(soft music) - [Rennie] We've lived with 212 for as long as I can remember.

You know, it's a place that, it's part of our homeland.

And it has taken many lives.

Many lives.

(air whooshing) - [Jeramie] And unfortunately, I became one of the many people that has lost somebody that I cared about on 212.

(air whooshing) - [Kimber] Highway of Death.

The Corridor of Death is the big one.

It has quite a nasty ring to it when that death is someone you love.

(wheels clacking) (air whooshing) (birds tweeting) (soft music) - [Instructor] Boom.

Here you go, Darrell.

Scoot that butt all the way up there.

One hand way high in the air.

- You would've really liked him if you met him.

I have videos of him that I would take because he was being so silly, and I would videotape him on the sly, you know?

And if he saw me videotaping him, and he'd say, "Hey!"

And I'd have to quit.

- [Instructor] Guys of the Navy.

Boom!

(laughs) Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Darrell.

Well look out now, he's gonna hit you in the butt, like the guys in the Navy, boom.

(group laughs) - Darrell, I want to say had a magnetic personality.

Didn't matter who you were, didn't matter where you were from.

You run into him, he made friends with you.

And that would be it.

You guys would be friends forever.

You know, he could light up a room just by walking into it.

He was very smart, very outgoing.

There was no obstacle too hard for him.

- He started the Korean, he was in Korea.

That's him right there, but you can't even tell.

And that's him in the middle.

- I was on the volunteer fire department back in 2002, and he was working for the Northern Cheyenne Police Department.

I was always just trying to get under his skin a little bit 'cause he was always so, like, uptight.

(laughs) I don't remember what exactly started, but he told me, he says, he says, "Don't be such a smart ass."

And I told him, I said, "Well, I'd rather be a smart ass than a dumb ass."

And so that kind of started everything off.

- He came to me and he said, he's always calling me Pops.

He said, "Pops, why don't you go with me on a ride?"

And I said, "All right."

"I'd like to have your opinion."

And I said, "Okay, well, what do you want?"

"I'm thinking about running for sheriff for Big Horn County."

And my first reaction to that was, "No, uh-uh.

I don't like that."

I said, "Darrell, how long you been thinking about this?

Just a few days or a week?"

He said, "No, I've been thinking about it the past two or three elections.

- He was campaigning for several things.

One was 212.

He wanted to make 212 safer for everyone, because we both traveled 212 and all of our families traveled 212.

(air whooshing) - Oh, there it is.

Okay.

Let's see what we got here.

Where is she?

So Caty.

Oh, Caty.

Caty was born missing the left side of her brain.

And we didn't know that extent when she joined our family, but she knew nothing but joy.

She could laugh and keep people in line.

She liked order.

(laughs) And she hated spaghetti.

- The screen is working.

- She was a light.

I said, "This girl's gonna change the world.

I don't know how, but when she does, it's gonna be big."

She changed our world.

♪ Radio - Cale is the reason I breathe.

He was happiness, he was light.

He made the person that he was talking to feel like the only person in the world that mattered.

I heard from a gentleman down at the gas station that Cale saw every morning, used to wonder why he'd run out of food, but I found out after the accident that Cale would go down and buy burritos and donuts and coffee and bribe his teachers to let him eat it in class.

The gentleman told me, he goes, "There wasn't a morning, Kimber, that he did not say, 'Good morning, how are you?'

And shake my hand."

He was a gentleman.

He never had anything negative to say about anyone.

He said he made it his mission to make the people around him happy 'cause he didn't like it when people were sad.

(air whooshing) - They called it the Highway of Death.

What a name.

This runs through our reservation.

She was a mother (sniffs).

She was a grandma and she was valuable.

It was on Saturday, February 4th, 2017.

It was a flustery day that day, that morning.

The semi was throwing the snow flurries.

Visibility was limited.

It must have been about 10:30, 11 o'clock.

I got a message from my daughter, Robin, and she said that she thinks that Angela was in a wreck.

I stopped the chief of police and I asked him where my daughter was, and he said, "They're on their way to Crow."

With his demeanor, it didn't seem like things were serious.

But by the time I got to Crow, I had already gotten a message that she had passed away.

Angela and Hannah, they never knew what hit 'em.

They didn't know what hit 'em.

Yep.

So.

They both died.

(birds tweeting) - [Jade] Community is just, honestly, it's everything.

It's where you raise your children.

It's where my home is, it's where my land is.

It's all of those things.

I'm a member of the House of Representatives for the state of Montana.

I'm really grateful and thankful for this opportunity to be here and to have been elected and the faith that they have in me.

- [Speaker] Welcome to the House.

(audience applauds) - I'm really humbled by it.

