The Charles Mix County sheriff’s deputy who arrested Robert “Berta” Enoch before his death by overdose in a Lake Andes jail will not be reprimanded for his actions. That was the decision of the South Dakota Law Enforcement Officers Standards Commission during a hearing in Pierre for 31-year-old Jon Werkmeister. Enoch, a 35-year-old Native American man, from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, was found unresponsive in his cell on April 3rd. Werkmeister lacked the training to identify signs of a drug overdose, and the Charles Mix County Jail lacked a drug overdose policy, which left him unprepared to respond when Enoch began to show signs of medical distress, commissioners found. The commission also found that Werkmeister had not acted with racist intent or treated Enoch differently than other inmates because of previous encounters or bad blood.
As part of a nationwide tour, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chair Maria Rosario Jackson visited South Dakota over the first week of July to meet with local artists in Rapid City and artists from the Oglala Lakota Nation and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. South Dakota is the 19th state Jackson has visited on her tour, and this was her first time visiting the Native nations that share a border with South Dakota.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
