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| Former Colville Tribal Police Officer David Finley |
When he had the
chance to buy a piece of history — the shell of a light green patrol
boat used to issue a citation to a county officer, which contributed to
the tribe regaining its rights to enforce law on its land — he didn’t
hesitate to make an offer.
“This boat was used to save our water rights,” he says, to give back “our jurisdiction on the reservation.”
When Finley started with the Colville Tribes in 1972, the issue had been escalating. It had been seven years since the Colville Business Council, then under the pressure of termination by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, requested the state of Washington assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over the Colville Reservation. Law enforcement responsibilities fell into the hands of Ferry and Okanogan counties.
The decision evolved into a state game warden, based out of Republic, patrolling reservation waters looking to ticket non-Indian fishermen. At the time, a fisherman would have needed licenses from the state and tribe.
As an officer and tribal member, Finley recalls feeling insulted by the state's reign over the Tribe.
“They were telling us they had jurisdiction,” he says, “and we had no jurisdiction over non-members fishing on our reservation.”
A sitting Colville Business Council which included Lucy Covington and Al Aubertin, two people Finley greatly admired, were dedicated to winning it back for the tribe.
“That didn’t sit so well” with them, Finley says. “They said, ‘We gotta fix that.’ At that time the council was very good at taking care of things. They told the reservation attorneys what they wanted and it got done.”
But what could they do?
In order for a case to reach federal court, Finley says, a strategy was put in place for the tribe to formally cite the state officer for applying law outside his jurisdiction.
A game warden issuing a citation to a fellow game warden? According to Finley, the action was organized by both parties, with himself writing the citation. Each side was confident they’d win the case in court.
“We thought we had the best shot in the world,” Finley recalls. “We thought we would win. This is a federally-recognized reservation. We’re recognized as a sovereign nation. ... We have jurisdictions over ourselves. No one else comes in here and tries to enforce law on our reservation. We were here before the state was here.”
Finley says because the Tribe was federally-recognized, the issue skipped past state court and onto district court.
None of the case materials mentions the citation of the other officer. Most stories from this incident refer to a 1975 incident involving a state officer arresting “several non-Indians fishing on the reservation.” Finley says the citation wasn’t publicized.
Once the issue reached district court, in 1975, each side traded blows. An initial ruling to do away with requiring dual fishing permits, state and tribal, on tribal land sided with the tribes, which resulted in a temporary restraining order being placed on state Fish and Wildlife.
The state followed by taking the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in February 1976. There, it was ruled that Colville tribal fishing laws were too vague and jurisdiction was returned to the state.
The tribes didn’t back down. A month later, the Colvilles, behind then-councilman Jac Charbonneau, who headed the fish and wildlife committee, began planning to resubmit their case as an answer to the overturning.
The Tribe felt it had not made enough of a case to specifically assert its jurisdictional rights. It changed its tribal fish and wildlife code to remedy the criticisms outlined in the court decision. It would then ask for a declaratory judgment in its favor to re-affirm tribal jurisdiction.
In 1979, the tribe argued that “losing this case would harm the Indians. Enforcing state fishing laws on the reservation clearly would have a chilling effect on tourism. We’d like to eliminate this two-permit system.”
The argument was enough to win over U.S. District Judge Jack E. Tanner, who signed a preliminary injunction in support of the Tribe, stating, “applying state law to non-Indians would put away the tribe’s tourist industry. This would put the Indians out of pocket economically.”
“Non-Indians would have become political pawns of the Game Commission in this attempted power play,” Charbonneau said, “but, the injunction protects everyone.”
“We knew we were correct in our right to jurisdiction on reservation land, and the ruling proves our point,” then CBC chairman Al Aubertin said in a press release.
Though the state appealed again, the Colvilles won their right to law and natural resource enforcement back. It was an issue that could have set a national precedent. “The case has nationwide significance in the hotly fought battle for tribal jurisdiction,” a Spokesman-Review article read.
It was Finley’s proudest moment on the force.
* * *
But even his role in the fishing jurisdiction case couldn’t stop the nightmares Finley suffered from an earlier incident. He's spent decades trying to get past one specific day: August 27, 1973 — the day he witnessed his fellow officer Roy Bradshaw being killed by childhood friend Larry Lemery.
