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Around 2:30 a.m. on the morning of June 15, 2021, the neighbors of 62-year-old Ella Mae Begay witnessed a strange sight: the headlights of her silver truck leaving her home. Begay's family and friends from the Sweetwater, Arizona chapter of Navajo Nation would later comment on how out of character this was. Usually, the quiet, cautious 62-year-old didn't leave her house after dark.
In fact, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the previous year, she had mostly stayed at home, masterfully weaving rugs. Beneath her colorful scenes of people, houses, and animals against the backdrop of Arizona's Carrizo Mountains, Begay often wove in threads to form the words "Bless our home." The phrase was meant to be a prayer offering protection and safekeeping to her and her loved ones. But it seems someone paid her a visit late that night, and it wasn't to impart a blessing.
After her truck was seen pulling away, Ella Mae Begay didn't return home. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Distraught, her niece, Seraphine Warren, did everything in her power to bring awareness to her aunt's disappearance. But after Warren attracted the spotlight of national attention, something dark came out of her past and took center stage. This is Vigilante, an original podcast from Podcast One.
You're listening to a story told in one episode called Serafine Warren, Long Walk to Justice. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we'll hear about Warren, her efforts to locate her aunt, Ella Mae Begay, and the shocking twist that changed her image from peaceful activist to violent vigilante.
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There are some football feelings you can only get with BetMGM Sportsbook. That's right. Not just the highs, the ohs, or the no, no, no's. It's the feeling that comes with being taken care of every down of the football season. The feeling that comes with getting MGM rewards benefits or earning bonus bets. So, whether you're drawing up a same-game parlay in your playbook or betting the over on your favorite team. Cheers!
The BetMGM app is the best place to bet on football. You only get that feeling at BetMGM, the sportsbook born in Vegas, now live across the DMV. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only, subject to eligibility requirements. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. The story of Serafine Warren's activism started, as many do, with a devastating loss.
After her beloved aunt went missing, Warren dedicated everything she had toward bringing her home safely. She didn't want her aunt to become one of thousands of indigenous women who disappear every year without a trace and without any real effort to find them. At first, Warren made the drive to Sweetwater, Arizona from where she lived in Utah to lead search parties. Then, after months went by and it seemed less and less likely the Begay would be found, she continued to keep the search for her aunt alive.
We spoke with Stephanie Munez, an Albuquerque-based reporter familiar with the case. She highlighted how patterns of discrimination impacted the investigation into Begay's disappearance and motivated Warren to take matters into her own hands.
Not a lot of attention really went into Ella May's case. So Seraphine was the one person that really put herself at the forefront and became essentially Ella May's voice and began social media pages called Trailing Ella May Begay, really looking and asking for answers, pushing local officials for any information that
of this case and asking the community to keep an eye out and started to become more of an advocate as she was searching for answers for her aunt. It's a harrowing situation whenever anyone goes missing, but when it happens to a member of an Indigenous community, there are even more culturally specific obstacles and layers of difficulty to finding them.
Well, I think for a lot of Indigenous populations, one of the biggest challenges when young women are
elderly women, even men and children go missing. There's always a stigma attached to it. So I think that's the first portion of there's a stigma of who is this person? Oh, this person may have been around the wrong crowd, or they may have been involved with other people who may have
have gotten upset. And then the second part, which I think is one of the biggest elements to why we see these kinds of cases really not get attention or move forward is jurisdiction. And that's a huge part. So for the Navajo Nation, the Navajo Nation spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. So as a journalist, when I would ask questions to Navajo Nation police of,
Hey, why weren't you at Ella May's house within an hour of her being reported missing? Well, most of the time they only have a very, very small amount of officers to cover miles and miles of information.
desert, essentially. For generations, the indigenous people of our country have been put aside. And we see it time and time again, when we see a white woman or a white man go missing, there are manhunts throughout the country looking for a specific car, a specific location. And
what happens with indigenous people is they, they try to get that information out there and it just doesn't gain the same traction as a story of, Oh, a young white college student went on a hike and we never saw her again. And, you know, those, those are the type of stories that typically national media is
Describing the situation as "a little bit of historical trauma" is putting it lightly. It would take far more time than we have here to go into all of the traumatic clashes between the USA and the Native people the country violently displaced.
