photo by: Brown County Sheriff's Office

Lester Joe Randall

A former Kickapoo Tribal Council chairman and former Haskell Indian Nations University regent was federally indicted this week on multiple counts of felony assault resulting in substantial bodily injury.

The grand jury charges against Lester Randall include accusations that on multiple occasions he assaulted a woman with whom he was in a domestic relationship with a wooden bowl, an Xbox headset and an aluminum baseball bat, as well as allegedly “strangling and attempting to strangle” the woman. Lester faces four counts of assault in the case.

The incidents are all alleged to have happened within the confines of the Kickapoo Tribe. The first incident is alleged to have taken place in September of last year, and the remaining three allegedly occurred on three different days in April of this year.

The grand jury indictment, undersigned by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jared Maag, was returned on Wednesday and requested that a trial be held in Topeka.

Randall, 48, appears on a list of Haskell National Board of Regents as recently as 2021; when he left the board wasn’t immediately clear, but a fellow member of the board said she believed he resigned last year. Randall’s LinkedIn page indicates that he was on the board from January 2021 until September 2023.

He was arrested in Brown County in April and charged with aggravated domestic battery; he posted a $150,000 surety bond to be released in that case.

On Thursday, he was listed as an inmate in Brown County, having been arrested again on May 3, according to the jail’s booking log. In that case, a complaint filed on May 8 by Kickapoo Tribal prosecutor Charles Branson accuses Randall of eight counts of attempted homicide in the first degree, one count of attempted arson and one count of assault in the second degree. All of the alleged homicide targets appear to have been officers with the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribal Police. The circumstances related to those charges weren’t clear, but the attempted arson appears to have been at Randall’s home.