[Christine] It was my birthday.
My aunt had called my mom
and said that Racheyl had been involved in an accident out at the hunting club.
No hunter in their right mind would ever go into this rickety tree stand.
[Carolyn] You're not going to get that many bruises
in that many different places falling out of a tree.
[Graham] Any sudden, unexpected death
should be treated as a crime scene and that was not done.
[Christine] We just knew something wasn't right.
Racheyl never went into that tree stand.
She had so much to live for and so much to fight for
and that's what she was doing.
We knew it was a lie and we had to get to the bottom of it.
I practically happened to force the investigators to investigate.
I don't believe in any way that my sister would take her own life.
[Cindy] There's been no closure.
There's still been no real investigation.
[opening theme music playing]
[narrator] November 25th, 2001, Kingsland, Georgia,
bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Florida to the south.
The area is rural, heavily wooded and sparsely populated.
A paradise for anyone who loves the outdoors.
But when a 32-year-old mother is found dead at her hunting club,
the small community is suspicious
of what some want to quickly brush off as an accident.
The town loved her and the town's suffering for this loss.
I couldn't wrap my head around it.
You just don't think something like that's
going to happen to your family.
[narrator] Growing up in rural Georgia,
Racheyl Smith can't imagine living anywhere else.
She fit right in perfectly, she loved Camden County.
It was her playground.
[Carolyn] She loved it here.
She was very active.
She liked riding horses.
Hunting, fishing, you name it, she did.
[Christine] She was a petite tomboy, if you want to say.
Racheyl was very well-known and very well-liked in this small town.
[narrator] Racheyl's idyllic childhood takes a tough turn
when her father dies suddenly.
She's only 14.
She was devastated.
[Carolyn] He taught her how to hunt.
He taught her how to ride horses.
They were very close.
[narrator] With her father gone, and as the oldest child,
Racheyl takes a leadership role in the family
alongside her mom, Pat.
[Christine] She had to help Aunt Pat take care of Aaron and Brian,
and she would cook, and she'd clean
and she would go to school.
She had a large responsibility.
[narrator] In high school, Racheyl meets her future husband, Steve.
[Christine] Racheyl was smitten with Steve.
Steve was her first everything.
It was what she thought true love should've been.
They were really good together.
[narrator] June 8th, 1991,
Racheyl marries Steve and becomes Racheyl Brinson.
She soon learns her husband has special privileges in their small town.
I remember her telling me that they would get out of trouble
because Steve was cousins with the Sheriff.
[Fish] She loved him but it wasn't too long
before there started to be problems in their home.
[narrator] A few years into the marriage,
Racheyl discovers Steve does not only feel above the law,
but above his wedding vows as well.
Steve cheated on her and it really tore Racheyl up.
I do believe that Racheyl had forgave Steve,
but I think she had a hard time trusting him afterwards.
[Christine] They decided to work things out and not get a divorce,
and she thought that having a child would mend their relationship.
[babies crying]
[narrator] In October, 1999, eight years into their marriage,
Racheyl gives birth to the couples' only child, Cole.
[Fish] She lived for Cole, she really loved him,
and from whether family said
she really changed when she had Cole.
She went from this wild, uncontainable spirit to focused on her son.
Racheyl was a great mother.
She loved that little boy.
[Fish] While she was completely enamored with her baby boy,
her husband really didn't like Cole very much.
He would refer to Cole as, "it," rather than, "him."
And it was at that time that Racheyl discovered
that Steve was being unfaithful
for about the third time in their marriage.
[narrator] Steve's infidelity leads to escalating arguments.
On July 22nd, 2001,
Racheyl calls 911 to report
that Steve is suicidal and is threatening her life as well.
A few weeks later, on August 16th, they're fighting again,
and Racheyl's family is concerned for her safety.
This time they call 911.
[Jackie] I know the officer that went there,
he begged Racheyl to go and file charges against him for domestic violence
but she wouldn't do it.
I believe Racheyl was scared to press charges
because the sheriff was related to Steve.
[narrator] That fall, Steve moves out of the house
and stays in the couples' camper
at Mumford Island Hunting Club.
