The Crimes of David Okerlund Leavitt

An Illegal Adoption, and a Deeply Corrupt Prosecution

Previous IRA articles have profiled David and Chelom Leavitt in the context of accusations made by the Hamblin daughters against the Leavitts.   

David Leavitt managed to incinerate his political career by holding an ill-advised press conference to preemptively deny being a member of a satanic cult that raped and murdered children, while also engaging in cannibalism.   No law enforcement agency or employee had accused Leavitt of any criminal acts, but Leavitt managed to conflate the Utah County Sheriffs Office investigation into ritual abuse allegations with the so-called “Satanic Panic” allegations of the Eighties.   He also managed to draw attention away from the investigation to himself and to a fugitive named Nicholas Rossi.   

In Leavitt’s narrative, Rossi had managed to come across the 2012-2014 case against David Lee Hamblin, and he had used that the allegations against Hamblin to smear Leavitt.  Leavitt, who was named in the Hamblin Victims Statements as a perpetrator of child rape, trafficking, and murder, insisted to the world that he was not a satanic cannibal ritual abuser.  No one had publicly accused him of any such crimes.  

Behind the scenes, however, David Leavitt had been the target of an ongoing criminal investigation from 2014 to August 2020.   When the charges against David Lee Hamblin were dropped in 2014, sources indicate that the Provo Police Department packed up their case files and turned them over to the Department of Homeland Security.   HSI Special Agent Jared Browne took over the case, five years into a thirteen year career with the Department of Homeland Security.  For Browne, the case was on the back burner due to his already stacked case load.   Additionally, Browne was a Special Agent and Task Force Affiliate with the Utah Valley Child Abduction Response Team, or CART.

David Lee Hamblin and his alleged accomplices within the LDS Church of Satan were in the clear, thanks to the Utah County Attorneys Office’s decision to drop the charges against Hamblin.   Although the prosecutors had Hamblin on tape apologizing to his daughter for raping her, they had dropped every single charge.   Their motion to dismiss was without prejudice, meaning they could refile charges in the future, and their stated reason was the inability to procure old medical records.  The allegations were 20 to 30 years old.  

Jared Browne had current allegations to focus on, and within a year he transferred the case over to Special Agent Adam Koeneman.     Koeneman had started with Homeland Security in 2006, and the case was one of many he was tasked with investigating.   The allegations, sensational though they were, were difficult to unravel.   Browne, himself a Latter Day Saint, believed the allegations made by Rachel, Eliza, and Katherine Hamblin, even though the Utah County Attorney’s Office had dropped the charges against David Lee Hamblin.   

For years, the Hamblin allegations lingered in the back of Koeneman’s caseload as an HSI Special Agent.   In 2019, a young analyst named Noel Engels started his job with the Department of Homeland Security, and he was paired with HSI Special Agent Adam Koeneman.   Sources characterized Engels as a maverick, and an individual willing to push for unconventional investigative tactics.   Noel Engels began pressing forward on the 2012 to 2014 allegations against David Lee Hamblin, which had languished for five years as DHS prioritized other cases.   

As Engels began to contact the alleged victims of David Lee Hamblin, he began to strategize with Koeneman on an extremely unorthodox tactic: a subpoena of the Kirton McConkie sex abuse hotline to determine if the Hamblin daughters or any other victims of Hamblin’s LDS Church of Satan group had reported their abusers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.   This set Engels on a collision course with the rest of the DHS in Salt Lake City, because many of the special agents were Latter Day Saints.  Engels wasn’t simply putting David Lee Hamblin on the spot; instead, he was targeting the Church of Jesuss Christ of Latter Day Saints.  HSI Special Agent Brandon Crane, a dedicated Latter Day Saint, got wind of Engels’s idea.  Sources unanimously indicate that Crane was incensed with the idea, and angry with the young analyst for proposing that DHS subpoena the sex abuse hotline run by Kirton McConkie.  

