After the Crash
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A police officer chased a Native teen to his death. Days later, the police force shut down without explanation.
In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team.
That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a head-on collision with a train. Desperate for details about the accident, she went to the police station, only to find it had shut down without any notice.
“The doors were locked. It looked like it wasn’t in operation anymore—like they just upped and left,” Old Bull said. “It's, like, there was a life taken, and you guys just closed everything down without giving the family any answers?”
This kicks off a yearslong search to find out what happened to Glenn and how a police force could disappear overnight without explanation. This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels’ investigation into the crash is at once an examination of a mother’s journey to uncover the details of her son’s final moments and a sweeping look at a broken system of tribal policing.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2024.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Did you kill |
| 0:03.9 | kill Marlene Johnson? I think you're one of the first people to have actually asked. |
| 0:06.3 | From WB and ZSP media, this is beyond all repair. A new podcast about an unsolved murder that will leave you questioning everything. |
| 0:15.6 | Wow, it just gets more interesting. |
| 0:19.2 | Beyond all repair. Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:30.6 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. |
| 0:35.0 | I'm Al Ledson. |
| 0:37.0 | Blossom Old Bull had a lot on her plate in the fall of 2020. |
| 0:41.0 | She was looking for work as a nursing assistant, and she was a... of Together, they lived with a few other family members in a small house on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. |
| 0:58.0 | It was a cramped space for seven people, and it felt even more cramped after the pandemic hit, |
| 1:05.0 | especially for her youngest son, Braven Glen. |
| 1:08.0 | He didn't want to be isolated from his friends. |
| 1:11.0 | He was always asking to go be with them and you know I told him it's a pandemic people are getting COVID and dying and he just insisted on being there with them. |
| 1:27.3 | 17 years old Braven hated the new normal of going to school behind a screen. He also just suffered a big loss. His grandmother had died from complications with COVID. One night that |
| 1:36.1 | November, Braven wanted to go to her house, his cousins who were some of his |
| 1:40.3 | closest friends and who were also grieving her death were going to be there. |
| 1:44.8 | I was like, no, you're going to stay home now. I got after him and he his upset and he just got his stuff and walked out the door. |
| 1:58.0 | So I let him go because I just figured, you know, he was going to to cool off we knew where he would be at. |
| 2:05.5 | I was going to go have another one of my sons go look for him and bring him home and by that time |
| 2:12.1 | it was too late. |
| 2:14.0 | The next day, Blossom gets a phone call from one of Braven's older brothers. |
| 2:19.0 | He was crying. |
... |
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