Issue of the Week: Human Rights

Predator on the Reservation, The Wall Street Journal, Frontline, February 12, 2019

 

Last night, Frontline on PBS aired Predator on the Reservation.

A related article on the Frontline website, How The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE Uncovered a Pedophile Doctor’s Past, begins with the following:

“Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver, Dan Frosch and Gabe Johnson spent more than two years investigating the Indian Health Service, the federal agency that provides health care for Native Americans. In collaboration with FRONTLINE, they found that the agency employed a number of problem doctors, including Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber, a pedophile who — despite the suspicions of co-workers up and down the chain of command — continued treating children for more than two decades.”

Links to this and other related articles and videos, and the full transcript and link to the one hour program, follow.

Most would agree that if there is a primary job government is supposed to do, it’s to protect its citizens and their basic human rights–starting with children.

There is a theme in this new Frontline program that is not unrelated to its July 24, 2018 program, UN Sex Abuse Scandal, which we posted on then. Here’s an excerpt from our commentary:

The issue of child sexual abuse is, as noted often, not primarily an institutional issue–but the institutional issue is critical because any source of such abuse is critical to unmask, and because of the inter-related impact of institutions, culture, families and individuals.

And as we noted before, the importance of the scandal this documentary covers is in no small part that it is about the United Nations. This is the benchmark institution, with all its declarations and conventions, which is used to measure the proper or improper conduct of other institutions and nations on this and other issues.

So too for nations. The United States was the most influential founding nation of the UN, and is still, as we keep reminding, although power on the planet is increasingly diffuse and shifting, the single most powerful and influential nation on earth.

The most important level on which child sexual abuse is an institutional issue is the degree to which the most powerful institutions–governments–protect or fail to protect children from individuals and other institutions. The government agencies, child protection services, police, prosecutors, courts, legislative and executive branches either protect or fail to protect. Too often, it’s the latter. In the end that’s on all of us too. It can change, and is in some ways, but the resistance remains enormous as is always the case in attaining progress. The first step in change is fully facing the problem, from institutions to our own avoidance. Everyone agrees there is no more heinous evil. When it is unveiled in ways we haven’t faced, most of us respond with demanding and creating change.

There is another element to this story of abuse of power, which child sexual abuse is the ultimate example of–and that is the inequality of the haves and have-nots that has driven history in so many ways, the grievous crimes against indigenous peoples and the racism attached. The film-makers and journalists make clear that while this is the backdrop that has its own impact, the larger story focused on is what can and does happen everywhere in society, and the failure of a government agency to do its job.

We have praised Frontline for many years. It is the flagship of documentary excellence on PBS, and has been as good or better than any such series for decades. The program has an impeccable record of journalistic integrity, sparing no one or no ideology from its factual investigations.

The program and related articles and video speak for themselves.

. . . 

How The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE Uncovered a Pedophile Doctor’s Past

By Rashima Nasa, February 12, 2019

Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver, Dan Frosch and Gabe Johnson spent more than two years investigating the Indian Health Service, the federal agency that provides health care for Native Americans. In collaboration with FRONTLINE, they found that the agency employed a number of problem doctors, including Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber, a pedophile who — despite the suspicions of co-workers up and down the chain of command — continued treating children for more than two decades. FRONTLINE’s Rahima Nasa spoke to Weaver about how he and his colleagues got the story.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you come to learn about Dr. Weber?

We first heard about Dr. Weber over the course of reporting on the Indian Health Service hospitals in the Dakotas. We were covering some regulatory problems those hospitals had, one of them being that they were kicked out of the Medicare program, which is about the stiffest sanction that a U.S. hospital could ever get. In more than 10 years of covering U.S. health care, the only hospitals I’ve encountered that have faced that penalty were the ones that would later be indicted on fraud charges and things like that. It’s just not something that ordinarily happens, so it caught our attention. In this case, the hospitals were getting penalized for poor care.

One of the other things that began to emerge was that a lot of the doctors who were employed by the Indian Health Agency had issues clinically, like maybe they had malpractice claims against them or some track record of adverse effects in the operating room. Also, there were doctors with conduct problems.

We heard about these very serious allegations: that a pediatrician at this one hospital in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, had been sexually assaulting his patients for many years and on possibly more than one reservation. We thought, if this was true, that exemplifies the broader range of issues that this agency has been grappling with and has been unable to put an end to.

What were some of the challenges you, Dan and Gabe faced during your reporting on tribal communities?

Trying to get documents for this story has been a huge challenge, and it’s not just with the tribe. We don’t have the same access or right to government records that members of the tribe would have. We have not had the law on our side in trying to get records of the tribes’ own investigations or some of the incidents that surround the story.

For instance, Dr. Weber faced justice not because of something the IHS or federal investigators did, but because a tribal investigator took the initiative to pursue this guy even though the tribe has no jurisdiction to prosecute a non-Indian perpetrator of an alleged crime. But the records of that investigation, which could have been invaluable, are basically unavailable to us.

But even more vexing is that the federal records, the Indian Health Service’s own records, have been really hard to come by. They’ve not produced substantive responses to our FOIA requests in many cases. In some measure it’s a reflection of the dysfunction of the agency, because I don’t think they are stonewalling us on some specific requests. They may just not have documentation of stuff that you would expect a government agency that’s running hospitals to have at its fingertips.

How did you convince folks to trust you all to tell this complicated and sensitive story?

When we first got there, people were skeptical of us. Then, when we came back again, we were just people who were around — people expected to run into us. We’ve made at least eight trips to Pine Ridge and additional trips to the Blackfeet Reservation near Browning, Montana, and additional reporting trips to other locations. We spent eight weeks on the Pine Ridge reservation over the course of a year and became familiar faces.

How did you approach privacy concerns from victims?

At The Journal, we have a pretty strict policy to not out victims of sexual assault who have not agreed to be identified affirmatively. There are people who we are not naming because of that. There have been some people who have been identified in court records, in the public record, and we named them in some cases.

It’s hard to talk about with people. For many of them this is the last thing in the world that they want to discuss. I don’t worry about offending people when I ask about this. I think it’s clear that we genuinely want to know, and I think in many cases people have agreed to talk to us because of that.

What does the IHS need to do to better handle cases like this in the future?

I mean, it’s a tough thing. The balancing act they are trying to achieve is real, right? They need to fill positions in their hospitals, and they need to keep those hospitals open because in many cases they are the only access that the people they serve have to health care. The pool of medical providers and administrative leaders they have to choose from is not always as good as you would hope. As one senior administrator in the agency told us, they just don’t get “the best of the best.” They’re making compromises all the time because they want to keep their facilities operating.

I don’t know exactly what the answer is. If you take a zero tolerance policy for providers who have conduct issues, or if you fire every provider who gets nailed with a DUI, then you’re reducing the pool of people you have to provide the only health services that are available.

But on the other hand, they have created a situation in which they are running into the inevitable problem of having to make those kinds of compromises. The buck stops not just with the Indian Health Service, but with the federal health department and with Congress, which appropriates the money that they have at their disposal to fix it.

Is there anything that wasn’t captured in the film or print story that you want to emphasize?

We spent a lot of time with these people, and in some cases we spent a lot of time with friends and families of victims, with administrators, with people who one way or another touch a different part of the story … People who, in many cases, were living in these really dire situations. There’s this incredible circumspection about what’s going on in the world that immediately surrounded them and the history that they are living with — that was kind of a surprise to me. You hear a lot about intergenerational trauma when talking about the Sioux Indians … the Wounded Knee massacre was just in the 1890s, so up until recently a lot of great-grandmas may have remembered it.

A lot of reporting on indigenous people by those outside of the community has a tendency to rely on stereotypes — usually with a focus on substance abuse, poverty or exotifying their identity. How did you, Dan and Gabe circumvent that in your reporting?

