Keeping an accurate count is at best challenging, and the true numbers may never be known. The most familiar AIM victims have been Annie Mae Pictou Aquash and Perry Ray Robinson, but a strong case can be made that 20 year old Johhny Moore, a Penobscot, found dead in a Nebraska AIM house can be added to the list.
The original official report listed the cause of Moore’s death as suicide, and the story was floated that he had become despondent. But this story was disputed by individuals who knew and had access to him.
The cloying scent of foul play that has clung to Moore’s death has resulted from the fact that he was under supoena to testify against Stanley Neptune-a fellow AIM member.
The investigation into Moore’s death was originally conducted by the Lincoln, Nebraska police department who listed it as a probable suicide, and it wasn’t until years later in a follow up investigation by the Nebraska State Police that the cause of death was changed to
undetermined.
As I understand it when such is the case it is protocol to then pursue it as a possible homocide- and although I am not privy to any official information pertaining to such an investigation I do know that statements have been issued addressing the difficulty attributed to the now infamous code of silence.
I don’t know, and neither do I think does anyone what the nature of Johnny Moore’s testimony would have been-but the mere fact that he was supoenaed was apparently sufficient cause for the AIM “security apparatus” to label him a snitch. Sounds all too familiar doesn’t it?
And so once again all the elements were in place:
Motivation: A young man deemed as a threat and labeled a snitch, and effectively isolated among his peers by such a pronouncement just as Annie was.
Opportunity: Moore was staying at Wounded Knee Legal Defense flop house in Lincoln along with several others.
Result: Another senseless death, and AIM as usual has been struck deaf, dumb,and blind-nobody knows anything and have even less to say.
I didn’t know Johnny Moore but I suspect he was a decent young man who cared for his people, and in wanting something better for them fell for the bullhit AIM line-a line of bullshit and an association that ultimately cost him his life…..at a mere twenty years of age.
It is my sincere wish that people would just step back a moment, forget all the by rote defenses and factory issued conspiracy tales and objectively look at events that have transpired in the last few decades-I’m not suggesting they summarily toss their beliefs asides but to ask questions, to think, to employ even the most rudimentary forms of logic and reason.
If everyone would do so this would be a whole new ball game-silence is consent, it is a degree of participation by any formula, if we do not personally grieve for a loved one lost, a victim, we are no less removed from those who do.
That’s what the “we are all related” is about-and seemingly forgotten.