Blow the Whistle Pitch Deck

© 2021 Syncro Studios LTD.

Episode 5: The Tribal Prosecutor

 
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  • Cold Open: “I’d hear him riffing through my charts, cherry picking the cute teenage boys,” Doctor Butterbrodt takes a moment before continuing

  • The Crime: A pediatrician was allowed to rape children for over 20 years

  • The Witness: Mark Butterbrodt and Elaine Yellow Horse

  • Gathering the Evidence: Found charts with all boys. Unsupervised visits

  • Blowing the Whistle: Reported to administrators

  • The Retaliation: For 15 years Butterbrodt was ignored by supervisors, demoted, withheld pay, and transferred to another hospital

  • Solved: The pediatrician is serving a life sentence but the victims still fight for reparations from the years of abuse

It’s winter in Vermillion, South Dakota and you can hear the wind rattling the window panes. Elaine Yellow Horse carries a bowl of oatmeal to the kitchen table. Her partner Jill, already seated, is coaxing their toddler son to eat his breakfast. Yellow Horse sits next to her niece in a high chair and starts spooning the oats to the smiling baby.  

A decade earlier, down the road, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, whispers spread about the teenage boys who frequently visited Dr. Stanley Weber’s home. He was seen hanging out with children at Pizza Hut and had arranged a patient camping trip. In private, the doctor plied teen boys with money, alcohol and sometimes opioids, and coerced them into oral and anal sex with him. A former patient testifies that the doctor had inserted a finger into his anus in an Indian Health Services (IHS) exam room when he was 8 years old. The doctor used two fingers on his next visit, and later, his penis. 

Weber’s supervisors at the IHS buried their own suspicions about his conduct, tried to silence whistleblowers who raised concerns, transferred the doctor from one reservation to another and allowed him to continue treating boys after managers concluded he might have molested his patients. 

There’s an ominous feeling to the North Dakota landscape. Dark storm clouds obscure the sky, casting long shadows over Dr. Mark Butterbrodt’s face as he pulls yard equipment into his garage. Over the span of 15 years, the former IHS pediatrician, called attention to his colleague, Dr. Weber's behavior.

“I contacted the South Dakota medical board and told them how Weber selectively cherry-picks young teenage boys at the clinic. Nothing came of it. The following year I documented all of the allegations and sent a letter to my IHS bosses. Not one physician stood with me on that medical staff, instead, they just snickered about his behavior.” 

An IHS official even signed off on renewing Weber’s patient-care privileges just one day after he had submitted a form alerting the agency that he was under investigation by the South Dakota board of medicine. After a clash with Dr. Weber, Dr. Butterbrodt was pulled into a supervisor’s office and, within weeks, transferred to a remote facility in North Dakota and stripped of bonus pay. “I was chased off by a pedophile,” said Dr. Butterbrodt, who retired soon after.

In 2015, Mr. Weber was finally tripped up—not by IHS officials contacting law enforcement, but by Elaine Yellow Horse, a Oglala Sioux tribal prosecutor at the time. She helped blow the whistle on Dr. Weber’s abuse of Native American boys for over 21 years.