Right now, Highway 212 is a pretty lawless highway.

Oh gosh.

Driving on that road is such a hazard.

I fear for my older kids, who are driving now.

Even my little kids, when they get on the bus, it's terrifying to know that they're, you know, boarding on that highway.

Yeah, it's a, you know, the fuel to why I wanna help the situation, so some sister won't lose her brother or a daughter wouldn't lose her mom or her child or her family relative.

It's just, it's too much.

It really is.

It's too much.

(sniffs) (air whooshing) (air continues whooshing) - It's a two lane highway with rolling hills.

And when you try to pass, you can't see what's coming over the next hill.

It seems like once you make that hill, there's another hill.

- [Shane] As we have rebuilt more and more stretches of this highway to a more current design standard, more trucks are driving it because it's become a nicer highway.

Percentage of trucks is much higher here than a lot of routes that we have.

- [Jeramie] Their understanding of 212 is that it's basically a cut across for them.

It's a simpler, faster way for them to get from point A to point B.

- [Shane] This corridor runs between 600 and 900 trucks a day.

- The other day I was coming back from Billings.

I came over a hill and around a corner, and one semi was passing three other semis.

When you get behind five or six or 10 trucks, you're just at a total loss and there's nothing you can do.

- We collaborated basically with the four counties, Big Horn County, Rosebud County, Powder River County, Carter County, as well as the Crow Tribe and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and changed it to 65, day or night, car or truck.

One of the benefits of that is, you have less drivers getting irritated, having to get stuck behind the trucks.

(traffic whooshing) - There's a big language barrier when it comes to truck drivers.

I've seen the Albanian, Spanish, Russian, but a lot of 'em have no idea what our signs say because they can't read 'em.

We're at a loss here.

- [Jeramie] I don't necessarily think that they understand that that's a 65 zone most of the time.

Going across it, my GPS tells me that it's a 70 zone.

- Just put it this way.

Every time we hear a siren and see lights, when someone says, "212," we automatically know semi fatality.

I hope that they can find a way to regulate the semis on there and start holding them accountable.

(air whooshing) Sunday came around and it was football season.

My Broncos were playing his Vikings.

We were getting ready for it.

And I remember, I thought, "Man, I want to call him just to see where he's at.

It's about kickoff time."

But my wife started getting ready for work and as she was getting ready, I noticed cops going.

I mean, they were flying towards Crow, lights and sirens.

- My sister was coming from Hardin and she was a little bit behind him and she saw what she thought was our truck.

And she called me and she was, she asked me, "Where you at?"

And I said, "I'm home."

And she goes, "Oh, good."

She said, "Man, there's a really bad wreck out here."

She said, "I thought I rec," and she said, "It looked like your truck."

And I told her, I said, "Well, Darrell's out there."

- I got a phone call and they said, "You need to come.

There was an accident.

Darrell was involved."

(traffic whooshing) - And I was crying and I was trying to call him and I was hoping that maybe there was this, maybe there was a wreck and he had to stop to help.

And then Jeramie called me.

He told me, I told him I was gonna come over, and he said, "Just stay put."

He said, "I'll come out there and see you."

And I waited and I waited and I waited.

I thought he was gonna come and tell me that maybe he was seriously injured, you know, and (sniffs) and he came and he told me that he didn't make it.

(soft music) - March 17th, 2022 was the day of the accident.

Cale, our 15-year-old son, was driving his Camaro and he had his younger sisters in it, all three of them.

They left for school that morning.

And the car that was in Cale's lane going stopped to make a left hand turn and the semi that was coming towards them swerved to the right to avoid the car and came back to the left and ended up hitting my son's car when he moved back to the left.

But something his dad and I both had always taught him is ditch right, ditch right.

Something happens, ditch right, because that's the flow of traffic and he couldn't ditch right.

I .

.

.

Left the school quickly, obviously, and drove, did not follow the speed limit on Highway 212 getting to the accident scene.

I didn't make it in time to see either one of the kids before they were taken in ambulances.

I had to tell my oldest son that his little brother was dead.

I had to call my husband and tell him that his son, his best friend, didn't make it.

The rippling effect of what happens on 212, of having someone die on 212, it doesn't, it doesn't just happen on 212.

It happens in your soul.

- You know, the individual that ran into my daughter and Hannah, he was a non-member and he never got charged.

The BIA had jurisdiction over the members, but not the non-members.

He never got a slap on the hand.

He didn't get a ticket, he didn't get reckless driving, he didn't get any kinda, nothing.

Nothing to this day.

Those girls didn't get any justice.

They never got no justice.

- So it gets kind of complicated when we're talking about roadways that go through a reservation.