A few days later, on November 25th,
Racheyl drops her son off with her mother, Pat,
because she plans to pay Steve a visit at the hunting club.
So the point of going to the club was two-fold.
"I'm going to tell my husband that I want a divorce,
and then I'm going to go to the tree stand that I've carefully prepared."
So she was going out to actually hunt.
At that time, members of the club
saw that Racheyl was drinking beer,
saw that Steve was drinking beer,
and they all scattered
to different parts of the hunting club property to hunt.
[narrator] At 4:30 p.m., Racheyl and Steve,
both leave for their respective hunting stands in the woods.
[Fish] Now according to Steve, she'd said,
"You know what, I don't want to shoot out of the stand
that I have prepared, baited, sighted in my gun for.
I think I would rather go to that stand over there."
Now the stand that he's talking about here
is about a 20-year-old homemade stand,
and one that no hunter in their right mind would ever go into.
[narrator] According to Steve, at around 5:45 p.m.,
he hears a deer make a sound known as a, "blow" from his stand.
[Fish] He didn't get a shot off
and figured that, "It's now too late, really, to hunt anyway,
I'm going to get down from the stand and go get Racheyl."
He calls for her, looks for her, can't find her.
But, eventually, finds her, according to him,
face down at the bottom of this rickety tree stand
that nobody had any business being in anyway.
[narrator] At 6:04 p.m., Steve calls 911.
He says his wife is lying face down.
She doesn't have a pulse,
she's not breathing, and her eyes aren't responding to light.
The 911 operator tells Steve to begin CPR.
It was my birthday.
My aunt had called my mom
and said that Racheyl had been involved in an accident out at the hunting club.
They were going to life flight Racheyl to Jacksonville.
And while we were in the car, we got the phone call
that life flight had been called off,
and that Racheyl had been pronounced dead.
[narrator] At the news of Racheyl's death,
her family and friends gather at her mother, Pat's house in shock.
[Jackie] It was just, kind of, frantic,
but at the same, like, time flew.
People just started piling in.
Like, I don't really know how they found out so quick.
When we arrived at my aunt's house that night,
Steve was still in his hunting clothes.
He cried and he told me that him and Racheyl had been getting along a lot better,
and that he was really lost.
[narrator] Racheyl's family immediately starts questioning
how a fall from a hunting stand could kill her.
The way that the ground was out there, I mean, it was just so soggy.
There wasn't really anything around that I think that she could've hit her head on.
[narrator] On the morning of November 26th, the day after Racheyl's death,
an investigator from the Camden County Sheriff's Office,
and an investigator from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources
returned to the scene.
It wasn't much of an investigation.
There should've been suspicion.
[Jackie] Racheyl was very cautious when she hunted.
I don't think she would ever even attempt to go in that stand at all.
[narrator] That afternoon, the coroner, L.W. Bruce,
after examining Racheyl's body,
requests a complete autopsy from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
because of the history of domestic violence reports.
Dr. Lora Darrisaw is the medical examiner with the GBI.
[Fish] Dr. Darrisaw was pretty new.
And she broke, what I think, is a complete cardinal rule of doing autopsies.
She took no photos of her examination and investigations.
[somber music playing]
[narrator] Three days later, on November 29th,
Racheyl's family, full of unease, gather at her funeral.
[Carolyn] His family's on one side, our family is on the other.
And nobody talked to each other.
It was just really bad.
["Amazing Grace" Playing on bagpipes]
[Christine] Steve would sit out there and laugh
and tell jokes with his buddies.
Just not something that you expect a grieving husband to do.
[narrator] When Racheyl's family finally sees her body for the first time,
they're alarmed.
At the viewing, they told Aunt Pat not to let anyone touch the body.
So when I got there,
I walked up to see Racheyl.
And I noticed that there were a lot of injuries on her face.
She had three fingerprint bruises on the inner part of her arm.
Looked like where someone had grabbed her, forcefully.
[narrator] After Racheyl's death,
her husband's behavior continues to disturb her family.
Morning after the accident, he called her job to see
if her insurance was double if it was an accident.
[Fish] Shortly after Racheyl's death,
Steve shows up in a brand new pickup truck,
and he starts, like, spending this money
like a guy who has no control and just won the lottery.
