Andrew Oswald Frost, a 21-year-old Native American man, died on November 11, 2017, in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, a community on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation where word travels fast and grief settles deep. In the early hours of that Saturday, a house party was still awake—voices echoing through rooms, people drifting in and out, the night stretching past the point of good judgment—when tension flared in a garage. What began as an argument between Frost and another man quickly turned physical. Frost pulled off his jacket and struck the man in the face, and in the jolt of that moment the gathering tipped from chaotic to deadly.
Nearby stood Dee Hawk Moran. Federal prosecutors later said that Moran produced a. 22 caliber pistol and fired multiple shots, mortally wounding Frost. The sudden crack of gunfire ended the confrontation, but it did not end the damage; the party scattered into shock and confusion as Frost lay fatally injured. Moran was indicted by a federal grand jury on November 14, 2017, and the case was investigated by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Law Enforcement Services and the FBI.
As the case moved through federal court, the original murder allegation ultimately gave way to a plea and conviction for a lesser homicide offense. Moran pleaded guilty on May 20, 2019. On September 3, 2019, a U.S. District Judge sentenced him to a total of 156 months in federal prison: 36 months for voluntary manslaughter, 120 months for discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence and an additional 18 months for a separate child-abuse conviction that ran concurrently with the manslaughter term. After sentencing, Moran was turned over to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.