If there is a tribal member involved in any of that, federally, they retain the jurisdiction.

If there is a non-tribal that commits a crime against a tribal member on the reservation, state and federal can prosecute that.

So when we talk car crashes, there's a lot of variables in that on who retains the jurisdiction of it.

- The lack of enforcement, I think, is the leading cause of all of the incidences that happen on 212.

Not having enough police patrolling the highway really has taken a lot of lives.

There are the three entities, the BIA, the highway patrol, the county sheriff's department.

It's a big fear of the community is that it would have an influence on our sovereignty if we allow other jurisdictions stopping non-tribal members.

Having that kind of agreement with the other departments, I think, would only make us stronger.

We really need to open our eyes and just really accept the changes that need to happen.

- US 212 is a National Highway, and so from a funding standpoint, it competes with other routes.

The bulk of our funding comes from the federal and state gas taxes.

So we get a certain portion allocation, as do other states, and one of the funding pots, smaller funding pots, that we have is safety money.

And that is driven off of crash data.

Just over the past 15 years on this corridor, we've invested over 125 million in projects.

I mean, you know, 125 million in 15 years on this corridor is a lot of our funding.

Sometimes they kind of come across like their highway is the worst around.

I say, "Well come with me over yonder here."

(laughs) Because there are other areas, right?

We have serious injury crashes and fatalities on all of our highways.

- You see these lighted speed signs that say slow down, they've had a tremendous impact here in this community, because I see the trucks and traffic do slow down.

Two things I'd like to see is make sure we have an apron on both sides of the road and put more passing lanes in and that'll cut the frustration down, it'll spread out the traffic.

Help flow of traffic a lot better.

Help the responders that have to get there.

- We've rebuilt over 25 miles.

For a full reconstruction, we're gonna be running three million a mile for a full reconstruct.

Sometimes it seems like the public is too quick to say, "Well, they just want to engineer everything."

You can build the perfect road, and if folks don't follow the laws and you know, drive appropriately, you're gonna have crashes.

- Felt like we all suffered a major loss.

You know, the people, the county, everybody.

I hope we quit losing our people and our loved ones.

You know, our goal is to walk on this earth for many years.

We wanna see our grandchildren and our great grands and our great-great grands grow.

- I thought my son was gonna out-live me.

I really did.

And that 212, he was so concerned about it.

He was so busy with 212.

I thought it was gonna be okay.

I thought he's gonna be okay.

- I just, I had hope.

I had so much hope that he just somehow would come back or somebody would tell me it was a bad joke or something, you know?

And I just.

The TV's been running.

I can't handle the quiet.

The TV stays on.

The dogs, Raji looked for him for a long time.

They'd come in and they'd run in the bedroom and run around in the house looking for him.

(wind whooshing) He was my best friend.

And when he'd come home, he'd open the door and he'd say, "Where's my wife?"

(laughs) It's been a real hard road.

- Raj!

- Just to keep pushing for change on 212 'cause eventually something's gonna happen.

(air whooshing) (birds tweeting) - I don't wanna be a number or a statistic, you know?

I fear for my family.

I don't like them on it.

And when they say they're going that way, I tell 'em to go all the way around.

I don't care how long it takes.

You leave two hours early.

I don't know if I'll ever drive it.

I don't think I'm able to.

(garage door creaking) (car engine revs) (air whooshing) - These deaths impact the people that live here and have lived here for generations.

This is real.

We need change and we can't change it ourselves.

We can't fix it ourselves.

We can't address the issues on Highway 212 ourselves.

And we can't change what happened, but maybe we can change it for other people coming after.

Can we add some passing lanes where we need some?

Can we put in some center turning lanes where they're needed?

Can we bring in some patrol?

Stay off your cell phone, please.

There's barely any service out here anyway.

Stop checking.

Don't tailgate.

If a truck wants to pass you, let 'em pass.

You wanna pass a truck?

Wait till a passing lane.

Just be safe.

Don't be stupid.

(traffic whooshing) - Just becomes so tiresome to hear all the lives just being continuously taken.

The kids, the adults, the elders, cultural leaders.

It's made a big impact in our community.

I really wanna dedicate my time and my energy and my focus to making those changes.

And not just making them, but helping my community make it a safer place.

- I hope we all can find a way to work together to find a solution.

We should all work together to keep each other safe.

(sniffs) - Can we make this beautiful corner of southeastern Montana safe for the people that live here and the people that wanna travel through it?

That's what I want.

It's where I live.

It's where my family is, it's where my kids are raised, and it's also where they died, so we have to fix it.

(traffic whooshing) (soft music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) - [Announcer] This University of Montana School of Journalism production was made possible with production support from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

And by the University of Montana.

(soft music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues)