Minneapolis, MN – On a hot summer day, June 20, 2022, it marked the one-year anniversary of the death of Richard “Ricky” Anthony Balsimo as friends and family gathered for his memorial service.
Ricky Balsimo was a 34-year-old father of three and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota when he was murdered. His remains were dismembered in gallon bins found at the bottom of Lake Superior on July 15, 2021, after he had been missing for nearly a month.
The memorial took place at Cedar Fields Park by United Tribes’ Little Earth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A truck decorated with American Indian Movement flags and a banner that reads: “Justice for Ricky” sat in the middle of the park and the family gathered to comfort each other.
Ricky’s cousin, Dustin, shared some cherished experiences and moments with Unicorn Riot:
“A few precious moments. Yes, he had a PlayStation and I always unplugged it because sometimes it wouldn’t let me in; after I unplugged it he would share it with me. I remember it was -10 degrees outside, we were trying to get this car battery to work and he finally figured it out after a long time – so we definitely had some good moments with my uncle. So RIP Ricky man, there will be justice, there will be justice.”
-Dustin Balsimo, Ricky’s nephew
“I think I felt they cut my son to pieces. Because I felt my hips, my legs, and I swear to the Creator, to my son to my grandchildren, I think I know that when it all happened I couldn’t get rid of the pain. I just couldn’t – I didn’t want to believe he was gone.”
-Kim Balsimo, Ricky’s mother
Last summer, Balsimo’s family began to fear the worst when he went days without responding to text messages and phone calls. Kim said, ‘We haven’t heard from him. He wasn’t home, we knew something was wrong, but we thought he was totally in the moment.”
Balsimo’s parents filed a missing persons report with the St. Paul Police Department, but the family told Native News Online that they never received a call from an investigator, as they were told. After continued frustration at lack of investigation and lack of search by authorities, Balsimo’s family said they decided to take matters into their own hands and hire Applied Professional Services (APS), who conducted an extensive investigation.
“There was never a search for Ricky, we hired a detective, [in addition to] our family, to find him. Without it it would not have happened, and we recognize that privilege.”
-Jasmine Laducer, Ricky’s cousin
Ricky’s sister, Raquel Turner, gave an impassioned speech at the June memorial about the… “Lack of Police Investigation” and said every step of the way the family has felt “no one is listening. Nobody cares.”
“You hire a private detective because the police won’t listen. Then you look for days through the forest into the water. Something in you tells you that he is not alive. But you can’t think like that. You have to hope it isn’t true. Every step of the way. When you call for help, it falls on deaf ears. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. He is lost and all the people who are supposed to help him say ‘go home’… Maybe I could have saved him before the time came. Maybe we could have taken it home in its entirety. Ricky’s life is important and when he lost it it completely broke our family. It has destroyed so many lives and we will never get over its loss. We will never stop fighting for justice.”
-Raquel Turner, June 6, 2022
The family started a GoFundMe in early July 2021 to find information, raise awareness and help pay for research costs. In an August 2021 update to the page, family member Austin Turner noted that Balsimo “was murdered by someone he called a friend, a brother,” Jacob Colt Johnson. Turner said Balsimo was killed on the subway by Jake, who was then… “Silence[d] him forever by chopping him up and putting him in buckets of cement to drop him in Lake Superior.
Turner noted that even after hiring APS, they felt that the police didn’t care about Ricky’s disappearance, saying: “To them he was just a criminal on the run or another missing Native, take your pick.”
“Jake thought no one would ever find Ricky, but we did. We investigated Ricky’s disappearance when no one would listen, we hired a private detective with APS investigations to help us find Ricky, to be the face the police would listen to, but even then we see how little the police did. to investigate Ricky’s disappearance/murder . To them he was just a criminal on the run or another missing Native, take your pick. We as a family have been away from our children and loved ones for weeks to find Ricky, we put every dollar in our name to find out what happened to him, we even put our own lives at risk by going straight to the people going involved in Ricky’s disappearance to get answers. We found Ricky even though they said we wouldn’t and we will make sure Ricky gets justice.”
–GoFundMe update by Austin Turner
At the June memorial, Ricky Balsimo’s native artist and cousin, Nikki Lavallie, aka Nikki Rae Banz, performed two songs in Balsimo’s memory, War Cry (text – pdf) and He is Me (text – pdf).
The MN Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) released an initial statement on July 19, 2021, that Ricky Balsimo’s body had been found in Lake Superior. The report further states that Balsimo was “probably murdered on or about June 20, 2021”, and that parts of his body were… “found off the coast of Grand Portage on July 15-16.”
The investigation into Balsimo’s disappearance and alleged murder involved several counties, jurisdictions, and two states, including: Cook County Attorney’s Office, Cook County Sheriff’s Office, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office (Wisc.), Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, St. Paul Police Department, Superior Police Department (Wisc.), and the Duluth Police Department.
However, based on the police reports, it was not police work that revealed the crime, apart from APS “Investigators determined that Mr Balsimo was the victim of murderous violence while collecting evidence identifying the people responsible for his death,” it was 32-year-old Duluth resident Tommi Hintz who spoke to Douglas County Sheriff’s Department on July 13, 2021 and revealed that she participated in helping to dispose of Balsimo’s body.
On July 16, a day after parts of Balsimo’s body were recovered, Robert Thomas West was charged with aiding a perpetrator and interfering with a corpse.
The man alleged to have murdered Balsimo, 36-year-old Wisconsin-born Superior, Jacob Colt Johnson, was charged with second-degree murder with intent to kill Balsimo in August 2021. According to police complaints, Johnson told West he shot and killed Balsimo for threatening him with a knife in the car.
Two months ago, in June, Tommi Hintz agreed to testify against Balsimo’s alleged killers as part of a plea deal for her involvement in disposing of Balsimo’s body. Under the terms of the deal, in exchange for her pleading guilty as an accomplice to murder, Hintz will have a felony count of interfering with a corpse dismissed. She is given probation in exchange for her testimony, despite fierce opposition from Balsimo’s family. However, this agreement is subject to change depending on the final outcome of her co-defendants’ upcoming lawsuits.
A petition on Change.org to get federal charges against Balsimo’s killers is approaching the total number of 5,000 needed.
According to the Duluth News Tribune, Applied Professional Services issued a statement following the August 2021 arrests saying that they “first to find evidence identifying him as a likely murder victim, along with the suspects and the location of his remains.”
Robert West has a trial scheduled for January and Jacob Johnson has an omnibus hearing scheduled for November 2022, according to Kim Balsimo.
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