He started calling on that insurance, like, real fast.
[narrator] On January 30th, 2002,
when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's medical examiner,
Dr. Lora Darrisaw completes Racheyl's official autopsy report,
the family notices details that clearly seem like errors.
She said there was no visible marks on her body, like scars and stuff.
Well, she'd had a melanoma removed from her arm right here
which left a pretty big, ugly mark.
[Christine] And you can see the scar,
and this doctor for some reason,
couldn't see it on her body when she did the autopsy.
[narrator] But her family's biggest issue with the report
lies in the cause and manner of death.
[Fish] Dr. Darrisaw came to the conclusion that
this indeed look like the death of a woman
that suffered blunt force trauma
as a result of falling out of a tree.
The autopsy report said she was crushed like Rice Krispies.
Falling out of a tree, you're not going to get that many bruises
in that many different places front and back.
[Christine] We asked the head investigator
how that could've possibly happened.
And he gave us the story,
"Well, Racheyl was probably traveling at such a high rate of speed
after she fell out of the tree,
that when she hit the ground," which was soft,
"That her body hit so hard that it probably flipped her over,"
at a 12 to 15-foot fall.
[narrator] In November, 2003,
Racheyl's mother hires two private investigators.
The very first mistake that was made was
taking Steven's word for the incident,
that she had fallen from that stand.
Any sudden, unexpected death
should be treated as a crime scene and that was not done.
[Ross] The scene was not processed correctly.
They didn't do any searches.
They didn't ask Steve Brinson any questions,
they didn't take his clothes.
[narrator] With private investigators on her side,
Racheyl's mother is hopeful that all her hard work will pay off.
What we knew from the beginning
was that Pat thought it was murder,
so we went with the intent to investigate and find out what it was.
Was it a fall from a tree? Was it a homicide?
And the more we investigated,
the more we determined that it was a homicide.
When I got there, it was like everyone in town knew I was there.
I would go into lunch cafe and they would all look at me.
But when I wanted to talk to these witnesses,
they all wanted to talk.
They were never interviewed by the sheriff
or the Sheriff's Department, at all.
So they wanted to tell their story.
[Christine] Law enforcement didn't interview anybody.
They didn't interview Royce Proctor.
He is the one that gave Steve a ride to Aunt Pat's house.
Royce turned to Steve and said,
"Steve, is there anybody you need to call, you know, to be with you at this time?"
[phone rings]
So he tried his dad.
The exact words that Royce said come out of his mouth when his dad answered was,
"Dad, I really [bleep] up this time, Racheyl's dead."
And Royce said,
"I almost lost it."
He said, "I was so shocked to hear that come out of his mouth."
[Ross] Blunt force trauma can come from different things,
and facial injuries can come from different things.
So instead of attributing to falling out of a tree stand,
there are other things that could do that to you.
[narrator] The private investigators
share the family's concerns about the thoroughness
of Dr. Lora Darrisaw's autopsy.
[Ross] It was a very partial, quick autopsy.
I found out later that the Sheriff's Department
had called her and told her what happened,
and she took that verbatim.
But I also found out that police officers had called
and told her about the physical abuse and the domestic problems.
And I asked her why she didn't pursue that,
she said the body had been already released.
And I asked her what would cause her to fall from a tree stand if she fell,
and she said, "She was drunk."
She had a .15 alcohol rating.
[narrator] PI Rich Graham has his doubts about the entire story.
[Graham] Racheyl never went into that tree stand.
I believe that when they left from shooting the rifles in,
they went back to Steven's camp.
And I believe that that's when
Racheyl told him that she wanted a divorce.
I believe that he's upset.
There was an altercation.
I think he also was suspicious of her
possibly having an affair with one of her coworkers.
There was a culmination of everything and he just lost it.
[Christine] He had made the comment to my Aunt Pat
that, "Racheyl makes me so mad sometimes, I could just kill her."
They were fighting, he cheated on her, he beat her up.
We just knew something wasn't right.
[narrator] The family's private eyes used their findings
to try to persuade law enforcement to reopen her case.
They approached L.W. Bruce, the coroner, who originally examined Racheyl's body.