Suffice it to say that relations between Native communities and the federal government have been and remain tense, polluted by generations of disrespect and outright theft. There's a huge distrust with police and with government, and that can be traced back to the time of
The conquerors and, you know, the indigenous people who were here really being kicked off of their lands. And that's where the generational trauma comes in. So oftentimes when someone is reported missing, they are the ones doing the work, either because a...
Police force on the reservation is short staffed. They only have a certain amount of investigators. They don't have the resources that they need and they're not up to date. A lot of evidence typically ends up being tarnished or never processed at all.
So between a long-standing and well-founded lack of trust in federal agencies and an understaffing of tribal ones in the Indigenous community, the work of investigating missing persons often falls onto the person's family members and members of their community. A lot of the families, probably 95% of the families that I've talked to that have had a missing Indigenous relative
have been the ones doing the police work themselves. The Indigenous community at this point has been leaning on each other to help each other out and try and really solve the crime or really just try. I mean, the ultimate goal is to find their relatives alive and some
found their relatives and a lot of the times they only find remains and some don't get any answers at all. Warren didn't want that to be the case for her aunt. She wanted answers. And if no one else was going to investigate what happened, she would do everything in her power to keep the spotlight on the disappearance and finally find closure. Coming up, Serafine Warren embarks on a grueling journey to bring national attention to her aunt's case.
There are some football feelings you can only get with BetMGM Sportsbook. That's right. Not just the highs, the ohs, or the no, no, no's. No!
It's the feeling that comes with being taken care of every down of the football season. The feeling that comes with getting MGM rewards benefits or earning bonus bets. So, whether you're drawing up a same-game parlay in your playbook or betting the over on your favorite team...
The BetMGM app is the best place to bet on football. You only get that feeling at BetMGM. The sportsbook born in Vegas, now live across the DMV. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only, subject to eligibility requirements. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Now, back to the story.
In the days immediately following the disappearance of Ella Mae Begay, her niece, Seraphine Warren, marshaled the local community to try to find her and bring her back home safely. Warren started by gathering people on social media to see if anyone had information about what might have happened to her aunt or where she might have gone. It was...
Facebook was the biggest way to get the word out. And so as she kept posting on Facebook, posting the details of what people knew about Ella Mai's case, that's when more people started getting interested in the case. However, Warren's community-based information gathering failed to turn up helpful leads.
So she changed her strategy, focusing on increasing awareness outside of Sweetwater to hopefully direct much-needed resources toward her aunt's case. And then it really eventually evolved where Seraphine was really trying to catch the attention of elected officials, asking why. Why is this happening? Why wasn't an investigation done earlier?
fully to figure out what happened to her at Ford F-150 that also went missing when Ella Mae Begay went missing. So that's kind of where that started. And then there was a transition when she became really that forefront leader of advocacy going out and doing rallies.
Eventually, Warren took her efforts to the next level, staging a bold and dramatic way to captivate people's attention and put pressure on local officials to support her cause. She decided to walk from her aunt's home in Sweetwater to the office of Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez in Window Rock, Arizona, a distance of about 100 miles.
It was a creative and challenging stunt, one that would show off her commitment to the cause in a dramatic way. And so that's what started to capture the media attention from local journalists of seeing what she was doing. And a lot of it was
really what it was called on her social media, trailing Ella Mae Begay. And she would walk from certain points from Arizona to the Navajo Nation presidential office, which was hundreds and hundreds of miles. And so that's when that transition began to happen.
Warren documented and livestreamed her journey, gaining followers over her four-day trek. Unsatisfied with the level of engagement President Nez initially gave to the case, she made the same journey several more times in the months after her aunt's disappearance. As Warren hoped, her displays of determination caught the attention of local media, and slowly but surely, people started paying attention.