The first guy we interviewed on the Pine Ridge reservation was named Henry Brown. He didn’t actually make it to the film. What he said to us was that every day of the year, somebody is on Pine Ridge making a documentary …

In looking at other work on the reservation, it’s always about the day in the life of a particular niche — like basketball in America’s poorest place, or about fixing cars in America’s poorest place or whatever. That kind of celebritization of poverty, of guys like Henry Brown, made people skeptical of us at first, because they are so used to having people film the trash piles in people’s backyards and things.

We made this really conscious decision from the beginning to not to let the poverty or the Indian-ness be something that we’d focus on. We wanted to cover this crime the same way we’d cover it in suburban Connecticut. We were there not to cover the story of a pedophile in America’s poorest place, but to cover this incredible tragedy that would have been a tragedy anywhere. At the same time, like any tragedy, it would take on some of the character of the people that it happened to — that it was visited upon. You can’t be on Pine Ridge and not see the poverty, or be affected by it or see people outside of it. We just decided to unravel this crime and what the fact that this was allowed to happen said about the Indian Health Service, an arm of the federal government.

. . .

A Sexual Abuse Victim, and Two Colleagues Who Suspected A Predator Doctor

By Rashima Nasa, February 12, 2019

Joe Four Horns was just a boy when he first met Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber.

Four Horns lived on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. He’d broken his tailbone in a skating accident, and was recovering at a health center. Weber, a government pediatrician based in a hospital run by the Indian Health Service, came to see him.

“Just the way he was talking to me, but had his hand was on, like — on my leg while he was talking to me,” said Four Horns. “He just left it there, and that was — it made me uncomfortable.”

Four Horns would later tell The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE that Weber molested him several times over subsequent visits. But he was not the doctor’s only victim. Over the years, Weber allegedly sexually abused several Native American boys, even as colleagues and whistleblowers raised alarms.

Predator on the Reservation, a joint investigation by the Journal and FRONTLINE, asks how Weber could continue treating children for more than two decades despite multiple warnings about his behavior. The investigation found that the Indian Health Service, a federal agency, moved the pediatrician to different IHS hospitals, where he allegedly preyed on vulnerable Native American boys.

Shortly after Weber arrived at the Blackfeet reservation, his colleagues grew suspicious about his interactions with young patients. In the clip above, Dan Foster, a former Indian Health Service psychologist, and his wife, Becky, who is also a mental health professional, described feeling uncomfortable about Weber operating an after-hours clinic for children without parents or guardians present. In some instances, they said, Weber was seeing patients long after other clinic staff had left.

“Normally if you bring your child to a pediatrician, a parent is with them, or if a social worker brings a child to a pediatrician the social worker is with them. An adult is with them,” said Becky Foster. “But these boys were going in there alone.”

The Fosters recalled that most of the boys who attended the clinic were either pre-pubescent or teenagers between the ages of 12 and 15 years old, who were particularly vulnerable. “So that was a red flag,” Dan Foster said.

One of those boys was Joe Four Horns.

Now serving time for bank robbery, Four Horns said he never told anyone what happened back then. He spoke to the Journal and FRONTLINE from prison about the abuse. “I was 11,” he said.

Dan Foster said he confronted Weber at the time. “I had these concerns, and I wanted him to know I was bringing these concerns forward. My hope was that if he were doing something he would stop,” he said. “And if he weren’t he would be warned, and he would modify his behavior accordingly.

“But he did not.”

. . .

A Pedophile Doctor Drew Suspicions for 21 Years. No One Stopped Him.

By Christopher Weaver, Dan Frosch, and Gabe Johnson, The Wall Street Journal.

At first, officials at the U.S. Indian Health Service overlooked the peculiarities of their unmarried new doctor, including the children’s toys he hoarded in his basement on the reservation. They desperately needed a pediatrician at their hospital in Browning, Mont.

By 1995, after three years, they became convinced Stanley Patrick Weber was a pedophile and pushed for his removal from the government-run hospital.

“You’re going to have to leave,” Randy Rottenbiller, its clinical director at the time, recalled telling the doctor after learning a child patient had stayed the night in his house.

But the Indian Health Service didn’t fire Mr. Weber. Instead, it transferred him to another hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D. He continued treating Native American children there for another 21 years, leaving behind a trail of sexual-assault allegations.

Many of his known and alleged victims have since struggled with addiction and have moved in and out of prison. As boys, they were especially vulnerable and troubled. They lived in some of America’s poorest communities, isolated and desolate places where health problems are rampant and basic services such as grocery stores are scarce.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE found the IHS repeatedly missed or ignored warning signs, tried to silence whistleblowers and allowed Mr. Weber to continue treating children despite the suspicions of colleagues up and down the chain of command.

The investigation also found that the agency tolerated a number of problem doctors because it was desperate for medical staff, and that managers there believed they might face retaliation if they followed up on suspicions of abuse. The federal agency has long been criticized for providing inadequate care to Native Americans.

After a tribal prosecutor outside of the IHS finally investigated his crimes, Mr. Weber was indicted in 2017 and 2018 for sexually assaulting six patients in Montana and South Dakota. Court documents and interviews with former patients show that Mr. Weber plied teen boys with money, alcohol and sometimes opioids, and coerced them into oral and anal sex with him in hospital exam rooms and at his government housing unit.

“IHS, the local here, they want to just forget it happened,” said Pauletta Red Willow, a social-services worker on the Pine Ridge reservation. “You can’t ever forget how someone did our children wrong and affected us for generations to come.”

In an interview, Rear Adm. Michael Weahkee, an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and the acting head of the IHS, expressed sorrow over the agency’s failures and promised an investigation into how Mr. Weber was able to prey on children under the agency’s care. “We really want to mitigate the possibility of anything like this ever happening again,” said Adm. Weahkee.

Mr. Weber, 70 years old, told investigators he never had sex with his patients, according to a recording of a law-enforcement interview in May 2016. He was convicted in September of sexually assaulting two Montana boys—a verdict he is appealing—and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He faces another federal trial later this year in Rapid City, S.D. He has lost his medical license. He and his lawyers declined to comment for this article.

The IHS provides medical care for 2.3 million Native Americans, many of whom have no other access to health care. Because the agency has struggled to recruit medical staff and experienced leaders, especially at remote reservations, officials said they gave second chances to doctors who likely would have struggled to find work elsewhere. This includes some with histories of drug problems, criminal convictions and violence, the Journal-FRONTLINE investigation found.

“It’s fair to say that because of the absolute need to fill positions, we don’t really get the best of the best,” said Bob McSwain, a former director of the agency. “There’s a strange tolerance level that, ‘Oh, OK, the guy’s a womanizer, the guy’s this, the guy’s that, but he comes in to see patients,’ ” he said.

One of Mr. Weber’s victims, testifying in Montana, described the doctor sexually assaulting him on a hospital examination table when he was about 11, around the time his father had killed himself.

“It’s in my mind every day. I got molested. I got—I was a little boy,” testified Joe Four Horns, now a convicted bank robber.

Another former patient testified that the doctor had inserted a finger into his anus in an IHS exam room when he was about 8 years old. The doctor used two fingers on his next visit, and later, his penis. The man, now age 32, said in an interview he learned years later he wasn’t Mr. Weber’s sole victim. Others in his circle of friends were also assaulted and sometimes swapped stories about it at drunken gatherings, he said. He said the incidents ruined his life.

The Journal doesn’t disclose the names of sexual-assault victims without their permission.

Mr. Weber, known as Pat, got his start in medicine as a Green Beret medic. After finishing medical school in 1983, he joined the IHS and worked in Oklahoma and New Mexico before landing in Browning, the seat of the Blackfeet reservation, in 1992.

The hospital’s CEO at the time, Mary Ellen LaFromboise, said she initially welcomed Mr. Weber. “We had been without a pediatrician for a while,” she said.