[Graham] In my opinion, Coroner Bruce made his ruling
based largely on Steven Brinson's statement.
And we tried to approach him with information after we investigated,
to try to explain to him why we felt he should change his ruling.
And he referred something or other about,
"You damn Yankees don't come down here
and tell me how to do my work."
[narrator] Coroner Bruce did not respond to our interview request,
and has made no public statements.
Given the official refusal to take another look at the case,
Racheyl's family is left piecing it all together themselves.
Based on the timeline evidence found by their private eyes,
the injuries they witnessed at the funeral,
and what they know about Steve and Racheyl.
I believe that Steve and her got into an argument
on the way back to the hunting club.
I believe he beat her.
I believe he grabbed her by the arm and put those bruises on her.
I believe she got away from him.
I believe she ran out of the trailer, he followed her.
I believe he took the butt of the gun
and hit her so hard in the back of the head with it
that he split her from ear to ear.
And Lt. Dale Bundy's report
said that he checked the gun,
he noticed blood all over the gun,
and he did not send it for forensics,
he gave it back to Steve.
I don't even think she died underneath that tree,
I think she was moved there.
[narrator] Neither Steve Brinson nor his cousin, Former Sheriff Bill Smith,
responded to our request for an interview or statement.
Steve is not considered a suspect,
and has not been charged with anything related to this case.
While Racheyl's family lives with unanswered questions,
they continue to mourn their loss and fight for justice.
[Carolyn] It's really been rough on everybody for 20 years now,
and I think somebody, somebody needs to do something about it.
We just want some answers, you know.
[Jackie] I think that we all have been cheated out and it's unfair.
Miss Pat, she's been a different person, I think,
from the time that she heard, you know, Racheyl had passed.
The only thing she focused on was trying to prove that Steve done it.
[Carolyn] My sister, she's not in the greatest condition right now.
We'd like to see something done while she's still alive.
Racheyl was smart, she was a good person,
and she would've done a lot in her life.
She would've raised her son with love and care and tenderness.
And I would've loved to have seen
where she would've taken her life today.
I think she would've gone far.
Jessica died too soon.
And we need to understand why.
Today I call upon San Francisco District Attorney
to investigate the wrongful death of Jessica Nicole Alva.
I just couldn't have any peace.
It was like she was there waiting for me to find what was there.
She had so much to live for and so much to fight for
and that's what she was doing.
We knew it was a lie. We knew it was a lie.
And we had to get to the bottom of it.
[narrator] Born in San Bernardino, California, in 1984,
Jessica is the third of four children.
As a military family, they moved frequently
before settling in Redding, California.
I remember when they told me that I was a having a baby sister,
I was so happy.
And when she came home, like, we were inseparable, like,
we've always shared a room, we've always had same friends.
[Cindy] She would take care of all the other kids in the neighborhood.
She was everybody's favorite aunt.
She was just, like, a person that was born to care for people.
[Cindy] We had domestic violence in our home.
And when I was working, when I wasn't there,
it was mostly turned on her,
and she did everything to try to win the love of her father.
Including later picking men exactly like him.
[narrator] Jessica's caring nature follows her into motherhood.
She eventually becomes a mom of six.
But her life is not without hardship.
My sister had a lot of struggles with addiction,
and I'm not sure, if it's because our dad left
and she just wanted a man to love her
the way that she loved everybody,
and take care of her the way that she would try to take care of everybody.
She finally started to see that she wanted a whole different life,
and she started treatment.
[narrator] In 2015, Jessica moves to San Francisco
determined to start fresh for her two youngest kids.
She attends the recovery program at Friendship House.
Friendship House provides traditional behavioral health services
and recovery for native women and native men.
Jessica was really proud about her recovery.
She came to San Francisco to find her recovery at Friendship House.
In her recovery, the first thing she did
was start reaching out and helping others.
[April] She was able to work at Friendship House.
One of the things that Jessica loved doing was being at the front desk.
She was there to tell jokes, she was there to dance, listen to music.
Like, she would just be... [laughing] Be so crazy.
And just be funny and be herself.
[narrator] The native community in San Francisco
plays an important role in Jessica's recovery and life.