Noel Engels wasn’t simply pulling at a thread that would unravel the Hamblin case; he was yanking at a thread that threatened to reveal the inner workings of the Church and its protocols on sexual abuse.   The Church was a $150 billion target, and Noel Engels was an outsider who had no real idea how the LDS worked, or how the culture of the LDS extended well beyond the Church itself through its members in various occupations.   Brandon Crane was a Latter Day Saint first, and a Special Agent with the Department of Homeland Security second.   Noel Engels was about to get an education in how pervasive the institutional perogatives of the LDS were embedded in LDS members, particularly those within federal, state, and local law enforcement.  

Engels wasn’t even a special agent; he was a mere analyst with less than three years of experience.  Engels wasn’t simply setting himself up for a collision with Kirton McConkie.  He was setting himself up to confront the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints itself, regardless of the fact that the Church was the most powerful institution in the state of Utah.  At the core of Engels efforts was his belief that the victims had contacted the sexual abuse hotline, and Kirton McConkie had buried their reports.   The Church itself did not need to overtly act; it had loyal members who would cover its flank from the likes of Noel Engels.   Brandon Crane was just such a member.   

Within DHS, Engels was becoming a problem.   Adam Koeneman and Noel Engels were given a gift in the form of David Leavitt’s interview with a documentary filmmaker.  In that interview, Leavitt described the process of adopting a little Native American girl, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana.   Leavitt described the obstacles he countered adopting the girl, characterizing the resistance to his adoption as rooted in prejudice against non-Native Americans adopting Native children.   This would have been an innocuous enough characterization, but Leavitt explained how he had overcome the resistance.  

Leavitt claimed he had managed to persuade Killsback to greenlight his custody of the Native American girl by offering to leverage his contacts in Ukraine to export buffalo from the Northern Cheyenne to Ukraine.   In doing so, David Leavitt clearly offered an inducement to a public official to achieve an adoption that was illegal under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.   ICWA gave Native American tribes exclusive jurisdiction in child custody proceedings relating to children who were domiciled on a reservation, and concurrent and presumptive jurisdiction over Native American children in foster care placement cases.  Most importantly, ICWA specified that state courts had no jurisdiction over the adoption of Native American children residing within tribal reservation.   

The child David Leavitt sought custody of was an enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana, and she was physically domiciled on the Northern Cheyenne Tribe’s reservation.  Tribal courts have exclusive jurisdiction in custody, adoption, and foster placement proceedings for such children.   David Leavitt did not petition a tribal court to obtain custody of the child.  Instead, he went directly to Lawrence Jace Killsback, the president of the Northern Cheyenne.  Killsback had no legal authority to bypass the tribal court and facilitate an end run around the tribal courts, who held exclusive jurisdiction under ICWA.    

Leavitt needed to override Tribal Social Services, which was refusing to hand over the child.   Killsback initially consented, but Tribal Social Services dug in, and Leavitt made a second visit to Killsback.   Killsback made a call to Social Services, telling them “the Leavitts are friends of the tribe...They’re assets to the tribe for more than just this.”  According to Leavitt, five minutes later the phone rang and a social worker told him there was a way to get the child to him.  On September 27, 2017, David Leavitt left the Northern Cheyenne Reservation with Allisandra Florence Fishinghawk, the Native American girl he had fought Tribal Services over, after offering Lawrence Jace Killsback a way to export buffalo from the tribe’s reservation lands to Ukraine.  

That was not the full story.   Killsback allegedly later told an NBC reporter that Leavitt had paid him $30,000 to fast track the foster placement of the child.  In March 2020, HSI Analyst Noel Engels and Specialist Adam Koeneman became aware of the documentary video in which David Leavitt recounted his trade of buffalo exports to the Ukraine for the girl.   Engels would later go public with his allegations that Leavitt’s actions constituted trafficking when he illegally bypassed ICWA to take a Native American child across state lines without first getting the authorization of a tribal court.  Engels outlined his allegations to Fox 13 reporter Adam Herbets in June 2022.  

Engels and Koeneman had a video of David Leavitt confessing to bribing a tribal president to greenlight an illegal adoption.   In that same video, David Leavitt admitted to taking the girl across state lines as part of his illegal activities, which constituted trafficking.  What Leavitt did not admit in the video was the full extent of his relationship with the girl’s mother and her immediate family.   Leavitt’s wife Chelom Eastwood’s family had taken in two of those family members as part of the LDS’s Indian Placement Program.   It is unclear whether or not DHS was aware of this fact, as sources within DHS never mentioned the relationship between the Eastwood family and the family of the adopted child.   

Engels and Koeneman were battling two major obstacles to advancing their investigation: the first was COVID, which shut down the entire country and the federal government.  There was no travel, and there was no way to conduct interviews with victims in the Hamblin statements.   The second obstacle was Brandon Crane, who had gone to ASAC Steve Andres to lobby him to block any attempt to subpoena Kirton McConkie.   Crane was ultimately successful, convincing Andres and Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew R Choate to pull the Assistant US Attorney from their case.   Without a prosecutor, Engels and Koeneman had no one to go to court to secure subpoenas.  

By August 2020, Engels and Koeneman were off of the investigation into David Leavitt and the Hamblin group.  The story of David Leavitt’s crimes was effectively buried, until Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith began digging into the allegations from Hamblin’s past as part of a new investigation.  The case simply wouldn’t die, no matter how many people tried to kill it.   David Leavitt’s adoption of a Native American girl from Montana would be central to investigators, as his actions constituted a series of crimes.   The story behind that adoption was deeper and darker than previously known.  

Placement and Legacy

From 1947 to 2000, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints operated the Indian Student Placement Program, which placed students from Native American tribes with LDS families.  Those students would attend public schools with a majority or nearly exclusive white student population, with the idea that Native students would be assimilated into white culture.   The end goal was to turn the students from Lamanites with dark skin into “whitesome and delightsome” individuals, thereby breaking the curse of the Lamanites.  With the curse of the Lamanites broken as dark skin turned whitesome and delightsome, prophecy regarding the redemption of the Lamanites would be fulfilled.  

As such, Mary Medicinetop and her son Justin Fishinghawk were taken in by the Eastwood family, the family of Chelom Leavitt.  Mary’s daughter Tonah Fishinghawk was not taken in by the Eastwoods, according to Justin Fishinghawk.  The legacy of the placement program was a complicated link between Native American and LDS families with ripples that stretched to the present day.   

Some of the Native American students placed within those families sued the LDS, alleging that they had been sexually abused while in foster placements under the program. The plaintiffs sued in Navajo Nation District Court, and the LDS predictably moved to file a motion for declaratory judgment in federal district court for the District of Utah.  The Church sought a declaration that the Navajo Nation District Court lacked subjecting matter jurisdiction over the LDS, and an injunction barring the case from proceeding in tribal courts.  U.S District Judge Robert Shelby denied the Church’s motion.   

The Fishinghawk family’s ties to David Leavitt are through his marriage to Chelom Eastwood and her family, who fostered both Mary Medicinetop and her son Justin Fishinghawk.  The Eastwoods kicked Justin Fishinghawk out of their home when he began to question the Church, but not before he spent years as a cousin of both the Eastwood’s and Leavitt’s children.

His sister Tonah would spend her formative years fighting with substance abuse issues and criminal charges arising out of her substance abuse issues.  

The Long History of Tonah Fishinghawk

The earliest court record in Utah for Tonah Fishinghawk dates back to August 8, 1999, when she was cited for Unlawful purchase, possession, and consumption of alcohol by a minor.   It took nearly three years for that case to be resolved in a Plea in Abeyance on March 20, 2002.   By 2006, Tonah was facing a child support order that named Geoffrey Sather and Tonah as the parents of a child, and on February 9, 2009, Tonah gave birth to Josephine C. Fishinghawk, whose father was Olsen Salazar.   

Tonah bounced in and out of jail for various issues, including her delinquent child support payments.   In August 2011, the court filed a transportation order for Tonah Fishinghawk so that she could be taken from jail to an ORS hearing.  By 2016, Tonah was pregnant with the daughter of Gary A Valenzuela, but she was living at Timothy Stern’s home.   On June 10^th, 2016, Valenzuela allegedly became physically abusive with Tonah, and Stern told him to leave the home.   The next night, Tonah reported hearing a noise outside of the house, and Stern grabbed his gun and went outside.  Gary A. Valenzuela was outside in the yard, and he allegedly charged Timothy Stern with a knife.  Stern shot Valenzuela in the head.  

The next month, Mary Medicinetop, Tonah’s mother, obtained guardianship of Josephine C. Fishinghawk from Tonah.   By July 21, 2016, a police officer swore out a warrant againt Gary A. Valenzuela for Aggravated Assault.  Valenzuela would plead guilty and receive a five year suspended sentence with 36 months of probation.    

Tonah Fishinghawk went to Montana to work and live on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and her mother Mary came to visit her.  While Mary was visiting, she asked Tonah if she could take Anna Danielle Louise Fishinghawk, her granddaughter, back to Utah for a month long visit.   At the end of August 2017, Mary Medicinetop did not return Anna to her mother on the reservation.   Tonah alleged that her mother had stopped taking her phone calls and refused to give her a current address.   Tonah went to the court in Utah, and Judge Brady issued an Ex Parte Warrant to take custody of Anna on October 19, 2017.  A hearing was set for October 27, 2017, but Tonah Fishinghawk failed to show up.   The case and the Ex Parte Warrant were both dismissed.  

What the court did not know was that on September 20, 2017, Tonah Fishinghawk had dropped her youngest daughter Allisandra at the Rosebud Emergency Lodge on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.   Seven days later, David Leavitt showed up to  take custody of Allisandra Florence Fishinghawk.  According to sources, Leavitt paid Tonah Fishinghawk to obtain custody of Allisandra, using a US Bank account.  Tonah Fishinghawk began driving a gold colored Cadillac around the reservation.   

Under the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), tribal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over foster placement and adoption proceedings involving enrolled members of Native American tribes.  Allisandra Fishinghawk was a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.  David Leavitt was not a member of the Northern Cheyenne or any other Native American tribe.   He managed to show up and take custody in a single day of wrangling with the Northern Cheyenne tribe and its Social Services staff.  

According to Leavitt’s own admissions in a documentary interview, he offered Northern Cheyenne President Lawrence Jace Killsback the ability to export buffalo from the reservation to Ukraine using Leavitt’s contacts in the Ukrainian government.  That offer was a quid pro quo exchange, a bribe to bypass the tribal courts of the Northern Cheyenne in order to obtain custody of Allisandra Fishinghawk.   Other sources indicate that the true story was much worse: David Leavitt allegedly paid Killsback $30,000 to facilitate the fast-tracked transfer of custody for Allisandra Fishinghawk to David Leavitt.  Killsback allegedly confessed the arrangement to an NBC News reporter.   

Gary Valenzuela had no idea where his daughter was for over a year.  As her biological father, he would have had a legitimate claim to custody for Allisandra after her mother Tonah abandoned Allisandra at the Rosebud Emergency Lodge.   Instead, Gary Valenzuela spent the next year trying to locate his daughter until he realized that Allisandra was living in foster placement at the home of David and Chelom Leavitt.   

Tribal President Lawrence Jace Killsback resigned his office in a letter dated October 9, 2018, but on October 12, 2018, he wrote a letter to the court in Utah overseeing Allisandra Fishinghawk’s adoption.   Killback claimed that the Norther Cheyenne Tribe considered David and Chelom the aunt and uncle of Tonah Fishinghawk, and the great uncle and aunt of Allisandra Florence Fishinghawk.   Killsback lacked any authority to make the declaration, just as he lacked the authority to enable Leavitt to bypass the Northern Cheyenne’s tribal courts on a foster placement and adoption for an enrolled member of the tribe.   

Under ICWA, a parent who reuqests transfer of foster care or termination of parental rights would have to clear the transfer with the other parent.  If Gary Valenzuela had been given notice, he would have objected to the transfer.  He was never notified, even though he was the biological father.   The matter never went to tribal court, because Lawrence Killsback simply made a phone call to Social Services to expedite David Leavitt’s placement, either due to an offer to export buffalo to Ukraine, or in exchange for a $30,000 payment, or both.  The procedural requirements of ICWA were bypassed.

Since Gary Valenzuela was arguably in an involuntary position as the non-custodial parent, ICWA required notice to him, plus at least 10 days after the receipt of the notice.   The priority would be for Allisandra Fishinghawk to stay in the custody of her Native family, such as her grandmother Mary Medicinetop, or in the custody of her Native father, Gary Valenzuela, who also has Native American blood.   Instead, Lawrence Killsback bypassed ICWA’s clear requirements to enable David Leavitt to show up to the reservation on September 27 and leave the same day with Allisandra Fishinghawk.  A little over a year later, Killsback wrote a letter to the court in Utah claiming that the Northern Cheyenne considered David and Chelom Leavitt Allisandra Fishinghawk’s grand uncle and grand aunt.  

Under ICWA, David Leavitt was not a family member of Allisandra Fishinghawk.  Killsback did not exhaust the family member requirements under ICWA, which would have  required the tribe to consider Allisandra’s biological Native relatives before David Leavitt when it came to foster placement or adoption.  Additionally, David Leavitt would have been subject to the requirements of 25 USC 3207, which requires that Tribal Social Services Agencies perform criminal records checks, checks of abuse registries maintained by the tribe, and checks of state abuse registries for any individual seeking a foster placement of Native child going back five years.  There is nothing in the records examined by IRA to indicate that Killsback or the Northern Cheyenne Tribe’s Social Services ran any checks on David and Chelom Leavitt to comply with the requirements of federal law for foster placement or adoption of a Native child under 25 USC 3207.   

Instead, David Leavitt walked onto the reservation and into an unscheduled, impromptu meeting with Lawrence Jace Killsback on September 27, 2017, and he walked off of the reservation that same day with Allisandra Fishinghawk in his custody.   A year afterwards, three days after his resignation letter was dated, Lawrence Killsback wrote a letter to the court in Utah overseeing Allisandra Fishinghawk’s adoption stating that David and Chelom Leavitt were the grand uncle and grand aunt of Allisandra Fishinghawk.   

As he did so, David Leavitt committed the act of trafficking.  He had illegally obtained a Native American child in violation of ICWA and 25 USC 3207’s clear requirements, and he bribed Lawrence Killsback with at minimum an offer of buffalo exports to Ukraine.   At maximum, David Leavitt allegedly paid Killsback $30,000, and he allegedly purchased Allisandra Fishinghawk for an unknown sum of money through a series of transfers through a US Bank account owned or accessed by Tonah Fishinghawk, and some of that money was used by Tonah Fishinghawk to purchase a gold Cadillac.   

In simple terms, David Leavitt allegedly purchased a child.   That is the very definition of human trafficking.   He transported that child across tribal and state lines to Utah, where he concealed the child in his home from the child’s biological father and her family as he conducted a three year long effort to illegally foster and adopt Allisandra Fishinghawk.  The adoption of Allisandra Fishinghawk was illegal and therefore invalid.   David Leavitt further transported Allisandra Fishinghawk across international lines to his current home in Scotland.   

In 2017, David Leavitt had not finalized his adoption of Allisandra Fishinghawk.   Over the next three years, he had to navigate the court system and the ongoing legal issues of Allisandra’s mother Tonah.  In March 2019, Tonah Fishinghawk was arrested after her mother Mary reported her to police for possession of methamphetamines, heroin, and drug paraphenalia.  Tonah Fishinghawk was living in Mary Medicinetop’s house, and the drugs and paraphenalia were within reach of her other minor children in Tonah’s bedroom.   Tonah was charged with felony child endangerment and drug possession, along with possession of drug paraphenalia.  The original information in the case was sworn out by Deputy Utah County Attorney Douglas W. Finch, but the case was transferred to American Fork.   

After the transfer, David Leavitt’s name appeared on the court filings as one of two prosecutors in Tonah Fishinghawk’s case.   A little over a month later, on April 23, 2019, Tonah Fishinghawk entered a plea agreement.  Two of the possession charges were dropped, and her reckless endangerment charge was knocked down to a misdemeanor.  

Tonah Fishinghawk received 24 months of probation and a 365 day suspended sentence,  along with $846 in fines.  The conditions of her probation required her to obtain part time employment within 120 days, and full time employment within 180 days, and to abstain from alcohol or association with establishments or persons who used alcohol, even in a private setting.   She was to complete a mental health evaluation, a substance abuse evaluation, and complete all recommended treatment.   Tonah was also required to comply with random monthly drug testing.   

She immediately violated the conditions of her probation in 2019, which led to the issuance of a warrant for her arrest.   In 2022, Adult Probation alleged that “Ms. Fishinghawk’s behavior has clearly displayed a complete disregard to the orders of the court” and noted that she had not reported to Adult Probation and Parole since September 2019.   Tonah Fishinghawk had been a fugitive for three years.    In February 2023, Judge Denise Porter issued an arrest warrant for Tonah Fishinghawk that listed her address at 343 E 1050 S in Springville, Utah.   David Leavitt was no longer the Utah County Attorney, and he was off to Scotland with his wife, his son, and Tonah Fishinghawk’s daughter Allisandra.   

The adoption had been finalized in 2020, but for three long years, Tonah Fishinghawk had somehow evaded any serious culpability for her probation violations.   David Leavitt was able to delay her culpability in order to get his adoption of Allisandra Fishinghawk finalized in Utah.   If he had not given a documentary interview discussing the particulars of that adoption, Adam Koeneman and Noel Engels would have had nothing to go on besides a complaint from Gary A. Valenzuela, Allisandra’s biological father.   

David Leavitt was on video detailing actions that constitute bribery in order to illegally obtain custody of Allisandra Fishinghawk.   It is unclear why the media outlets who covered that video footage did not also cover Leavitt’s alleged payments to Tonah Fishinghawk and Lawrence Jace Killsback, particularly since Killsback went to federal prison for fraud he committed while he was the president of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.   

David Leavitt’s actions constitute adoption fraud, potentially reach to perjury depending on the specifics of sworn statements he made in the adoption proceedings, bribery, and human trafficking.   Given the allegations of James Webb, the disgraced former owner of the Adoption Center of Utah, Leavitt’s history of adoption fraud and malfeasance extended to utilizing his office as Juab County Attorney to intimidate Webb into returning the vehicle Leavitt had given to him in lieu of paying for his adoption fees.   

Conclusion

Prior reports have noted David Leavitt’s alleged criminal conduct with regard to the daughters of David Lee Hamblin, which extend to child rape, the trafficking of a polygamist boy, and murder.   The allegations surrounding his adoption of Allisandra Fishinghawk provide clear context of Leavitt’s use of his elected office to run interference for Tonah Fishinghawk’s criminal violations, and nothing in the record indicates that Leavitt disclosed to the court that he was in the process of finalizing the adoption of Tonah’s daughter while he was prosecuting Tonah for possession and child endangerment charges.   

David Leavitt broke the law with regards to his adoption of Allisandra Fishinghawk.  It is time for the Utah County Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to bring Leavitt to an account for his conduct, and to return Allisandra Fishinghawk to her family.   It is time for DHS to root out those individuals within its Salt Lake City office who prioritized protecting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints from investigative scrutiny over getting to the bottom of David Hamblin and David Leavitt’s alleged criminal acts.   Given that David Hamblin apologized on a recorded line to his daughter for raping her, those acts are proven.   Given the clear timeline and evidence surrounding David Leavitt’s procurement of Allisandra Fishinghawk, David Leavitt broke numerous laws regarding the foster placement and adoption of Native American children.   

No one should be above the law, no matter how politically connected or wealthy they are.   It is time for David Leavitt and David Lee Hamblin to face a reckoning.   It is time for those individuals within DHS who ran interference for David Leavitt in the current investigation of the Utah County Sheriff’s Office to face their reckoning as well.   A