She said she overlooked some initial suspicions about Mr. Weber. Her personnel director said she saw him hanging out with boys at a Pizza Hut. One doctor said that Mr. Weber told him he had arrived in Browning early so he could arrange a camping trip with his future patients.

Mr. Weber was assaulted by a relative of a boy who was upset the youngster was spending time at the doctor’s house, according to Ms. LaFromboise. By that time, some administrators said they concluded he was a pedophile.

Ms. LaFromboise wasn’t so sure, she said, but agreed she had to act. She said she didn’t know of any IHS doctor “who was ever fired, even if they had problems.” She alerted IHS regional officials.

An official there ordered Dr. Rottenbiller, Mr. Weber’s boss at the time, to remove him from the Browning hospital. Dr. Rottenbiller said when he confronted Mr. Weber, the pediatrician replied he was planning to leave anyway after receiving threats.

On June 8, 1995, soon after he left Montana, Mr. Weber reported for work at the Pine Ridge IHS hospital, personnel records show.

In his first months on the job, a parent complained about Mr. Weber’s conduct, said Sara Dye, then the top doctor at IHS’s South Dakota regional office.

Hospital staff referred the matter to law enforcement, Dr. Dye said, and reassigned Mr. Weber to administrative duties. A Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry didn’t lead to charges, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Weber was returned to normal work, Dr. Dye said.

Kathey Wilson, an IHS manager at Pine Ridge at the time, said she had learned that Mr. Weber had been investigated in Browning. He was allowed to practice anyway, she said, because he had never been charged or convicted. She declined to answer additional questions.

In Pine Ridge, whispers spread about the teenage boys who frequently visited his home. Mr. Weber later told investigators he simply hired them for garden chores. Nurses said he checked boys into the hospital room farthest from their station.

One of Mr. Weber’s patients, now a 31-year-old South Dakota state inmate, said in a series of interviews that the pediatrician molested him in the hospital’s exam rooms starting in the late 1990s, when he was about 11 years old.

When his head was cut open in a fight, the inmate said, Mr. Weber stitched him up at his house and gave him a bottle of narcotic pain medicine. After that incident, the doctor often used pain pills and money to coerce him into sex, the inmate said.

Late on the night of Nov. 14, 2006, the inmate said, he decided to enact revenge. He and two other teenage boys knocked on Mr. Weber’s door with shirts tied around their faces. When Mr. Weber cracked the door, one of the boys, Henry Red Cloud, kicked it in, bashing Mr. Weber in the face. They battered the doctor and stole a couple hundred dollars, Mr. Red Cloud said.

The inmate said it was payback for “what I was put through.”

A third man present that night eventually testified that Mr. Weber sexually assaulted him, too, saying Mr. Weber invited him to his home to help clean up his basement, gave him beer and asked him to perform oral sex on him. Then a 13-year-old boy, he complied and left with $100, he said in court.

Bill Pourier, CEO of the Pine Ridge IHS hospital from 2003 to 2011, said in an interview he found Mr. Weber sitting on a gurney in the emergency room the night of the assault, his face bloodied. The doctor refused to answer his questions or talk to law enforcement, Mr. Pourier said.

Mr. Pourier said his boss in the agency’s regional office in Aberdeen, S.D., required him to seek her permission to contact law enforcement about any concern. He said he asked to do so after Mr. Weber’s incident, but never heard back.

Asked whether he should have stepped outside the chain of command to contact police, Mr. Pourier said, “I couldn’t afford to take the risk at that time to lose my job.”

The Journal was unable to reach Mr. Pourier’s immediate boss at the time. The current IHS director, Adm. Weahkee, said management should never bar anyone from reporting potential misconduct to law enforcement.

On Dec. 2, 2008, Mark Butterbrodt, another pediatrician at Pine Ridge, contacted the South Dakota medical board alleging that Mr. Weber “selectively cherry-picks young teenage boys in clinic,” according to a copy of the complaint described to the Journal and FRONTLINE. The board investigated. It declined to comment on its findings.

The following year, Dr. Butterbrodt documented the allegations in a letter to his IHS bosses, including Jan Colton, then the hospital’s clinical director. She appointed a panel to investigate. “There were suspicions, but they could find no hard evidence,” said Dr. Colton, a dentist who is now retired.

The IHS suspended Mr. Weber around this time and referred the matter to Ronald Keats, a regional IHS administrator. When the IHS investigation turned up nothing, Mr. Weber returned to work, according to Mr. Pourier.

About a year later, Mr. Keats himself was arrested on child-pornography charges. The investigation revealed he had stored sexually explicit images of children on a compact disc found in an elevator of his government office building. He was convicted in 2012 of possessing child pornography. Mr. Keats didn’t respond to requests for comment.

After a clash with Mr. Weber, Dr. Butterbrodt was pulled into a supervisor’s office and, within weeks, transferred to a remote facility in North Dakota and stripped of bonus pay, which amounted to around one-third of his annual salary, according to personnel records and Dr. Butterbrodt.

“I was chased off by a pedophile and the people who chose him over me,” said Dr. Butterbrodt, who retired soon after.

The agency’s then-top regional doctor in Aberdeen, Rod Cuny, said he reviewed Dr. Butterbrodt’s transfer in 2011 and concluded he had been unfairly punished. Dr. Cuny said he also followed up on questions about Mr. Weber’s conduct. Relying on the earlier findings of the agency’s 2009 internal probe that cleared the doctor, however, he dropped it.

Dr. Cuny said many IHS hospitals suffered from a weak medical staff, in which problem doctors were asked to police one another. When a hospital CEO wanted to hire an Oregon emergency-room doctor in 2013, Dr. Cuny said, he learned from his staff that the doctor, John F. Lindberg, had testified in court that he had sex with an underage prostitute. Dr. Lindberg said he thought the prostitute was 19 years old.

“I just held back and went ahead and gave this guy a second chance,” Dr. Cuny said. Dr. Lindberg didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The IHS also hired a family-practice doctor who had previously been barred from the agency after inappropriately doling out narcotic pain pills, and a doctor who previously had been convicted of several crimes including exposing himself to a teenage girl, according to regulatory and court records.

Adm. Weahkee said managers should prioritize protecting patients over filling slots.

Dr. Butterbrodt made one last effort to oust Mr. Weber. He said he called Wehnona Stabler, then the new CEO at the Pine Ridge IHS hospital, and made an anonymous complaint.

Ms. Stabler said in an April 2017 email to the Journal that she remembered the call about Mr. Weber, but the complainant didn’t follow up with specifics.

Two months after that email, Ms. Stabler was indicted in federal court for accepting a $5,000 gift in 2013 from Mr. Weber that she didn’t report on a government ethics form. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year of probation. She didn’t respond to requests for comment about the gift.

In 2015, Mr. Weber was finally tripped up—not by IHS officials contacting law enforcement, but by tribal investigators.

Elaine Yellow Horse, then a tribal prosecutor, decided to look into the case after an unrelated sex-crimes case reminded her of allegations she had heard years earlier from Dr. Butterbrodt. She identified a potential victim of Mr. Weber’s—the inmate who had participated in the assault on him—and her boss contacted federal agents, according to tribal investigative records.

The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the IHS, opened a criminal investigation. In May 2016, local IHS officials tipped off Mr. Weber that he was being investigated, the doctor later told law-enforcement interviewers. He resigned the following Sunday evening, effective the next day.

Following Mr. Weber’s conviction last September in Montana, the Journal and FRONTLINE sent the IHS written questions about the agency’s handling of the matter. Two weeks later, officials began seeking an outside contractor to investigate Mr. Weber’s three decades at the agency.

“If there are individuals who were aware that something was going on” but didn’t speak up, Adm. Weahkee said, “then you’re basically culpable and complicit in those actions.”

