A Yaqui woman’s disappearance in Portland exposed policing flaws in MMIP cases

This story originally appeared on Underscore Native News.

Content warning: This story contains graphic details about violence and death, as well as information about suicide and missing and murdered Indigenous people. Resources are available for trauma survivors at the Strong Hearts Native Helpline.

Last fall, things were going great for Wilma Acosta, an unenrolled Pascua Yaqui woman. She had recently landed the job of her dreams. She moved to Portland for the role and began to build her life there, including a new Dalmatian she lovingly named Nasferatu. She played the piano, loved to draw and had dreams of traveling to Paris. According to her family, she radiated joy and felt optimistic and accomplished.

Then she disappeared, and Portland police told a different story — one her family disputes.

On Nov. 25, Acosta and two friends from out of town went out dancing. Her friends left Acosta at the bar in the early hours of Nov. 26, about 20 minutes before she left. She wasn’t seen alive by her family again. On Jan. 2, deputies assigned to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office River Patrol Unit located Acosta’s body in the Willamette River, near Cathedral Park.

Before she moved from San Jose to Portland, Acosta and her family were close. They’d go to comedy shows and concerts and spend time together as a family. Once she moved, she still spoke with them daily. So when she went missing and Portland police shared publicly that Acosta had suicidal ideations without consulting or clarifying with them, the family immediately contested the claim.

“That’s a lie,” Acosta’s mother, Wilma Acosta Sr., told Underscore Native News + ICT. “She was happy, and she was a go-getter.”

Acosta’s case fits a pattern identified in a 2020 report by Oregon State Police aimed at addressing gaps in police investigations of missing and murdered Indigenous people. The study was informed by community listening sessions with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the University of Oregon Many Nations Longhouse, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon State University Native American Longhouse Eena Haws, and the Burns Paiute Tribe.

“[The police] heard exactly what we told them they would hear,” Oregon Rep. Tawna Sanchez, Shoshone-Bannock, Ute and Carrizo, who sponsored the bill that mandated the OSP report, told Underscore Native News + ICT. “Suicides are not often investigated, because they’re assumed to be suicides rather than, possibly, murders.”

Suicide reporting

When a detective with the Portland Police Bureau spoke with one of Wilma Acosta’s friends from out of town who went dancing with her the night she disappeared, Manny Luna, police asked Luna if Acosta had depression, according to her brother, Michael Acosta. Luna responded by saying, “Yeah, but everyone does. Everyone gets sad. Everyone gets depressed.”

Luna told Acosta’s brother the police blew his words out of proportion.

“I was so heated about this because day one [the police] just wrote it off as [suicide],” Michael Acosta, unenrolled Pascua Yaqui, told Underscore Native News + ICT.

Luna did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In cases like Acosta’s, reporting the possibility of mental health needs of a missing person could highlight the need for a non-law enforcement response. But it can also lead to stigmatization of the missing person, according to Pamela End of Horn, national suicide prevention consultant for Indian Health Services Suicide Prevention and Care Program.

“The risks and benefits of sharing this information should be carefully weighed and in consideration of the family’s wishes,” said End of Horn, Oglala Sioux Tribe. “The disadvantages of sharing information is the potential to generate negative public commentary as well as prompt fatigue in empathy or reduce compassion for the missing person.”

End of Horn went on to explain that every case is unique and releasing information can help. But she reiterated that the family and each unique situation must be considered.

Jason Renaud, board secretary of the Mental Health Association of Portland, went a step further. He coordinates the Law & Mental Health Conference and the Mental Health Alliance, which advises courts and government agencies in relation to mental illness and addiction.

Renaud explained that if a person is in recovery from addiction or struggling with mental illness but has the potential to overcome them, sharing this information publicly is harmful to their long-term recovery.

“Placing that jacket on in a public way is detrimental to their recovery and their anonymity,” Renaud told Underscore Native News + ICT.

