Lost Sparrow

Short Synopsis

The documentary LOST SPARROW is the culmination of filmmaker Chris Billing's two-year investigation into the tragic deaths of his two adopted Crow Indian brothers, Bobby and Tyler. The two boys were struck and killed by a freight train on June 27, 1978.

Description/Treatment

I was 16 years old in1978 when a 44-car Conrail freight train killed my two brothers.  Their deaths devastated my family and sent shockwaves through the quaint community of Little Falls, NY.  No one could understand why Bobby, 13,and Tyler, 11, had run away from the white, Baptist family that seven years earlier had adopted them and their two sisters, Lana and Janelle, out of a troubled home on the Crow Indian reservation in Montana.  And why were the two boys lying on train tracks?  For three decades, questions and doubts nagged at me.

The feature-length documentary film LOST SPARROW is the product of my search for answers.  In making this film, I traveled to Montana, Florida, North Carolina and upstate New York and interviewed key people involved in the lives of the two boys, including their biological sisters, their adoptive parents and siblings, their biological father, the social workers who oversaw their adoption, and the police officers who investigated their deaths.  I also scoured newspaper articles, adoption records, police reports, family scrapbooks and miles of super 8mm home movies. 

LOST SPARROW presents a vivid portrayal of the tortuous path traversed by Bobby and Tyler during their brief lives.  It documents their births to teenage parents on the Crow reservation in Montana, their early years of abuse and neglect, their adoption by a wealthy, East Coast family, and their sad and sudden demise on railroad tracks near Little Falls, NY.  

A sub-plot of the film is the return of my brothers’ remains from Rural Park Cemetery in Manheim, NY, where they were buried in 1978, to the Stands Over Bull Family Cemetery in Pryor, MT.  The film opens with shots of a backhoe digging up a gravesite and lifting out two bronze coffins.  "We as Crows don't believe in burying a Crow Indian some place off in a far away land," intones Pat Stands Over Bull, the boys’ uncle, as the backhoe’s bucket scoops up dirt.  "The Crow belief is that their spirit never rests, and they just go around, when that happens."

Following the cemetery scene, LOST SPARROW returns to the site of the train accident.  Two Little Falls Police officers who investigated the tragedy detail their memories of that fateful event:  an all-night search for Bobby and Tyler, an early morning call about an "incident" at the railroad tracks, and the grisly discovery of "two young men on the tracks."  "It was just a terrible, terrible, terrible thing," says retired officer Edward John Dillon.  "Even today, the thought still comes into my mind.  You never forget things like that.  Never."

The documentary then moves to the Crow Reservation and explores the alcoholism and domestic violence that led the Montana Department of Public Welfare to take permanent custody of Bobby, Lana, Tyler and Janelle in 1970.  Police reports, court documents and adoption records describe "deplorable” conditions under which the four children were left unattended while their parents drank and sniffed glue.  "I remember [biological father Ben Stands Over Bull] would be drinking and coming home and beating up [mother Evelyn Bird Hat], and hit her with whatever he can," says paternal aunt Norma Falls Down.  "And the kids would be running under the bed and hide there.  It's really hard."

After their adoption by my family in September 1971, prospects for the four Crow children appeared to have improved.  Home movies show the ten siblings in the newly constructed Billing family playing happily together.  But a dark side began to emerge.  The tenor of LOST SPARROW changes as I begin uncovering events in my own family that led to the disappearance and deaths of Bobby and Tyler.