photo by: Journal-World File

A sign at the entrance to Haskell Indian Nations University is shown Friday, Aug. 5, 2016.

After a denied Freedom of Information Act request, a lawsuit and, finally, the release of more than 500 pages of documents, one nonprofit is still hunting for an investigative report about alleged crimes on Haskell Indian Nations University’s campus — and multiple students are now encountering the same problem.

As the Journal-World reported, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sued the Bureau of Indian Education, the federal agency that oversees Haskell, after the bureau withheld hundreds of pages of records related to a previous FOIA request. PEER was under the impression that records the agency had requested were related to a six-month investigation that purportedly took place on campus starting last year in July and had uncovered alleged crimes such as sexual assaults, embezzlement and theft by January 2023. A couple of months later, a group of students sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland petitioning that the investigation be released.

What the BIE eventually released, though, was not that investigation but instead material related to an earlier investigation of “allegations of harassing conduct” against former Haskell cross country coach Clay Mayes, who has disputed that report’s findings and said that BIE Director Tony Dearman and other officials told him his employment with the BIE would be reinstated.

Now, multiple current and former Haskell students say the same thing has happened with their records requests — they each filed an individual FOIA request asking for a report on the investigation that started in July 2022, but instead received documents related to the investigation on Mayes that concluded the same month.

The Journal-World has obtained copies of FOIA response letters directly from four of those students. Each of their letters specifies that the investigation they’re interested in began in mid-July 2022 and finished around the middle of January 2023. Some specified that the alleged criminal activity they were aware of was not harassing conduct from one individual but rather a web of multiple crimes including sexual assault and theft.

Two of those students submitted their FOIA requests on the same day, Sept. 4, and received responses more than two months later on Nov. 7. That date is just a few days after the BIE complied with PEER’s initial request.

The investigative report that’s now been sent to multiple students has also been made publicly available on the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ website as two separate “frequently requested FOIA documents.” One 320-page file details the investigation into Mayes’ conduct, while the second file of 208 pages appears to be about Mayes’ allegation that at least two others at Haskell — whose names have been redacted — had themselves exhibited harassing behavior.