Then after that, once the attention started coming from local media, that's when agencies like the FBI and the Navajo Nation actually started talking about the case and this topic to the point where it was a case out of Arizona, but even the New Mexico Attorney General was getting involved and trying to push other elected officials to
to continue that search. So it was a little bit of a slow progression, but it really started with her actually trailing, walking and doing the walking. Essentially, the walking is what was the biggest piece that got media attention and the public's attention to want to support her and also look for answers as well.
After Warren had established a growing platform, she set her sights on a much grander vision. She would walk all the way from Sweetwater, Arizona to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. That was a distance of well over 2,000 miles. Warren's goal was to bring national attention not just to her aunt's case, but to the plight of thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous people and their families who, like her, were desperate for help, resources, and closure.
My walk is for the missing and murdered and to spread awareness and share most of the stories that we're dealing with. And then also highlighting my aunt's case and seeing if somebody could help us locate her and get justice. Warren began her prayer walk on June 15, 2022, exactly one year to the day from when her aunt went missing. She even started at 2.30 a.m. as that was the time her aunt's car had last been seen.
When Warren set out, she carried tokens of her aunt, including one of her hand-woven tapestries, as well as a staff with colorful ribbons tied to it, bearing hopes and prayers from her people. Along the way, Warren made daily posts to her online community. By this point, she'd built a following of more than 16,000 people.
In her dispatches, she called attention to the shockingly high number of missing Indigenous people and the unique structural barriers and lack of resources stacked against them. There's a lot that goes into this walk. I chose to pray. There's times where it does get emotional just because it's frustrating to see what we're dealing with and just feeling so helpless. It's
I would say it's hard, but at the same time, I'm trying to enjoy it. On a more personal note, she also documented the emotional and physical struggles she endured on the grueling hike, such as coping with extreme heat and snow. Ultimately, despite ups and downs and moments when she questioned whether she could go on, Warren completed her audacious journey. She arrived in D.C. in October of 2022, covering the 2,000-plus miles in about four months.
Warren triumphantly livestreamed her arrival to over 20,000 followers of her Facebook page called Trailing Ella Mae. Once in DC, Warren was able to leverage the media attention into a meeting with Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior and the first ever Native American cabinet member. Warren had achieved her ambitious goal, voiced her concerns to a high-level government official, and brought significant attention to her cause.
And just a few months later, there was finally an update into the investigation into her aunt's disappearance. However, it wasn't the kind of news Warren and her family were hoping for. In March of 2023, a man named Preston Henry Toth was indicted on charges of carjacking and assault, resulting in serious bodily injury in connection with the case of Ella Mae Begay.
23-year-old Toltz had a history of run-ins with the law, including charges of resisting arrest, drug possession, burglary, and aggravated battery. On the night in question, back in June 2021, he drunkenly got into a fight with his father that ended with him getting kicked out of the car on the side of the road, about 11 miles away from Begay's house.
That same night, someone broke into Begay's daughter's house, rummaged around and stole some drinks before heading down the road toward Begay's home. Toth proceeded to break into Begay's house where he snapped and hit the elderly woman in the face until she was bleeding from the nose and mouth. Soon after the break-in, the headlights of Begay's truck were seen driving off into the night.
Toth confessed to driving Begay's truck to New Mexico, where he sold it for $200 and amphetamines. Toth told investigators he wasn't sure if Begay was dead or alive when he left the scene in her car. Frustratingly though, the Begay family still didn't get the closure they longed for about Elime's fate or where her remains might be.
Tult was not charged with the murder and did not provide information on what happened to Begay after he assaulted her. In a hearing, Warren got emotional as she pleaded with Tult saying, "Will you please just tell us where my aunt is? You know exactly what you did to her." So this was the public image of Warren in the spring of 2023. She was an indigenous woman who had been tragically failed by the justice system. A passionate advocate who fought to the bitter end for a resolution to her aunt's case.
In a certain sense, she was a social justice vigilante who used her voice to shine a light on a broken system. But very soon, a bombshell revelation came out that completely changed the way the world looked at Serafine Warren.