Some officials who crossed paths with Mr. Weber say they are haunted by that possibility.

“One of the feelings I had was of somebody coming up to me and saying, you didn’t protect me,” said Ms. LaFromboise, the former Browning hospital CEO. “You hired him, he worked in your hospital, and you let him do things to us.”

“Predator on the Reservation,” a documentary produced by FRONTLINE and the Wall Street Journal, will premiere at 10 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12, on PBS. Check local listings.

. . .

Predator on the Reservation

The Wall Street Journal and Frontline, PBS, February 12, 2019:

CURT MULLER, Special Agent, Department of Health and Human Services:

[subtitles] This is special Agent Curt Muller, inspector with the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General. I’m here meeting with Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber in his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation’s Indian Health Service hospital campus.

NARRATOR:

Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber was a pediatrician working for the Indian Health Service.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] We’ve got some instances what we need to talk about. OK? We’re not here to judge anybody. We’re here to try to get down to the facts of what had happened and why it happened.

NARRATOR:

His patients were Native American children.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] Would there be any reason that your nurses were emphatic that you wanted to see boys instead of girls?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] I don’t know.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] There was a certain type – skinny, muscular.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Mm hmm.

CURT MULLER:

I mean I’m…

FRED BENNETT, Agent:

[subtitle] Acne issues.

CURT MULLER:

Yeah.

[subtitles] I mean I’m not making this up, doc. I’m talking to all the nurses. I know you wanted to keep things quiet but things were never quiet.

NARRATOR:

Allegations followed Dr. Weber from reservation to reservation.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Let’s be clear about this, OK? I have not had sex with my patients. I don’t. That’s just a, a principle I have.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Doc, people have been talking for 20 years here.

FRED BENNETT:

[subtitles] It seems that wherever you go, there’s the allegations that you’re, you’re with young boys.

NARRATOR:

Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver and Dan Frosch have been on the trail of Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber and the government agency he worked for – the Indian Health Service.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER, The Wall Street Journal:

Starting about two years ago, we got interested in a federal agency called the Indian Health Service.

Their hospitals have had an ugly track record in the last few years. They were missing diagnoses. Patients were dying for no reason. And we found that the agency had failed for many years to take in hand a series of structural problems that had basically rendered these hospitals incapable of meeting their regulatory requirements.

We found a bunch of doctors with troubled track records before they joined the IHS or once they got there. In some cases, people who had, who had been convicted of crimes prior to their service with the IHS.

JENNIFER FORSYTH, Deputy Investigations Chief, The Wall Street Journal:

And the IHS hired them anyway?

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

And the IHS hired them anyway.

DAN FROSCH, The Wall Street Journal:

We began looking into troubled doctors that had got in trouble during the course of their careers at IHS. And one of those doctors was a guy by the name of Stanley Patrick Weber.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Upon finishing the residency, he immediately joined the Indian Health Service. He was stationed from ’86 to ’89 at a hospital in Oklahoma – Ada, Oklahoma – that the IHS ran at that time. He was a pediatrician there.

JENNIFER FORSYTH:

And have we tried to reach him?

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Yes.

JENNIFER FORSYTH:

And?

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

And he hasn’t responded.

DAN FROSCH:

This doctor being accused of sexual assault by patients and we thought that warranted a broader look, both at Dr. Weber, but also at sort of widespread practice of hiring doctors who, who would get into trouble.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

We thought we gotta find out: Did the IHS know? Did anybody have any inkling that there might be an issue with this doctor?

NARRATOR:

In 1992, Dr. Weber arrived in the little town of Browning, Montana, part of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

DAN FROSCH:

Blackfeet Reservation is about 2,300 square miles. It butts up against Canada. This stunningly beautiful place. Like a lot of Indian reservations, there is high poverty rates, high rates of alcoholism, diabetes, domestic abuse, et cetera. And so this is really one of the most far-flung places that you could go if you were a doctor.

NARRATOR:

The reservation’s only hospital was run by the IHS, which struggled to find doctors. Mary Ellen LaFromboise was the hospital’s CEO at the time.

MARY ELLEN LaFROMBOISE, Former CEO, Browning IHS hospital:

We had been without a pediatrician for a while. So here comes Dr. Weber. And all I could think of is: He looks comfortable, huh? He looked young, and just seemed like he was, would be a good fit for us.

NARRATOR:

One of the first things Dr. Weber did was help expand the hospital’s youth outreach programs.

MARY ELLEN LaFROMBOISE:

And they were talking about: We want to do some things in the school. You know, we have some programs that would blend really well with middle school. I just thought: Wow, here’s something that the hospital can offer the community. We’ll put Dr. Weber out there in the community.

NARRATOR:

Almost from the start, concerns began to emerge. Tim Davis is the chairman of the Blackfeet Tribe.

TIM DAVIS, Chairman, Blackfeet Tribe:

Running Weasel is my Indian name.

NARRATOR:

But in 1992, he worked in the hospital’s facilities department.

TIM DAVIS:

That green house, 105 is it? That’s the one Weber was in.

NARRATOR:

Part of his job was to inspect government-owned houses, including the one where Dr. Weber lived alone.

TIM DAVIS:

So what we did with each annual walk-through, we’d come through each house and I’d do the inspection of the roof, the floors, the walls, the windows, the doors, and then go through the basement, check out for any leaks.

When I went downstairs is when I was kind of like floored because of what I saw there is to me a signal of something that wasn’t right. The gentleman had a lot of food items, candy, pop, cookies, and then toys, games, videos, games that boys would play with. I mean it wasn’t just a, a small… It was stacks of stuff. I mean they were stacked. I mean I’m a dad, I got boys, I got eight boys, and I mean I buy my kids stuff but it’s not stacked up in the basement like, like that was. You know, that to me signaled there’s something wrong with this guy.

NARRATOR:

Davis says he shared his concerns with Mary Ellen LaFromboise, who at the time didn’t see it as cause for alarm.

Law enforcement interview excerpts

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Have you ever had any boys spend the night with you?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Well, when I was in Browning some kids would come by and they didn’t have a place to stay.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] How old were the kids?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] I, I can’t remember at the time.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] You think they were 18 or 10. Or I mean…

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Most of them were probably, you know, yeah, of age. I don’t know. Some of them might have been minors.

MARY ELLEN LaFROMBOISE, Former CEO, Browning IHS hospital:

The comments that were coming from maintenance about how there was a lot of traffic of young people in and out of Dr. Weber’s quarters. And I think somebody had asked him about it – why there were so many young people. Oh, they, we just like to get together, you know, to have pizza or pop. You know, things that kids like to do.

He seemed to be genuinely interested in our young people. He came with the idea of having a, a teen clinic area, you know, by having evening clinics, being more user-friendly to the community.

NARRATOR:

Others at the hospital were suspicious of Dr. Weber’s intentions. Psychologist Dan Foster and his wife Becky, a mental health specialist, knew some of Dr. Weber’s patients. They became increasingly uncomfortable with his after-hours clinic.

REBECCA FOSTER, Former IHS therapist:

Normally, if you bring your child to a pediatrician, a parent is with them. Or if a social worker brings a child to a pediatrician, the social worker is with them. The adult is with them. But these boys were going in there alone.

DAN FOSTER, Former IHS psychologist:

It was prepubescent, adolescent males, most of them teenagers, 12 to 15 years old. All of them vulnerable, high-risk, many of whom we already had suspicions that they’d been sexually molested or, or abused. And so that, that was a red flag. And then later, one of our colleagues came and told me he had real concerns regarding this doctor’s bringing a couch into his, his office and that he was keeping young males in there after hours when most of the staff had gone home.

NARRATOR:

While Dr. Weber was on the Blackfeet Reservation, no child is known to have come forward with a specific allegation of abuse. But Becky Foster remembered one boy who she’d later had concerns about – Joe Four Horns. He’s now in prison for bank robbery, but spoke to reporter Dan Frosch by phone.

