The murder of Unnamed 23-month-old girl (name not publicly released)

The death of the 23-month-old girl on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation was solved not by a laboratory result but by a witness who, after more than thirty years, finally identified what had happened in the home on the night of September 4, 1992. For decades, the toddler's death carried no resolution. There was no public arrest, no charge, and no widely reported forensic breakthrough; the case sat among the long list of unresolved deaths in Indian Country that would later draw the attention of the federal Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons effort. The decisive development, as described by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of South Dakota and reported by multiple South Dakota outlets, came in early 2023, when a witness to the crime came forward and identified Jay Adams Jr. as the person responsible for the girl's death. That single account reopened a case that had been closed for a generation. Federal prosecutors emphasized that the matter was not cracked by modern DNA technology but by the witness's information, corroborated by a medical review: a pathologist re-examined the 1992 autopsy findings, and the medical evidence was consistent with, and corroborated, the account of how the child died. The investigation that followed was carried out jointly by the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribal Police Department and the FBI, with the case prosecuted under the Department of Justice's Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Regional Outreach Program by Assistant U.S. Attorney Troy R. Morley. A federal grand jury returned an indictment in April 2023 charging Adams with first-degree murder. Because the crime occurred on a federal Indian reservation and involved an enrolled tribal member, jurisdiction lay with the federal courts. Adams, who was an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and who had once served as a dispatcher for the tribal police department, did not go to trial. On November 20, 2023, he pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, admitting that he had injured the child and caused her death. As part of resolving the case, prosecutors described the conduct as a killing committed in the heat of passion after Adams found the toddler had soiled her diaper and bedding, an account the medical evidence supported. On June 24, 2024, U.S. District Judge Charles B. Kornmann sentenced Adams in Aberdeen to 10 years in federal prison, the statutory maximum for the manslaughter charge, plus three years of supervised release and a special assessment payable to the Federal Crime Victims Fund. U.S. Attorney Alison J. Ramsdell announced the sentence. No DNA, fingerprint, or genetic-genealogy evidence was reported as the basis for the resolution; the case turned on the witness who came forward in 2023 and on the corroborating pathology review of the original autopsy. The victim's name was not released to the public, consistent with the handling of the matter as a sensitive Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons case involving a young child.