There are some football feelings you can only get with BetMGM Sportsbook. That's right. Not just the highs, the ohs, or the no, no, no's. No!
It's the feeling that comes with being taken care of every down of the football season. The feeling that comes with getting MGM rewards benefits or earning bonus bets. So, whether you're drawing up a same-game parlay in your playbook or betting the over on your favorite team. Cheers!
The BetMGM app is the best place to bet on football. You only get that feeling at BetMGM. The sportsbook born in Vegas, now live across the DMV. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only, subject to eligibility requirements. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Now, back to the story.
Sarah Fien Warren had been searching for her missing aunt for more than a year before a man was finally charged with carjacking and assaulting her. That seemed to put the matter at rest. But just a few months later, shocking news came out about a court case of her own. Yeah, well, this is where things get a little bit more interesting.
A bizarre twist in the high profile missing persons case of Ella Mae Begay from the Navajo Nation. Her niece, who's been leading the effort to find Ella Mae, has now been arrested and indicted for a kidnapping incident in 2021, just months before Ella Mae went missing. It's a far cry from the person many have come to know and love on social media in the fight for Ella Mae Begay's case.
The interesting and ironic part of everything is that in October of 2023, that's when federal prosecutors were accusing Serafine Warren and her sister and her sister's husband of allegedly kidnapping and beating a man. And so this comes into play when throughout the past decade,
two, three years, she's become this advocate. You heard that right. Serafine Warren, the woman who dedicated her life to finding her aunt, who was presumed to be kidnapped and murdered, was herself charged with being part of a kidnapping. And the story gets even wilder because it isn't just your run-of-the-mill kidnapping. If there even is such a thing, this was something else entirely.
According to court documents, Warren and three family members, her husband, sister, and brother-in-law, were searching for a car that had been stolen from them. Believing that they couldn't rely on local law enforcement to track down the vehicle, Warren and her family took matters into their own hands. They went to Facebook, where they narrowed in on a suspect referred to as John Doe in court documents. Then, they armed themselves with handcuffs, paintball guns, a metal baton, and a Glock handgun.
Warren's sister even gave the Glock a test fire to "make sure it was ready if needed." On or around March 29, 2021, Warren and her family drove to the man's property in Arizona where they first broke into the wrong house. They confronted a relative of their target who pointed them toward John Doe's house. Then, Warren and her crew broke out the windows with a baton before spraying everyone in the house with pepper spray, including two children.
After the crew broke into John Doe's house, Morin allegedly hit their suspect over the head with a blunt object before the group shot him with paintball guns, handcuffed him and put him in the back of their truck. Then, over the course of several days, they drove John Doe across state lines from Arizona into New Mexico searching for their stolen vehicle. All while the man was handcuffed, covered in paint and his own blood.
When their search failed to turn up the stolen car, the crew decided to drop John Doe off at a San Juan County jail on April 1st, 2021. A deputy there called an ambulance, seeing that Doe needed immediate medical attention. But bizarrely, Warren and her family of vigilantes weren't arrested at that point.
So, to recap, at the end of March/early April, Seraphine Warren and her family go on a vigilante hunt to find and punish a carjacker. And then, just a couple of months later in June, Warren's aunt suffers a violent carjacking and assault. Naturally, people wondered if there was a connection between the two jarring events. For his part, Ella Mae's son asserted that Warren and company's vigilante kidnapping had nothing to do with his mother.
So there's that.
If Begay's son is to be believed, Seraphine Warren was apparently connected to two unrelated carjackings within a few months, and both with serious consequences. Which seems… strange? And even stranger, Warren's vigilante adventure happened before her aunt went missing. It would be one thing if Ella Mae disappeared and then Warren's car was stolen.
You could almost see the justification if Warren was desperate for some kind of justice. No one was helping her or her family. So when the car went missing, that was the last straw and she decided to handle the situation without the authorities. But that's not what happened. Maybe as soon as Warren's car went missing, the situation felt so dire that it demanded vigilante justice. Maybe her first thought was that the only way to get what was hers was if she took it herself.