DAN FROSCH:

[subtitle] Describe to me the first time you met Dr. Weber.

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[subtitles] I was skating and I collided with another kid and I fell and I broke my tailbone. So they brought me to the hospital and that’s where I met him at. He came and did a checkup on me like about a week later when I was at the nurturing center.

DAN FROSCH:

[subtitle] Did he do anything that day that was inappropriate in your mind?

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[subtitles] Just the way he was talking to me, but had his hand was on, like, on my leg while he was talking to me. And, and he just left it there and I kinda… That was, it made me uncomfortable. Why you just leave your hand on me, on my leg while you’re talking to me?

DAN FROSCH:

[subtitle] And Joe, tell me how old you were at this time.

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[subtitle] I was 11.

NARRATOR:

Joe says he never told anyone at the time what was happening during his visits with Dr. Weber. But on the reservation, the rumors and suspicions were growing.

DAN FOSTER:

He took the kids to Great Falls shopping. He took them to basketball tournaments when our kids would qualify. To us, that was getting the community used to seeing him with these kids and the implication of parental permission.

BECKY FOSTER:

This is grooming behavior. So you take kids who are high-risk, who are from difficult family circumstances, and who are poor. And you offer them new clothes and you offer them food and you offer them, you know, a home where the lights are on all the time. A child will gravitate toward that.

NARRATOR:

Dan Foster says he decided to confront Dr. Weber.

DAN FOSTER:

I had these concerns and I wanted him to know that I was bringing these concerns forward. My hope was that if he were doing something, he would stop. And if he weren’t, he would be warned and would modify his behavior accordingly. But, but he did not.

DAN FROSCH, The Wall Street Journal:

How did he respond to you?

DAN FOSTER:

He was polite, he assured me that he would not harm a child. He was respectful. And then I just didn’t see him after that.

Law enforcement interview excerpts

CURT MULLER, Special Agent, Department of Health and Human Services:

[subtitle] Did you ever have any sexual contact with anybody in Blackfeet?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] No.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Anybody, adult or juveniles?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Not even adult.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Not even adult. OK.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

No.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Did you know some folks there by the last name of Four Horns?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Four Horns? Um, I don’t remember any Four Horns.

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[subtitles] I went to the hospital to get my eyes checked to see if I could get some glasses. And he was just saying stuff, like, trying to touch me and told me that if I feel uncomfortable with what he was doing to let him know and he would stop. And I told him that I did, like I, yeah, I feel uncomfortable. Like, I don’t know what this is for. Like, why are you touching me?

DAN FROSCH:

[subtitle] Where was he touching you?

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[subtitles] Everywhere. Like, rubbing my leg and my arm and my chest and stuff like that.

DAN FROSCH:

[subtitle] Was he touching you on your genitals as well?

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[subtitles] He got to that but not right then, not at that time.

NARRATOR:

Finally, after years of suspicion and rumor, there was an incident that couldn’t be ignored involving a boy who’d been sleeping at the doctor’s house.

MARY ELLEN LaFROMBOISE, Former CEO, Browning IHS hospital:

There was an incident reported to me where a family member to a kid, you know, went over and wanted to fight him and ended up smashing him in, smashing him in the face, breaking his glasses. Kind of black eye.

I just thought, you know, he’s just going to be, he’s going to be a problem. And then, you know, get with the other staff and they were like: Yeah, you know, something’s going on.

NARRATOR:

LaFromboise reached out to the region’s top IHS official, who summoned the hospital’s acting clinical director, Randy Rottenbiller, to his office in Billings.

RANDY ROTTENBILLER, M.D., Former IHS acting clinical director:

He said, you know, I’m concerned that you have a pedophile on your staff and, and you need to get rid of him. And so I just said, OK, I’ve got to deal with this task.

The first thing I did when I got back to Browning was called him and asked him to meet me in my office. And I said, “Well, I’ve been told that you need to leave.” And he said that he had had some threats made against him and he was worried about his life and he was getting ready to leave Browning anyway. And I think he packed up and left the next day.

I guess the better response would be launch an investigation. And, and yet the IHS response is typically to sweep it under the rug or, you know, or pass it on to some other place.

NARRATOR:

The IHS would transfer Dr. Weber to its hospital on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER, The Wall Street Journal:

Yeah, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is notoriously one of the poorest places in the United States. Their public health situation is dire. Life expectancy is among the very lowest in the country.

Law enforcement interview excerpts

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Why’d you leave Blackfeet?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Pardon?

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Why did you leave Blackfeet and come here?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Well, you know, I have family in this area. And I’ve always wanted to come. I always thought my place was to be Pine Ridge. I don’t know why. I just felt that this was the place for me to come.

NARRATOR:

But within months, a parent was already complaining that Dr. Weber had inappropriately examined a child. The IHS took him off clinical duties as federal authorities looked into it. They didn’t substantiate the complaint and Dr. Weber went back to work. But as in Montana, Weber’s interactions with boys continued to raise suspicions.

Kelly Brewer was a nurse who lived across the street from him.

KELLY BREWER, R.N., Former IHS nurse:

The tan house straight ahead, that was Dr. Weber’s house And then back here was where Dr. Weber’s garden used to be. Like all this area here where it’s kinda mulched, that was all garden. He hired kids to work in it all the time and they were always young Native American boys, 10-ish to 12-ish in age.

NARRATOR:

The kids coming and going would earn a nickname around the reservation.

Law enforcement interview excerpts

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] They called it the Weber boys. Have you ever heard that term?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] No, never heard that.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] Let me introduce you to it today ’cause that’s what was going on. People that lived in the community were seeing boys come and go, in and out, in and out of your house.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Maybe in the garage cause that’s where the tools are, but rarely would people come into my house.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Which boys do you think did come in your house? Do you remember?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] The only ones that ever did needed to use the bathroom and that was infrequent. But nobody’s ever stayed here overnight, ever. Sometimes they’d come in to use the phone, but that’s about it.

NARRATOR:

One of the so-called Weber boys was named Paul. Like Joe Four Horns in Montana, he is now in prison serving time for assault.

PAUL:

[subtitles] I had nothing and nobody. My stepmom talked my dad into turning his back on me. And then my mom threw me out. You do what you have to in order to get by. You know what I mean?

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

[subtitles] I do. And we’re talking, you’re like 13, 14 years old at this time?

PAUL:

[subtitle] Yeah. I was about 13.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Thirteen.

PAUL:

[subtitles] Little guy, man. Now I’m just, I’m ashamed of the whole situation. You know?

NARRATOR:

Paul says that in exchange for sexual favors, Weber would give him money or prescription drugs. Like the other boys, he kept his encounters a secret, year after year.

PAUL:

[subtitles] Here this guy was offering me money so I could find a place to sleep. All I had to do was a few f—– up favors. And at the time, it just made me feel super f—– up.

NARRATOR:

One night, he says, he pushed back.

PAUL:

[subtitles] That night, I did some pills and was drinking Everclear with it, man. I remember talking to Weber and then I remember him telling me to come pick some money up but was already drunk. And I remember blanking out.

When I came to, I think he was pressing up on me and that f—— fool was like trying to press me against that table. Man, that whole s— with Weber was just like, he was a f—— predator. I remember telling him to back up. He was like, “Oh, you just want money. Is that all you come up here for?” On the table there was a wallet sitting there so I snatched it and I shoved him.

I remember running and seeing those cop lights. And I ran inside, flew into that laundry room and tried to barricade myself in there, man.

NARRATOR:

Tribal police officer Dan Hudspeth was called to the scene.

DAN HUDSPETH, Former police officer, Oglala Sioux Tribe:

Call came in. There was an assault. We chased the suspect down, located him not too far from the IHS housing. We took him into custody and then on to juvenile detention.

