic. (2023, January). Remains found in 2008 identified as Daisy Mae Heath, a Yakama woman missing since 1987. Remains found in 2008 identified as Daisy Mae Heath, a Yakama woman missing since 1987 | The Vanished | yakimaherald.com
Contact Information for Benita Long’s Case
Yakama Nation Police Department: 509-865-2933 | Case Number: 22-004079
Washington State Patrol Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit: 1-800-543-5678 | MUPU@wsp.wa.gov
Washington State Patrol Tribal Liaison (Eastern WA): Anna Olson — anna.olson@wsp.wa.gov | 360-972-0985
Washington State Patrol Tribal Liaison (Western WA): Emily Main — emily.main@wsp.wa.gov | 360-890-0150
Helplines
StrongHearts Native Helpline: 1-844-7NATIVE (1-844-762-8483) | 24/7 | StrongHearts Native Helpline
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 | 24/7
National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN): 1-800-656-4673 | 24/7