Alma Garneaux, 38, was a Native American woman whose life ended in the first hours of January 5, 2022, after gunfire tore through a residence near Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. By January 10, investigators publicly identified her as one of three people found shot to death inside a home at 554 BIA 28 in Wounded Knee, a place where the winter night had barely lifted when the reality of what happened began to spread through the community.
In the days
that followed, authorities described a fast-moving investigation led by the FBI alongside the Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety, and they said significant leads had formed around a person of interest. At that stage, the suspect's identity was not released, and officials said the person was being held on unrelated charges while formal homicide charges were still pending, even as they tried to reassure residents there was no ongoing danger tied to the case.
The case soon took a definitive shape in federal court. Prosecutors later identified the shooter as Elijah West of Pine Ridge, and the U.S. Attorney's Office said a federal grand jury indicted him in January 2022 on three counts of first-degree murder, three counts of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, and a prohibited-person ammunition charge; he was detained pending trial after pleading not guilty in April 2022.
As the government later told it, the violence began in the evening hours of January 4 and carried into the early morning of January 5, when West entered a trailer near Wounded Knee where people had gathered around a kitchen table to visit. He spoke briefly, then pulled a firearm from his waistband and opened fire, killing three people. Prosecutors said he then forced a fourth person at gunpoint to help him get a ride to another residence in Manderson, South Dakota, and that after he left, the people there called 911. According to the same account, West was arrested in the early hours of January 5, 2022, and law enforcement recovered the murder weapon in his possession.
The legal process stretched on until a jury convicted West after a five-day federal trial in Rapid City, with the verdict returned on September 22, 2023. Federal prosecutors said the convictions included three counts of first-degree murder, three firearm counts tied to a crime of violence, and a prohibited-person firearm-and-ammunition count.
Sentencing followed in December 2023, when a federal judge imposed life in prison on each murder count and added ten years for each firearm charge, ordering the terms to run consecutively—three life sentences plus an additional thirty years. With that, the central suspect was no longer merely a person of interest or a name in a filing, but a convicted killer with a federal judgment attached to what happened in those dark hours when Alma Garneaux did not make it home.