NARRATOR:

As Hudspeth took Paul to juvenile detention, he asked him what was going on.

PAUL:

[subtitles] Man, that was like the first time in a long time that somebody had actually asked me: “Are you all right? What happened?” Like, actually showing some sympathy, you know? And then I was thinking about it and I did. I did talk to him about, like, that whole situation.

NARRATOR:

The authorities now had a firsthand allegation of ongoing sexual abuse by Weber. But on the reservation, the tribal authorities don’t have jurisdiction over non-Indians. So all Officer Hudspeth could do was pass along Paul’s allegations to federal investigators.

DAN HUDSPETH:

We forwarded it on to the Bureau of Indian Affairs criminal investigations, but I’m not quite sure how they ran with it. All I do know is, personally, I took, I made sure my, my kids weren’t seen anymore by that pediatrician.

NARRATOR:

The Bureau of Indian Affairs declined to comment and Paul says no one from the federal government followed up with him. He kept quiet about what had happened after that. At the IHS hospital, one of Weber’s fellow pediatricians was developing his own concerns.

MARK BUTTERBRODT, M.D., Former IHS physician:

I’d hear him riffing through my charts, cherry-picking the, the, the cute teenage boys. So at that point, I started having some suspicions about him. He didn’t like seeing babies, didn’t like seeing toddlers, didn’t like seeing girls, didn’t like seeing teenage girls. So, so just professionally, I just kept butting heads with this guy. But I couldn’t get anybody on the medical staff to listen me.

PAUL:

[subtitles] There was times where I’d be at the hospital. Right? And then, like, I’ll, I’ll go inside of Weber’s little examining room and like certain situations would happen. You know what I mean? I’ll come out and, like, nurses and other doctors, they’d just be like, staring at me. They knew exactly what was up.

When somebody looks at you a certain way, you know that they know something. Something inside is like, man, I hope they don’t think this, I hope they don’t think that, but you know that they do. You know, and at the same time you’re like, man, somebody help. You know what I’m saying? Somebody notice me, man. Somebody help me, man. They all just looked the other way, though, you know?

NARRATOR:

In November 2006, Paul did something that made it harder to look the other way. He wouldn’t discuss the details over the prison phone line, but he had one of his friends on the reservation recount what happened.

Henry Red Cloud says he, Paul, and another friend were out drinking and looking for trouble, and then ran out of money.

HENRY RED CLOUD:

All of a sudden, you know, Paul’s like, you know, he was like, let’s just go over to that f—— doctor’s house, man. I can’t remember if he was f—— calling him a child molester or something like that. I can’t remember, but I think I heard something like that. Paul had it out for Weber. Maybe it was just because of their little dealings. And I thought it was f—– up, too, ’cause he was my doctor and s—. I knew of several people that used to go get money from him.

So we went up there. We parked. As soon as he opened the door, I just kicked the door. He staggered back and he dropped and then I kicked him a few times, hit him a few times, and then threw him into the kitchen area. And then he was mumbling around and he started walking towards the back into that bathroom and Dr. Weber was sitting there looking at himself in the mirror. His eyes were f—– up, bloody mouth, bloody nose. He was pretty well done for, man. I said we better get that money. So he pulled out a couple hun and then he was like, “Here, here, here, here you go. Take it. Take it.” He said, “Just don’t kill me.”

NARRATOR:

Dr. Weber made his way to the IHS hospital. Bill Pourier, the hospital CEO, says security guards called him, and said one of his doctors had been assaulted.

BILL POURIER, Former CEO, Pine Ridge IHS hospital:

So I went up there and Dr. Weber was laying on a, on a gurney in the, in the emergency room. He looked rather beaten up and traumatized and so forth. So I asked him, “What’s going on, here?” I said, “Who did this to you?” He wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t say nothing.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER, The Wall Street Journal:

He wouldn’t say anything at all?

BILL POURIER:

He wouldn’t say nothing and it was frustrating.

NARRATOR:

Pourier says that he reported what happened to IHS’s regional headquarters, but that his bosses never pursued the matter, and he was afraid to take it any further.

BILL POURIER:

I probably would have been suspended, maybe even fired. You know, pretty much they can do what they want with you.

MARK BUTTERBRODT, M.D., Former IHS physician:

When he was beaten to the point of needing skull X-rays and no charges were filed for beating up a commissioned officer on federal grounds to the point where he needed skull films, I thought: What on earth is going on? What kind of coverup is this? I mean this involves a lot of people in a lot of high places.

NARRATOR:

Outraged, Dr. Butterbrodt would become increasingly fixated on exposing Dr. Weber.

Law enforcement interview excerpts

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] Dr. Butterbrodt has been trying to hang me because apparently he heard that there was an accusation of abuse. OK? And he’s been bringing it up ever since. OK? Repeatedly.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Why would there be a rub that he would bring things up?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] That’s the way he lives his life. He starts, you know, jumping on people.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Right.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] And I don’t know why he does that. It’s… You have to ask him.

MARK BUTTERBRODT, M.D., Former IHS physician:

I think a lot of people thought I was overreacting. And people would say to me, “You don’t have any real evidence.” And that was always the Indian Health Service line, too. You know, we’ve looked at the data bank. There’s no complaints on him. He’s clean.

And I learned that there was a psychologist who had worked with him at Browning and was aware of his activities in Browning, Montana, prior to 1995 when he came here.

NARRATOR:

It was Dan and Becky Foster who had had concerns about Weber’s behavior on the Blackfeet Reservation.

DAN FROSCH, The Wall Street Journal:

When Mark is telling you guys basically saying a crime has been committed, how did that make you guys feel?

BECKY FOSTER:

Well, I think it, I think we just… So you get to be just so angry and frustrated and then just kind of numb. Because part of what happens is that you can see all of these young people be hurt and knowing that you’ve tried to do everything that you could do within the bounds of what’s available to you, and then nothing happens. It says to me, as an Indian woman, as a mother, is that your kids don’t matter.

DAN FOSTER:

I felt deeply hurt and very angry. The anger was because I felt it was preventable.

NARRATOR:

In fact, years earlier, Dan Foster had heard Weber was working at Pine Ridge and contacted IHS leaders there to warn them.

DAN FROSCH:

Would you have said in as explicit terms, I’m worried this guy’s a pedophile?

DAN FOSTER:

Yes. Oh, I was clear. My concerns was that this man was sexually using children.

NARRATOR:

After the encounter, Dr. Butterbrodt was more determined than ever that Weber had to go. He complained to state medical boards and officials at the IHS. And he believed he’d finally found proof in a list of patients Weber had ordered tests on.

MARK BUTTERBRODT:

So I looked at these charts and there weren’t any girls. They were all boys. On this page, there are 14 patients and there’s one female. One out of 14.

I kept asking myself why would a pediatrician zero in on a population consisting of normal-weight boys and teenage boys? It just seemed incomprehensible to me.

NARRATOR:

Dr. Weber was suspended while the allegations were investigated.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER, The Wall Street Journal:

When Dr. Weber was suspended by the Indian Health Service over allegations of misconduct in 2009, one of the officials who was sent to look into this was this guy Ron Keats.

NARRATOR:

Keats, who was one of Weber’s superiors at the time, would soon leave the IHS under a cloud himself and later be convicted of possession of child pornography.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

So, effectively, they sent a guy who would go on to be arrested a year later of trafficking in child porn to investigate suspicions that their pediatrician could be a pedophile.

NARRATOR:

Keats did not respond to requests for comment. Weber was ultimately cleared and went back to work, according to Bill Pourier.