The Finleys and Lemerys spent quality time together, Finley recalls. Larry was Dave’s older brother Rusty’s age, about 8 years older. “We’d go (to the Lemerys) for breakfasts after church every Sunday,” Finley says. “His aunty lived over there in Nespelem; I knew her very well.”
Once, the Finleys relied on the Lemerys, who were at that time in Seattle, for shelter for a three- to four-month period, he said. The dynamic had changed a bit as Finley's generation became adults, but both families didn’t forget their close bond. As Larry got older, Finley says it was apparent that he “at the time, was a little bit, how do you say, had mental health problems. He was out of prison and stuff and had to take pills to try to maintain himself.”
Finley guesses that Larry had went off his medication that August.
In the days prior to the shooting, Finley received a call that Lemery was last seen on top of Bridge Creek with a rifle. “People seen him there in his socks,” Finley recalls.
A community member approached Finley when Lemery was spotted again. “There’s a guy on Cache Creek standing in his socks, dressed in black, has a rifle and is very suspicious,” Finley recalls hearing.
“I pulled up,” Finley remembers. “I was gonna put my gun on and didn’t. I just thought I would leave it in my pickup. I walked up to (Larry). He was raising his gun down and back up. And he says, ‘Hey Dave, how you doin’?’”
“Good,” Finley recalls responding. “What you doing over here? People are wondering what you’re doing.”
“Oh,” Lemery responds according to Finley. “I’m hunting. Got a deer. I’m over here with my uncle.”
Finley felt something was suspicious about his statements. “I knew that there was no other road on that side so maybe I missed something.”
He left Lemery looking for the road to verify his statement, only to find nothing. By the time he returned, his childhood friend had disappeared.
A meeting was held at the Tribal Administration building afterwards where Lemery’s aunt, Colville Business Councilwoman Elsie Picard, was present. She expressed concern for returning to her Owhi Flats home, knowing her nephew — who knew where she lived — was lingering in the area.
“She says, ‘I want to go home and I am afraid to go home. I don’t want to see him because I’m scared,’” Finley says. “They pointed at me. ‘You go see if he’s there and Roy, you go with him.’ So we decided to go up and see if he was there and Elsie decided to follow us.”
* * *
When Finley and Bradshaw approached Picard’s Nespelem residence, they looked for cowboy boot prints in the driveway. Finley says there were reports that Lemery was seen at the local tavern the day before wearing a pair.
“I looked down on the road that goes into the ranch where we went,” Finley says. “It wasn’t cowboy boots, it was waffle stompers.
“We says, ‘Well that’s not cowboy boots.’ So we went on in. When we got up to the ranch, all the sudden Elsie stopped way back there. We got there and looked around and right in front of the house you could tell a car pulled up and someone was standing there talking to someone in the rig.”
Finley recalls seeing these same waffle-stomper tracks all around the vehicle.
“We don’t know what that’s all about, but whoever it was was standing here talking,” he recalls thinking. “So we said, ‘Let’s go in and check this house out so Elsie could come in and be OK.’”
They headed in without a shotgun, “which we should have had,” Finley recalls. “I had one in my vehicle but I didn’t bring it with me. I had my (.38 special) with me and Roy had his.”
Finley and Bradshaw made their ways inside, into the kitchen area of Picard’s home.
“About that time, Roy said, ‘I’ll go right, you go left,’” Finley recalls. “I says, ‘OK, sure, I’ll do that.’”
Bradshaw went through the kitchen area while Finley began checking bedrooms on the left. Finley recalls seeing a small door off to the right, where Bradshaw was heading — a room he would later find out was a bathroom.
Finley peered into the first room, which he noticed had a chimney. He looked back to see Roy approaching the bathroom. As he rushes in to inspect the room, he hears a loud bang.
“I go, ‘Oh shit, he’s here,’” Finley recalls. “So I whipped around. I didn’t see Roy and all the sudden I see Larry coming out from that door.”
Finley, seeing the former family friend, yells at Lemery.
“Larry! Larry! Larry!” he recalls yelling.
He felt comfortable confronting the childhood friend wielding a rifle. Lemery continued and hid near couches in the living room.