[singing]
[Sarah] We're Blackfoot through my grandma
and we're Yaqui through my dad.
I think when she moved to San Francisco,
that's when she more got into her culture and realized, like,
that there was more help, more love,
more freedom in being in our culture.
[April] Her children were involved in the dance classes that we had.
She would come to the community dinners.
She was also really involved with the Indian education programme that we have here.
She was really thriving with her family.
[narrator] Jessica's generosity of spirit
extends to a friend she's known since childhood, Clayton Rhoades.
[Cindy] I've know Clayton since he was a young boy.
I knew his parents.
And his grandparents and I, we were very close.
They were wonderful, wonderful people.
[Sarah] We always called each other cousins in the neighborhood community,
cousins or sisters.
And so, like, basically, he was our family.
[Cindy] She had started communicating,
writing to Clayton while he was in prison.
I just told her, you know, "Just be careful.
Sometimes people are to stay in our past."
[Cindy] He had had years of violent crimes,
other domestic violence crimes.
Yet there was no way to try to convince her
that she wasn't going to reform him,
and make him into this wonderful man.
[narrator] After Clayton's release from prison,
he moves in with Jessica and her two youngest children.
Well, I had hopes because of her strong belief in Clayton's recovery
and that he really wanted to change his life.
She really thought that
because she had gotten clean and sober and changed her life,
that she wanted to give him that opportunity.
[narrator] But there are signs of trouble from the very start.
Jessica wouldn't stay that long at the events.
And we also saw that the children, their behavior was different.
And we knew that there was something about him that was holding her.
We could see it, we started to see it.
[Cindy] I didn't expect him to cut off all communication.
She couldn't talk to her family.
We could barely get a call through.
He'd have stay on the line and listen to everything.
And so that made it very difficult to help her.
[Sarah] When it came to her not being able to talk to us,
or see us, I was scared.
[narrator] On April 2nd, 2019,
the world of Jessica's family is turned upside down.
[Cindy] In the early morning, my daughter called me
saying that Jessica was in the hospital.
We got everybody together and got on the road to San Francisco.
[narrator] As they make the long drive,
Jessica's mom pleads for information from Clayton's sister.
[Cindy] And we keep asking her,
"Something had to happen, what happened?"
She says, "I don't know, we don't know.
We just found her lying on the floor.
And she was non-responsive,
and then Clayton got on her and tried doing CPR and it didn't work.
And so, and we called 911."
Finally got just outside of San Francisco,
I got a call from the doctor.
And he said, "Well, it's really hard,
'cause I need to tell you that she tried to hang herself."
I was in disbelief to hear that.
I don't believe in any way that my sister
was the type of person that would take her own life.
And I don't believe for one minute
that she would've ever given up on her kids, ever.
We knew that she was on life support.
But we weren't really prepared
to see what we saw when we walked into her room.
It was horrific.
Maybe because she was silent and she was never silent.
She's always, she would walk in,
she'd be smiling and laughing.
[Sarah] Her head was very swollen.
And I asked the doctors why her head looked like that and they didn't know.
[Cindy] My younger daughter was holding her hand,
and she said, "Mom, it's, like, bruised and it's swollen."
So then we looked at the rest of her body, and it was just
bruises and swelling all over her whole body.
[narrator] As family and friends struggle to reconcile
what they see in front of them,
with the story they'd been told,
they take pictures of all of the bruises and swelling.
[Cindy] And then the doctor came and said he wanted to take us into this room
to talk to us about her and what had happened to her.
He told us the story of, the paramedics had brought her in,
and she'd tried to hang herself
from a windowsill in her bedroom.
[narrator] But the family knows the windowsill is only two feet off the ground.
Jessica's mom shows the doctor the photos she's taken.
And he's just, like, just totally dumbfound
and he said, "I can't believe that."
And he goes, "They brought her in strictly as a hanging,
and so we were completely focused on resuscitating her that way."
So he went in and he reexamined her.
And came back in and said, you know, "This is really bad
because there's so much trauma to her head
that that maybe what's caused the unconsciousness."
[narrator] Jessica's mom stays at her bedside
desperate for more information.
The other family members go to Jessica's apartment.
Clayton's sister and cousin refuse to let them in.
[Cindy] The police arrived and tried to get them to let them in.
And they refused,
until, finally, the police had a whole SWAT team there surrounding the building.
[narrator] By now, hours have passed and Clayton is gone.
His sister and cousin are still there.
The police went in first, they wouldn't let us in,
they got Clayton's family out,
and they said the whole house smelled like bleach.
[narrator] When Jessica's sisters are granted access to her apartment,
they discover that her jewelry and bank cards are missing.
Her children's social security documents and piggy banks
also appeared to have been stolen.
Meanwhile, in the hospital, Cindy watches Jessica fight for her life.
[Cindy] During the night,
I just had this overwhelming feeling
that I wasn't sitting there alone.
Just all I could think of was that
every other mother of every daughter that's suffered through domestic violence
who were part of our missing and murdered indigenous women,
they were all there.
I could feel their pain and their presence.
I knew Jessica would want me to use that.
To speak to any other women out there.
And so, I put the pictures that I had taken of her
and posted it on my own personal Facebook page.
[narrator] The post is read and shared tens of thousands of times.
The next day, the San Francisco police show up at the hospital.
I said, "Well, so are you going to do the investigation?"
They said, "Well, we weren't but there were so many calls.
The Captain sent us out and said they had seen your Facebook posts."
And they told me they took it down.
And that I was not allowed to post anything else about Jessica.
[narrator] According to the family,
statements made to police by Jessica's boyfriend at the scene
tell a different story than what the family is hearing thus far.
In this version, her boyfriend says that Jessica hung herself
in her closet with a pair of suspenders.
[Cindy] He told the investigators
that he heard some kind of noise in the bedroom,
and that he went in and found her hanging in the closet
on her knees with her face six inches from the floor.
And that he had cut her down.
[narrator] He's not questioned further
and because he'd given the police a false name
he's not taken into custody even though he's in violation of his parole conditions.
A very customary thing for the responding officers to do
is to gather the names and, very often,
through the presentation of identification,
the identities of anybody who is at the scene.
The officer doesn't know
whether they're potential witnesses, they could be suspects.
[April] San Francisco Police Department failed Jessica.
San Francisco Police Department failed our community.
How are you going to go and believe a felon?
This person is on parole who has a lengthy background of violence.
You're going to believe him that she committed suicide?
I knew immediately when I heard that, that that was not true.
[narrator] Doctors tell Jessica's mom, Cindy,
that the damage to Jessica's brain
and the continued swelling mean that she will not regain consciousness.
I know she was fighting for her life, for her kids
and for her to leave this earth,
it was, yeah, it was pretty hard to take.
We got Jessica's kids to her to say goodbye
because those kids were her world.
And it was devastating, but after the kids left,
they gave a chance for me and brother, my sister and my mom to sit in there.
And we sat in there, and we held her hand sang songs to her.
Until she was gone.
Jessica's death
was devastating.
It's painful and sad.
And as a mother, you just keep feeling your child all the time.
Cindy took upon herself to do an investigation
because she wanted justice for Jessica.
She knew her daughter.
She knew that her daughter did not commit suicide.
I practically happened to force the investigators to investigate.
[narrator] Information from the children themselves fills out more of the picture.
Jessica's daughter was in her room,
she says she heard screaming.
She tells her grandma what happened next.
[Cindy] She said, "I looked out my door,
and I could see him pulling her by the hair in the hallway."
She said, "And then, I couldn't go out there 'cause we're not allowed to,
so I had to close the door and go back in my room."
[narrator] Multiple reports of suspected and observed violence were made
including one to police on April 1st, 2019,
the day before Jessica ended up in the hospital.
The kids were at the park with Jessica and her boyfriend.
There was an ATM at a store close by.
[Cindy] Clayton was really angry and telling Jessica he wanted money,
he needed money, so he had grabbed her purse,
and then, he took off over to the machine,
and because there wasn't any, it wouldn't give him any money.
So then, he became very furious,
came back over to her and the children.
Began hitting her and yelling at her and pulled her by the hair
and drug her from there over to the ATM machine,
and the kids were following,
and then she was yelling at the kids,
telling them to go back, to go get help.
And there was a young couple there,
there was a couple that was walking in the park,
so they called the police, the police came
but Clayton had already ran away.
And so they interviewed the people
and just did, like, an incident report on it and then that was it.
[narrator] The police don't pursue Clayton.
Jessica and the kids are left to handle the aftermath on their own.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
the murder rate for native women
can be up to ten times higher than the national average.
And the vast majority of those murders are unsolved.
As Cindy waits for the report from the medical examiner
and pushes for the police to investigate further,
she returns to Jessica's apartment.
[Cindy] I knew that the truth,
and the evidence to the truth to what had happened there was there.
And I just couldn't have any peace,
it was like she was not at peace.
She was there waiting for me to find what was there.
[narrator] Cindy follows up with everyone she can think of to press for action.
At night, she sleeps on a blow-up mattress in her daughter's apartment.
[Cindy] I measured, all of the measurements of the closet.
From the rod to the floor,
from the top shelf to the floor.
And then I went by what the details of what he said happened.
From the floor to the rod is five feet high.
Jessica was 5'.3", 5'.4".
There's not enough leeway to hang yourself there.
[Sarah] Because my mom would never give up,
and she kept haunting the police,
they finally went over the body cams, then came back,
because they were looking for something
they had discovered in Jessica's room.
[Cindy] It was a month later.
Investigator, Sergeant from the Special Victims Unit called me
and asked if I could still access the apartment.
I said, "Yes, I'm staying here."
I let them in.
And then, right away, could tell that
they were searching for something specific.
And they said that they had seen the videos of the bodycams
that the police officers who were initially on the scene.
And in those videos, the officers walk into the bedroom,
and it shows on the video,
this very long strip of reddish brown rough leather lying on the floor.
[narrator] It wasn't recovered from the initial crime scene.
And despite looking everywhere,
the police and Cindy still can't find it.
When Cindy finally gets the medical examiner's report a month later,
she understands why they were looking so hard for it.
[Cindy] In the autopsy report,
it says that on her neck there is fibers
from a reddish brown rough leather that's embedded in her skin.
[narrator] The medical examiner's report
also notes the numerous bruises all over Jessica's body.
Before Cindy even has time to finish reading it,
she receives a call from one of the police officers on the case.
[Cindy] He goes, "Well, I just wanted to let you know that since the autopsy,
it says on there that the cause of death is hanging,
then the case is closed,
and there's no further investigation."
And I said,
"It's closed for you but it's not closed for me.
I'll continue on until we have the truth."
[narrator] With the police declaring Jessica's case closed,
Cindy continues searching for answers.
[Cindy] Since I believe what happened to her happened in the bathroom,
the towel racks were broken off,
the shower doors, the runners, they were broken there.
There was damage like that all over it.
[narrator] The San Francisco Police Department declined to comment for this story
saying that the case is open but inactive.
Clayton Rhoades was arrested for parole violations on April 7th, 2019.
He has not faced any charges in connection with Jessica's death.
[Sarah] It's hard trying to move on
when we don't know what happened to Jessica.
We just, kind of, move forward,
we can't move on.
[singing native American song]
What our family wants is justice for Jessica,
and, especially, for her children.
And one day they're going to look at her death certificate
that says, "Hanged herself," on it.
And they shouldn't have to live with that,
because they lived with the violence and they know what happened.
[Sarah] I have taken in Jessica's children, the two youngest ones.
I just want to try to start over
and make sure that these kids have a better life.
[narrator] Native American communities have been calling for action for years
to address the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women.
Report after report document the failure of law enforcement,
the justice system and society, at large, to prevent this tragic loss.
Jessica's family continues to fight for justice
remembering every day what they've lost.
[Cindy] She'd be away, soon as she'd come through the door,
she'd come running through the door, and say, "I'm here, Mommy, I'm here,"
and run and grab me and hug me.
Say, "I love you."
And no matter what was going on that day,
no matter what troubles or problems or anything I was having,
it just lit up my whole life,
just to see that smile on her face, and that light in her eyes.
And it was needed.
It was needed by not just me and our family members,
but for all the other people that...
She was touching their lives, all over.