BILL POURIER, Former CEO, Pine Ridge IHS hospital:

The higher-ups, I guess, basically told me there was… They couldn’t find one reason to keep him on suspension. There was no facts, evidence, to support what happened and so forth and that’s pretty much what they gave me, the answer they gave me. So we just, directed me to put him back to work.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

At that time did you believe that Dr. Weber was, you know, potentially engaged in some kind of misconduct towards children?

BILL POURIER:

Yeah, I kind of felt that there could possibly be something going on here ’cause I started looking at everything, but you know, I just never got nothing. You know, I was frustrated as well.

NARRATOR:

In the summer of 2010, at the Pine Ridge hospital, Dr. Weber and Dr. Butterbrodt would clash over the care of a patient. Dr. Weber claimed he was threatened.

MARK BUTTERBRODT:

Within an hour, I’m sitting in the office of the acting clinical director in Pine Ridge. And finally, I said something really out of line. I said, “If I’d wanted to intimidate him I would have cut his nuts off with a rusty knife.”

And that remark went right to Washington. I was branded as a violent, out-of-control person and within a few weeks was traveling up to Belcourt, North Dakota, leaving my life and my career and my family, everything.

NARRATOR:

The IHS sent Dr. Butterbrodt to one of its most remote outposts, 575 miles away on the Canadian border.

MARK BUTTERBRODT:

The nurses came up to me and said, “Now you know why we don’t say anything, Dr. B. Look what they’ve done to you.” I was ordered to leave. I was chased off by a pedophile and the people who chose him over me.

NARRATOR:

Months later, a new IHS chief medical officer arrived in the region.

ROD CUNY, M.D., Former IHS regional chief medical officer:

You know, it just seemed like the perfect storm of issues that kind of arose.

NARRATOR:

Rod Cuny determined that Dr. Butterbrodt had been unfairly punished.

ROD CUNY:

Now I credit Mark Butterbrodt because he, I mean he laid his career on the line in doing what he needed to do. Really, he did the right things, and you know, and he’s a direct result of people fearing would happen, what might happen to you. I mean, it happened to him, and that’s why people didn’t come forward like he did. And that’s sad that that attitude has to prevail, but you know, people are scared to come forward.

NARRATOR:

Many of the officials who ran IHS during the years Dr. Weber was there declined to be interviewed. But reporter Chris Weaver tracked down Bob McSwain.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Mr. McSwain?

BOB McSWAIN, Former IHS director:

Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Hi. I’m Chris Weaver.

NARRATOR:

He worked at the IHS for more than 40 years, including two stints as director. McSwain conceded the agency has long tolerated problem doctors like Weber.

BOB McSWAIN:

It goes back to the, the very heart of, they needed his skills, and so they, they moved him around to, to maintain his, his contribution. It’s fair to say that because of the, the absolute need to fill positions, we don’t really get the best of the best. We get someone who… They have a degree, they’re licensed. And our requirement on licensing is at least licensed in one state in the system.

And there’s a strange tolerance level that: Oh, OK, the guy’s a, a womanizer, or a guy’s this and a guy’s that. But he comes in to see patients. OK? The, the, the antithesis is what would it be if he didn’t come in? Who’s going to see the patients?

SEN. BYRON DORGAN, D-N.D., 1992-2011:

[Senate hearing] I call the hearing to order. This is a hearing of the Indian Affairs Committee.

NARRATOR:

In 2010, the dysfunction at the IHS got attention in Washington, at the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee. Sen. Byron Dorgan was chairman at the time.

SEN. BYRON DORGAN:

[Senate hearing] We got a couple employees here that are trouble. And not only does the employee not get disciplined, but the employee gets a bonus.

SEN. BYRON DORGAN:

We found people who were transferred from one to the other, despite the fact that there were allegations of drug misuse, stealing, sexual abuse, inappropriate behavior, a whole series of things that would, in almost every other circumstance in life, require you to discharge someone, fire someone. Instead, the Indian Health Service moves them. They transfer them. They move them to the next service unit. And let’s have somebody else live with the incompetence and the mistakes.

SEN. BYRON DORGAN:

[Senate hearing] This system is not working, just isn’t working.

SEN. BYRON DORGAN:

We tried to browbeat the IHS in every way we knew how to get them to straighten out and they just seem impervious to improvement and they could not get it right.

NARRATOR:

In the case of Dr. Weber, warnings continued to go unheeded for years. In 2011, one of them reached Wehnona Stabler, then the CEO of the Pine Ridge Hospital. She says a caller complained about Dr. Weber, but didn’t provide her any specifics. The matter never went anywhere. Stabler later received a gift of $5,000 from Dr. Weber, and would plead guilty to not reporting it on a government ethics form. She didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Then, one day in 2015, it all started to unravel.

A tribal prosecutor recalled something Dr. Mark Butterbrodt had told her years before.

ELAINE YELLOW HORSE, Former prosecutor, Oglala Sioux Tribe:

Mark and I are really good friends. I’ve known him since I was in high school. So he was frustrated I remember one day, and he told me about me about Dr. Weber and how he was molesting kids.

I was driving to work and there was snow on the ground when I was thinking about the case. And I was like: I wonder if the attorney general even heard about this?

TATEWIN MEANS, Former attorney general, Oglala Sioux Tribe:

She just asked, “There’s some leads that I have on this. Can I start looking into this and seeing what I can find?” So I said, “Absolutely. If you can find something, let’s track it down and we’ll take that information forward.”

NARRATOR:

As in the past, it was hard to get anyone to talk.

ELAINE YELLOW HORSE:

Weber’s alleged victims are all boys. So you know, it’s even that much harder to get a, a boy or a man to speak about sexual abuse. So I think trust is a big thing.

TATEWIN MEANS:

We felt it was a priority to at least identify a potential victim so that it wouldn’t be dismissed anymore; so that it would be taken seriously and a full investigation would happen.

NARRATOR:

They began to look into the assault on Dr. Weber a decade earlier.

ELAINE YELLOW HORSE:

I learned that he was beat up really bad; that he was so beaten that he had to get MRIs done. What I think people should’ve noticed was that he didn’t press any charges on anybody.

TATEWIN MEANS:

And those whole circumstances just looked odd. There was something not right about that.

ELAINE YELLOW HORSE:

And I did go looking for that police report ’cause if he was beat up so bad, you know, the ambulances should’ve came, police officers should’ve came. But I couldn’t find anything.

NARRATOR:

After months of searching, she found a woman who said she knew the boys who’d done it.

ELAINE YELLOW HORSE:

But she didn’t give me much detail. She just said, “Yeah, they came to me that night after they beat up Dr. Weber.” She gave me the name of one of them. And I was like, all right fine. I have this one name to go on. We found out he was in prison, state prison.

NARRATOR:

It was Paul, by then in his late 20s.

PAUL:

[subtitles] He’s a bad man because of what he did in the past, what, what we went though, what I was put through. That’s the type of stuff that deserves punishment and he, he got what he had coming to him. But that’s why what happened, happened.

TATEWIN MEANS:

And after we received that information, we provided that, that potential victim’s name to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Law enforcement interview excerpts

CURT MULLER, Special Agent, Department of Health and Human Services:

[subtitle] Today’s date is May 19, 2016.

NARRATOR:

Federal investigators followed the trail the tribal authorities had uncovered. It started with Paul’s name and led to Dr. Weber’s door.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] Dr. Weber’s been kind enough to invite us into his home to discuss a few things. Now is it all right if we record the conversations?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Yeah.

FRED BENNETT, Agent:

[subtitles] Specifically, there’s an allegation against Dr. Weber involving a patient of yours in the past.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] I heard from another kid that he had made an accusation that I was sexually molesting him.

FRED BENNETT:

[subtitles] How about we go back to when he was a juvenile and he was in the juvenile service center in Rapid City. He’s saying that on that day he had sex with you.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] No, it’s not true.

FRED BENNETT:

[subtitle] And specifically that you gave him a b— job inside your car.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] It didn’t happen.