In 2021, the risk of suicide for Native people was double that of the general population. In 2019, suicide was the second leading cause of death for American Indian/Alaska Natives. The American Academy of Family Physicians created policing standards due to the growing number of deadly interactions with law enforcement and the harmful impacts on individual and community health. These standards consider the systemic health inequities experienced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color. But these standards do not include information related to reporting missing persons who may be going through a mental health crisis. This is true for most police policies that have standards in place for responding to mental health crisis cases.

According to Mike Benner, public information manager for the Portland Police Bureau, PPB has not created a procedural document that addresses what to share publicly when a missing person may be experiencing a mental health crisis. Generally, Benner said, he and his team speak with detectives and together they decide what information from each investigation should be disseminated publicly.

In Acosta’s case, Benner said police thought it would help their investigation if they told the public she was suicidal.

“This information was shared with media in hopes of getting the public to take the case seriously and push any and all tips to investigators,” Benner told Underscore Native News + ICT.

But in Acosta’s case, neither of the friends that the police say mentioned depression shared that Acosta was, or has ever been suicidal, according to her family and Acosta’s case file.

Police declined to specify the exact origin of their claim that Acosta was suicidal, instead directing UNN + ICT to request the case file. Our publication submitted the first public records request for those documents seven months ago which was denied because the case was still open. In the second UNN + ICT public records request, the second half of the case file is still pending.

Community action

Acosta’s mother and father traveled to Portland to search for their daughter on Nov. 27, the day after she disappeared. By then, their daughter hadn’t shown up for work the next morning and it was clear she was missing. A cousin of Acosta’s father found out they were in town and needed support so a dinner was organized with the family and other local Native community members. Together, the group gathered to brainstorm the best way to begin the search.

They created flyers, spoke with Acosta’s friends, with employees at Dixie Tavern (where Acosta had gone dancing the night she went missing), and with unhoused people in the area where the bar is located. Adam George, Coeur d’Alene Tribe, and his brother Sean searched along the banks of the Willamette River. They took a kayak along the river from downtown Portland to see if her body washed up onshore. George would kayak on the west side of the river and his brother would kayak along the east side.

George also spoke with a previous employer, Sevenson Environmental, and the company agreed to comb the shore in their tugboats from downtown to their main building a couple of miles away. Another group of volunteers with a boat detected what one volunteer described as “human shaped” at the bottom of the river on Dec. 17, 2023.

“We talked to the police and they said, ‘That can’t be right. We check that all the time,’” Brandie Dieterle Raddadi, Cherokee Nation, told Underscore Native News + ICT. “[Portland police] didn’t see that there was any concerns to really look for her. They seemed pretty resistant to spending time or resources for her.”

According to Raddadi, it took police several days to respond to the information about a possible body in the river near where her family and volunteers believed Acosta would have gone in the water. As a survivor of sex trafficking and someone who works to support survivors of domestic and sexual violence, that was alarming to Raddadi.

When UNN + ICT asked about the family’s concerns, police said to check the case file for more details. So far, they have provided only a portion of those documents. When asked what the policy is for sending out boats or divers Benner, spokesperson for the Portland Police Bureau shared, “We do not have a policy when it comes to working with partner agencies to search bodies of water. The experienced detectives in our Missing Persons Unit use their best judgment to determine when requesting assistance is appropriate.”

According to Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office River Patrol Unit representative Deputy John Plock, there was an extensive search for Acosta on behalf of PPB using sonar scanning technology on Dec. 1, 2023. Plock shared that they searched along the entire length of the seawall from the area near the Burnside Bridge to the Fremont Bridge, making multiple passes. According to Plock, PPB contacted the county river patrol unit on Nov. 26 when Acosta went missing. From Nov. 26 to Dec. 1, river patrol deputies searched for Acosta when they were in the area where she went missing on their regular patrols. But the agency never deployed their dive team.

“A dive team would only deploy shortly after a person missing in the water entered the water and when a specific entry point into the water is known,” Plock said in an email to UNN + ICT.

The Acosta family and advocates also shared with UNN + ICT that they don’t believe PPB prioritized locating and investigating video footage of Acosta’s disappearance.

“[The police] weren’t interested in looking at the footage of the place that she was at before she left,” Raddadi said. “It appeared that somebody might have been drugging her. There might have been something put in her drink. She was seen intoxicated walking away and because of that, it was sort of just sort of brushed off. It just really felt like they were just trying to [go through] the motions but it didn’t really seem like there was any help or support.”

On Dec. 1, Portland police collected surveillance video from Dixie Tavern showing the night Acosta went missing, according to police documents. That was five days after she went missing.

George had similar things to say. He spent a lot of time with Acosta’s family — not just searching for her, but having dinner with them and spending time with them during the holidays hoping to lift their spirits. George went bowling with the family and helped them move Acosta’s car so it wouldn’t be towed.

“The communication with the police was horrible,” George told Underscore Native News + ICT. “[Acosta’s parents] were just really disappointed with the way that the police kept them out of the loop.”

Acosta’s family and community supporters also started a social media awareness campaign for Acosta. The campaign garnered attention from folks raising awareness about the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Supporters organized a march in December that followed the Willamette River waterfront through downtown Portland to PPB’s central precinct and City Hall.

“After we did that march and stirred up a bunch of negative media for the police, is when the police finally stepped up and let [the family] come to the [police station] and show them the video of Wilma walking from the bar, past the Oregon store, out onto the waterfront,” George said. “The police kept all of that footage and information and didn’t talk to the family at all, which I thought was pretty disrespectful. That whole situation and the interaction they had with them was pretty ugly until right at the end.”

Missing and murdered

For Michael Acosta, Wilma Acosta’s older brother, connecting with families of other missing or murdered Indigenous people was eye-opening.

“Hearing from the families of other murdered and missing women out there, it’s the same thing, [the police] just assume it’s a runaway or they killed themselves. And then some of these girls were actually murdered and they’re just unsolved murders,” Acosta said. “Talking to the other moms, it’s typical for the detectives, and I guess the police out there to just write these women off.”

A 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute detailing the MMIWG crisis across urban areas in the United States reflects the pattern Acosta shared. The report details cases in Alaska classified as a suicide even though they had been reopened as a homicide, and another classified as an overdose “when her body had been moved and disposed of suspiciously.”

Acosta’s body was found on Jan. 2, by deputies assigned to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office River Patrol Unit. They located a body in the Willamette River near Cathedral Park, about 7 miles downriver from where a volunteer tugboat radar system detected a “human-shaped” object at the bottom of the river 16 days prior. The medical examiner positively identified the body as Wilma Acosta and observed no signs of foul play, according to the medical examiners report. Acosta was found along the river inlets George had been searching.

“If she was like murdered, or raped or anything, [the police] wasted so much time,” Acosta’s brother said.

He believes any evidence that may have been found early on was washed away by the time she surfaced.

“I just feel that since day one we never got the help that a woman deserves,” Acosta’s brother said. “Feeling like a second-class citizen. From the beginning they tried to say she was in the water but they never sent divers out there. It was like pulling teeth for us to even get a boat or divers out there. You just see the bias.”

Acosta’s body was found on Jan. 2. According to Acosta’s mother, Wilma Acosta Sr., the police told her she did not need to identify Acosta’s body because they identified her body through her tattoos. Acosta’s mother shared with UNN + ICT that she was warned by Omega Funeral and Cremation Service employees not to lift the white sheet that was placed over her daughter’s body because her body was in two pieces and her face would be unrecognizable.

“I’m really sad, so I didn’t question why she was in two pieces,” Acosta’s mom, Wilma Acosta Sr. said.

Acosta’s family and the volunteers that had become like family, held a small ceremony at OFCS just before Acosta was cremated. None of them believe Acosta took her own life.

“All I know is that she loved her life,” Acosta Sr. said. “She loved us, and we loved her.”

Underscore is a nonprofit collaborative reporting team in Portland focused on investigative reporting and Indian Country coverage. It is supported by foundations, corporate sponsors and donor contributions. Follow Underscore on Facebook and X.