Michael White Plume Sr., 39, a Native American man, was killed on January 5, 2022, in the Manderson–Wounded Knee area on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In the earliest hours of that morning, a gunman entered a residence near Wounded Knee where people had been gathered and, after a brief interaction, opened fire inside the home, leaving White Plume dead along with two others, Alma Garneaux, 38, and Jamie Graham, 38.
As the shock rippled outward, federal and tribal investigators moved in together. The FBI and the Oglala Sioux Tribe's Department of Public Safety publicly identified the three victims on January 10, 2022, and described the scene as three people shot to death inside the home at a Wounded Knee address. Even while details remained scarce to the public, investigators said they had developed significant leads and had someone they believed responsible in custody on unrelated charges while formal homicide charges were still being prepared.
According to federal prosecutors, the break in the case came almost immediately after the shooting. After the killings, the shooter forced a fourth person at gunpoint to help him get a ride to a different residence in Manderson; once he left that location, the people there called 911 to report what had happened. Law enforcement arrested Elijah West in the early hours of January 5, 2022, and authorities said the murder weapon was recovered in his possession.
The case moved into federal court under Indian Country jurisdiction. West was indicted by a federal grand jury in January 2022, and prosecutors later brought him to trial in Rapid City. In September 2023, a federal jury found him guilty of three counts of First Degree Murder, three counts of Discharge of a Firearm During a Crime of Violence, and one count of Possession of a Firearm and Ammunition by a Prohibited Person.
At sentencing on December 14, 2023, the court imposed life in prison on each murder count and additional consecutive time on the firearms charges, totaling three life sentences plus 30 years. With that judgment, the investigation's early “person of interest” became a convicted killer in the public record, and the case closed not with mystery, but with a federal verdict and a lifetime behind prison walls for the man found responsible.