It's almost like Warren and her family were taking out all of their fury and frustration at the system and the lack of resources and attention they received. It's almost like they violently unleashed their pent-up angst on this John Doe character, hoping for some kind of release. But ultimately, their actions only hurt their cause. So, even if the incidents aren't connected by motive, they are both part of a larger picture of the dismal state of law enforcement on Native land. Or rather, lack thereof.
This really puts in perspective of how you can be an advocate, but also be in that same realm of some of the violence that occurs on campus.
reservations. And so that's one of the most shocking parts when we did find out about these allegations, because she really became one of the main people nationwide recognized for trying to help others. And so when these charges were
were filed and she had to go in front of a federal judge, people in the community that she helped build really were asking themselves why and re-evaluating the root cause of some of these cases that we see. The root cause seems to be that the Indigenous community is underserved.
There aren't enough law enforcement resources to go around, and some members of the community believe that if they want anything to be done, they have to do it themselves. And in the case of Seraphine Warren, that can mean either the noble path of walking across the country to raise awareness, or a dark and windy road involving pepper spray, handcuffs, and a Glock.
Understandably, members of the Native community were shocked and dismayed to find that Warren, their bright, shining advocate, had been tempted by the dark side. A lot of the people that worked with Seraphine and were part of a lot of these searches were really appalled because finally there was recognition of this issue and
by law enforcement and by elected officials in the Navajo Nation, in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, but also in Washington, D.C. So it almost felt like a slap in the face for all of these advocates that have been working tirelessly, working so hard for so many years to get 30 seconds of airplay of their missing relative
And then to have someone like Sarah Fane who got all of the attention and then the tables turned for some people I talked to, it felt like a betrayal. It felt like...
She wasn't being true to who she was. And is it true that she was heartbroken for what happened to her aunt, which we don't exactly know and heartbroken for not knowing that's all true.
but it also shows that you can be an advocate, but also be a small part of the problem. And that brings us to this big full circle moment of what is the problem and what are the solutions? Because there's so many different factors to some of these cases that a lot of other advocates reacted to Serafine's charges as a group,
great. Now we have to go back to step one when we already did all this work and we're starting all over again because now we may not be seen as credible anymore. It really puts these advocates in a tough spot to say, hey,
We're not all the same. We're all trying to make change here. And we all have a common goal is to make sure that our Indigenous relatives don't go missing and solve the root causes. Because a lot of them are part of task force trying to find solutions to what's going on. The search for solutions is still ongoing, as is the case against Warren for vigilante kidnapping.
If convicted, Warren and her family members could all face a sentence of life in prison. As for Ella Mae Begay, her remains have still not been found. Her body is still missing. And really, to this day, there's still search parties going out.
And looking for her body. And so it really is these people that know the struggle. So I think when it comes to the issue of LMA, it's important to recognize that there's someone searching for LMA. But there are so many other people that struggle.
similar stories and nobody's looking for them. And that's where these community advocates really come in and bringing that awareness. And it really helps when you have local journalists and people like you talking about this because otherwise you
Their names are never known. And that's part of the crisis of missing murdered Indigenous people is a lot of people's stories never get told. Thank you for tuning in to Vigilante. This episode was written by Nani Okwulagu and executive produced by Connor Powell. We'll be back in a few weeks with new stories about people taking justice into their own hands. Until next time.
There are some football feelings you can only get with BetMGM Sportsbook. That's right. Not just the highs, the ohs, or the no, no, no's. No!
It's the feeling that comes with being taken care of every down of the football season. The feeling that comes with getting MGM rewards benefits or earning bonus bets. So, whether you're drawing up a same-game parlay in your playbook or betting the over on your favorite team...
The BetMGM app is the best place to bet on football. You only get that feeling at BetMGM. The sportsbook born in Vegas, now live across the DMV. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. See BetMGM.com for terms. 21 plus only, DC only, subject to eligibility requirements. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
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