Finley recalls demanding Lemery to stop trying to defend himself.
“Larry! Knock it off now! Stop that!”
Bradshaw was no where in sight. Lemery stood up and took off toward Finley, directing his rifle at him. “I backed off and I knelt down and he was coming right at me," Finley recalls, "and I says, ‘I’m sorry Mary (Larry’s mother)’ and I just started popping. I popped off six rounds in less than three seconds; it was that quick.”
Finley had shot Lemery twice in the upper body while backing into a room.
“I went and jacked my shells out and put one shell in,” Finley recalls. “I listened. I could hear something moving around out there. I listened and I put in a few more. I listened. I filled my gun. And I sat there and as I was listening I was wondering where Roy was at.”
Upon reloading, he went back out to the living room and kitchen area only to see his fellow officer down on the ground. Finley didn’t get much of a look as “about that time, Larry’s coming back in into the door there.”
Finley says he wanted to help Bradshaw, who was laying on the ground grunting from a shot to the chest. Bradshaw was dying fast, as his gums were turning white, Finley recalls.
But Lemery’s presence stopped him. He thought about shooting Lemery but “I couldn’t bring myself to shoot him," Finley says. "That was the deal."
Instead, he barraged Lemery with words. “What the hell did you do!? What the fuck you do that for!?”
Lemery repeatedly dropped his gun toward Finley, he recalls. “Every time he would, I’d cuss him. 'Don’t you do that!'”
Finally, Finley tells Lemery, “I’ve got to do something about Roy. You decide what you’re going to do.”
Lemery then lowered his rifle once more, says Finley. He was pushed back into a room, where he closed the door.
While inside, Lemery began throwing pots and pans at the door to try to mimic the sound of gunshots, Finley recalls.
“I thought that was pretty funny,” Finley says.
As he sat idle, Finley recalled thinking about how he could have missed so many times at that range. “I was questioning my gun. I qualified as almost distinguished, a point or two off. We had just bought the guns. We had round nose ammo, no hollow points. I was starting to doubt myself.”
If Lemery opened the door, Finley was determined to shoot him. But Lemery wasn’t the aggressor in that situation, Finley recalls.
Instead, a vehicle approached. It was Picard. Lemery went out to greet her.
“She saw him and just cleared out,” Finley recalls. “So I was left there with Larry moving around on me."
As Finley sat with his back against a wall, he could hear Lemery settle in on the other side.
He thought, “All I gotta do is pull my gun up and start blasting that wall; I bet I’d hit him six out of six.”
But, once again, the family history prohibited him from taking more shots.
“It was because I knew him; I knew the parents,” Finley says. “I said I’d like to take him alive if I could. The way this situation’s happening; it’s not good. He’ll likely kill me. It was my decision. I decided not to finish him off and I sat there for probably an hour waiting for help.”
Fellow officers Tim Wapato, Ron Toulou and Matt Boyd were outside, unaware of everything that had transpired in the house, Finley says.
“They pulled out in the yard and they stood there. They was standing around looking and I go, ‘Aw, shit, they’re gonna get shot,’” Finley recalls.
Frantically, Finley began rapping the window until it broke. He then shot up into the air as a warning.
Over time, more vehicles pulled in, Finley recalls. “Once or twice I think I heard Larry shoot. I guess he shot at the refrigerator.”
About an hour and a half goes by before his growing support makes a move, Finley recalls. He estimates 75 officers came from all different jurisdictions.
“You come out now Larry or we’re coming in!” Finley heard over a megaphone.
Moments later, as he sat there, Finley heard a large boom and hiss.
“Gas was coming out in between the wall,” he recalls. “It didn’t come in my room, thank God, or I woulda been bait. I think they would have shot anything that came out that window.”
A few more minutes passed before he recalled hearing the megaphone again. “Larry, we’re going to give you one more last chance! You come out!”
In that instance all Finley could hear was silence. “(Larry) didn’t move. He didn’t say nothing.”
Another smoke bomb came a minute or two later, Finley says.
For the first time, he hears Lemery speak:
“Mother! Help me!”
Lemery got on his feet and headed outside. Finley could hear him yelling and screaming from inside the room he was positioned.
