Police called because Native Americans brothers were being ‘too quiet’

A parent called campus police on two Native American teenagers who were on a university tour because she thought they were threatening.

Lloyd Skanahwati Gray, 17, and Thomas Kanewakeron Gray, 19, are brothers from Santa Cruz, New Mexico, who had driven to Fort Collins, Colorado, to go on a tour of Colorado State University.Their family are members of the Mohawk tribe.

The tour director was not even aware that the police had been called on the young men who told their mother Lorraine Kahneratokwas Gray that they were too shy to speak up during the portion of the tour when prospective students introduced themselves. Officers told the boys that a parent was concerned because they were “too quiet,” Ms Gray told the Associated Press. “I felt they had been the victim of racism and that they weren’t safe there,” she said.

"I was nervous for them to get in our family car and drive seven hours to a place they've never been before and find their way around and fight the Denver traffic," but ultimately agreed to the trip since though her son Thomas is a first-year student at Northern New Mexico College, he was hoping to attend his dream school with his younger brother, who is in his last year at Santa Fe Indian School.

About 30 minutes after her children arrived on campus, a bit late for the tour after getting lost in a new city, Ms Gray got a frantic phone call from one her sons saying campus police had approached them. She said in a Facebook post that the boys "were “patted down,” and my 17 year old ordered to “empty his pockets,” then immediately ordered to “keep his hands out of his pockets,” until he was forced to ask “which one do you want me to do?”

In another post she said simply: "I am lucky both my sons are alive" after comparing the incident to so many incidents of police-involved shooting deaths of African-American men in the US.

The university said in an email to all students a few days later said gave a summary of the incident but did not address why the police were called by the parent on the tour in the first place.

The university said the campus police “allowed [the brothers] to rejoin the group. Unfortunately, due to the location of the tour when the contact was made...the tour group had moved on without the students, who returned to Ammons Hall briefly, then left campus to return home to New Mexico”.

“The incident is sad and frustrating from nearly every angle, particularly the experience of two students who were here to see if this was a good fit for them as an institution. As a university community, we deeply regret the experience of these students while they were guests on our campus,” the email went on to say.

The campus police did not respond to a request for comment for more detail about the reason the parent called them.

Ms Gray said her sons were reticent to bring the incident to the public’s attention. “I don’t think they even grasped the magnitude of what happened to them until we talked,” she said. But, she is of "the belief that if you keep quiet about things then they're going to continue to happen...It's our responsibility to speak out and let other people know what's happening”.