Wheres Savanna

Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind was 22 years old and about eight months pregnant when she disappeared from her apartment building in Fargo, North Dakota, on August 19, 2017. She had gone upstairs to the apartment of a neighbor, Brooke Crews, who had invited her to try on a dress.

Crews, 38, had been pretending to be pregnant for months. Inside the apartment she killed Savanna and took the baby. Her boyfriend, William Hoehn, 32, helped hide what had happened. When police searched the apartment days later, they found the newborn girl alive, and she was placed with Savanna’s family. On August 27, eight days after Savanna vanished, kayakers found her body in the Red River.

Crews pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and other charges and was sentenced in 2018 to life without parole. Hoehn admitted conspiring to kidnap the baby and lying to police, and a jury acquitted him of conspiracy to commit murder. His life sentence depended on a dangerous special offender finding, which the North Dakota Supreme Court threw out in August 2019; he was then resentenced to 20 years. Savanna’s case helped drive Savanna’s Act, a federal law on missing and murdered Native women signed in October 2020.