At the window of the room, Finley soon sees Toulou and Boyd.
“Dave? Is that you?” one of them says.
“Yeah, it’s me," Finley recalls responding. 'Will you help me out this damn window?”
Finley, who took off his boots, went to his fellow officers. He could hear Wapato yelling, “Who in the hell shot (Lemery)?!”
“I did,” Finley replied back emphatically. “See what he did to Roy?”
Officers stripped Finley of his gun. He responded he’d like to go take some calming medication.
“I said I wanted ‘edge’,” Finley recalls. “They wanted me to calm down and they gave me some pills.”
As he was being hauled to the hospital, Lemery’s father was at the end of the driveway.
“He asked me, ‘What happened?’” Finley recalls. “I told him ‘I’m sorry but I seen what he did.”
After Finley was released from the hospital and he returned to Inchelium, he drove to his older brother’s house.
“I got some whiskey and got drunker than shit,” he says. “(The pills) didn’t go well with my booze.”
In the days that followed, Finley attended Bradshaw’s funeral — one of the biggest he’d ever seen.
“They had shit, two, three, four hundred cops there,” he recalls. “They were marching up and down the main road of Omak and stuff. I ended up blubbering like a little kid.”
Finley broke down watching the Bradshaw family mourn. “I just couldn’t handle it," he recalls. "I couldn’t bring (Roy) home with me. And it just tore me up.”
Because of Lemery's gunshot wounds, which were deemed ‘critical’ by Mid-Valley hospital in Omak, court was held as he lay in his hospital room, Finley recalls. “He just sat there and listened."
* * *
Lemery, who died at age 72 on July 4, 2016, spent the remainder of his life under lock and key. Finley saw the funeral announcement posted in the Inchelium community and felt emotional. “I felt sorry for him, real bad,” he says. “The rest of his life was in that place and he had to die there. I felt bad for that. But my hatred for him left a long time ago.”
Hatred that stemmed from that night caused his family to suffer, Finley says. When it first happened, I’d think about (Bradshaw’s death) 1,000 times a day. I’d try to make it go away; it never went away.”
“(Thinking about that experience) damn near killed me a few times. I went to bed with a gun in my hand ready to (commit suicide),” he says. “The only thing that saved me was my kids. My kids saved me.”
To this day, Finley says, “it comes up now and then. But I try to bury the past where it belongs.”
What did David Finley think about when the memory would come back?
At times he blamed himself for not killing Larry.
“But what would it have done?” Finley says. “Roy was already dying or dead already. The shell he shot him with, a 22-250, exploded in his heart and all they found was fragments of the shell. Blew his heart up.”
Other times he regrets shooting him at all.
“(Larry) was coming at me. I had to ... He wouldn’t stop with that rifle. When he was coming at me I had to. I didn’t want to. It was the worst thing I ever had to do was shoot a man. I’m glad he didn’t die.”
Some instances he’s thought about what would have happened had he went Roy’s way.
“I was gonna go that way but Roy decided to go that way,” Finley says. “He says, ‘I’ll go right.’”
He says the dynamic between the Finleys and Lemerys changed after the incident.
“They weren’t mad at me but yet you feel a bit of a tension there,” Finley says. "They’d talk to me and stuff. But you could see it bothered 'em. Because it bothered me. It’s hard to kill somebody when you know them as a friend.”
He’s avoided memorial events for Bradshaw in the years that have followed. “I felt bad that I couldn’t bring Roy back to his kids, and I didn’t want to be remembered for that so I didn’t go.”
Roy Bradshaw is one of 110 tribal officers who have been slain in the line of duty nationwide. In 1998, he was posthumously awarded the Washington State Attorney General’s Medal of Honor.
Finley remained on the force through the early 80s and a couple stints later on. All in all, he worked about 12 years as an officer for the Colville Confederated Tribes.
He’s planning to get his green boat back out on the water in the coming years. He knows it will bring back a sense of pride he held for his years on the force.
“The seats are gone, motors gone, controls are gone; I want to get it back running,” Finley says. “I want to be able to cruise the lake. I won’t have the authority or nothin’ but — by God — we’re gonna patrol again.”
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