FRED BENNETT:

[subtitle] And then you guys had anal intercourse at the Motel 6?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Never happened.

FRED BENNETT:

[subtitles] And at one particular time, you guys had sex in the mall parking lot at the Rushmore Mall in Rapid City?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Never happened.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] The problem is, the records that show that you rented the room on the same day he got picked up.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitles] I don’t remember anything. I mean, I can never, ever remember checking into a hotel with Paul.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] Did it ever concern you that people would talk in the community about boys coming over a lot?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Butterbrodt was somebody that, that I know he’s complained about it.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Is he wrong when he says you were picking up little boys?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] I have not had sex with my patients.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitles] Do you remember any of the, the providers by the name of Foster? Did you ever talk to them about these allegations?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] I can’t remember.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] Did you ever discuss these things with Bill Pourier when he was CEO?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Not really.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] You mentioned that kids stayed with you at your house in Blackfeet.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] They did at times.

CURT MULLER:

[subtitle] And you don’t remember anybody by the name of Four Horns?

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

[subtitle] Four Horns? No I don’t.

NARRATOR:

The years of accusations had finally caught up with Dr. Weber. Federal prosecutors would charge him with the abuse of four boys on Pine Ridge and two on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.

In September 2018, more than two decades after he was forced off the Blackfeet Reservation, Dr. Weber arrived at the courthouse in Great Falls, Montana, to stand trial. The first witness was Joe Four Horns, now 35 years old.

DAN FROSCH, The Wall Street Journal:

And in walks Joe and he is this muscle-bound guy, tattoos on his face, shackled. Very tough-looking guy.

The prosecutor, in her opening statement, she puts up a picture of Joe Four Horns when he was about 10 or 11 years old, right around the time that he would have been abused by Dr. Weber. She wants the jury to remember this little boy.

NARRATOR:

Recording was not allowed in the court. This is the trial testimony voiced by actors.

LORI SUEK, Prosecutor:

[actor’s voice] “Can I call you Joe?”

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “Yeah.”

DAN FROSCH:

Joe answers their questions. It’s clear he does not want to be on the stand.

LORI SUEK:

[actor’s voice] “Did he ever kiss you?”

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “Yeah.”

LORI SUEK:

[actor’s voice] “Where did he kiss you?”

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “The lips, my face, my neck and my chest.”

LORI SUEK:

[actor’s voice] “Did he touch any other part of your body with his hand?”

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “Yeah, my penis.”

DAN FROSCH:

Dr. Weber is sitting there, emotionless…

LORI SUEK:

[actor’s voice] “Did you ever touch his penis?”

DAN FROSCH:

…placid.

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “Yeah, yes.”

LORI SUEK:

[actor’s voice] “Why did you do that?”

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “Because he told me to.”

DAN FROSCH:

He looks more like the little boy on the screen than he does the hardened felon that is sitting there. He’s talking about the most humiliating thing that you could ever imagine talking about. He breaks down crying.

NARRATOR:

Dr. Weber’s attorney questioned why Joe had never spoken up before.

DAN FROSCH:

Joe reacts in a way that undercuts the defense’s entire sort of line of questioning.

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “Right now, I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t ever want to talk about that.”

DAN FROSCH:

And explained in really sort of honest, gut-wrenching, visceral terms, why he had never told anybody about this.

JOE FOUR HORNS:

[actor’s voice] “I got molested as a little kid, man. I don’t want to talk about that. All right, I’ll tell you the truth: Those pieces of s—, those child molesters, they deserve to be in prison. They don’t deserve to be on the street. They deserve to get f—— f—– up and f—— killed in prison. And that’s what’s gonna happen.”

DAN FROSCH:

So during his testimony and as he began sort of discussing in detail what had happened to him, his mom had to leave the courtroom in tears.

NARRATOR:

Marion Four Horns had lost custody of her son during those years.

MARION FOUR HORNS, Joe’s mother:

I never knew about any of this. And I feel bad for my boy because I wasn’t able to protect him. I feel, I really feel bad. [crying] I really hurt for him. I don’t know what to do.

NARRATOR:

The extent of the allegations against Dr. Weber would begin to emerge as the trial unfolded, with more men describing what they said he’d done to them as boys.

DAN FROSCH:

The prosecution brings several corroborating witnesses from Pine Ridge. And as was the case with Joe, you see these tough guys sort of reduced to little boys.

NARRATOR:

Despite the testimony against him, Dr. Weber continued to shrug off the allegations.

STANLEY PATRICK WEBER:

It’s a nice day today! Nice sunny day!

NARRATOR:

On the third day of the trial, the jury came back with its verdict: guilty on multiple counts of sexual abuse. Weber is appealing and, later this year, he’s scheduled to go on trial in South Dakota for alleged abuses there.

ELAINE YELLOW HORSE, Former prosecutor, Oglala Sioux Tribe:

I’m very glad that he was caught. I still am frustrated that he was allowed to work for so long in that environment. I think I’m still frustrated that more people haven’t been charged criminally.

MARION FOUR HORNS:

There was obviously a lot of people that knew something was going on and they didn’t do anything. They just let him go. I feel like somebody should pay for, for what all these boys went though because people knew.

NARRATOR:

To date, no one else in the IHS has been held accountable. And many of the officials who oversaw Dr. Weber did not respond to requests for comment.

But following questions from FRONTLINE and The Wall Street Journal, the agency ordered an independent investigation of Weber’s tenure.

The current head of IHS agreed to talk about it, and asked to do the interview at the hospital on Pine Ridge where Weber had worked.

Rear Admiral Michael Weahkee has been leading the agency since 2017.

REAR ADMIRAL MICHAEL WEAHKEE, Acting IHS director:

Since this case has come to light, we’ve been doing a lot of checking internally to, to see what people may or may not have known. If there are individuals who were aware that something was going on, then you’re basically culpable and complicit in, in those actions. I’m in the process now of developing a new policy that will require that every Indian Health Service employee be a mandatory reporter.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Of what?

REAR ADMIRAL MICHAEL WEAHKEE:

Of any potential child abuse, any sexual assault, any, anything potentially criminal in nature.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

And what would be a satisfying resolution to the crisis around the case of Dr. Weber?

REAR ADMIRAL MICHAEL WEAHKEE:

That he do his time, that he pay for what he did. He did a lot of damage to our agency. We’ve talked a lot about the difficulties we have recruiting providers. This isn’t going to help.

CHRISTOPHER WEAVER:

Where do you set the bar for yourself in terms of leading the agency out of this crisis?

REAR ADMIRAL MICHAEL WEAHKEE:

I think the bar is extremely high. There are so many people depending upon us. My own family receives their health care through the Indian Health Service. So I go home every day and… The expectation is to fix this. Sorry.

NARRATOR:

In January 2019, Dr. Weber, now 70 years old, was sentenced to more than 18 years in prison. But haunting questions remain.

RANDY ROTTENBILLER, M.D., Former IHS acting clinical director:

You know, it doesn’t sit well that somebody like this monster came in and did what he did. You know, and I didn’t do much to prevent it. I certainly could have done more.

BILL POURIER, Former CEO, Pine Ridge IHS hospital:

Well, at that time you think of your career and job and your livelihood. So I probably would have got fired. I guess that was the risk I would’ve took. I couldn’t afford to take the risk at that time to lose my job. Do I feel responsible for it? No. No.

MARY ELLEN LaFROMBOISE, Former CEO, Browning IHS hospital:

I guess I have to blame the bureaucracy of Indian Health Service. But I, I have to say, It was on my watch that happened. I should have known better but I didn’t. That, that’s still hard for me to kind of deal with.

NARRATOR:

After nearly 30 years, no one knows how many victims of Weber’s abuse are still out there or how many other people in the Indian Health Service could have done more to stop him.