The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is asking for the public's help to solve a cold case: the disappearance of Augustine "Auggie" Floyd.
As WCMU previously reported, Floyd went missing on Oct. 13, 2007, and was last seen travelling in a black Cadillac Deville in Mount Pleasant. He is a member of Grand Traverse Band and attended a concert with a girl by the name of Kenda or Kendra, who he met online. He also attended a party in Mount Pleasant on the day of his disappearance, according to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe website.
Special agent Nicholas Deplonty is with the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Murdered and Missing Unit, and is working on the case.
“There's been continuous effort throughout the years from a collaboration of a bunch of local agencies here,” Deplonty said. “I just really wanna stress to the public that if they have information related to the disappearance of Mr. Floyd to please submit some of that information.”
People can submit a tip to Deplonty anonymously via a phone call, text or email for a reward.
Deplonty said he’ll continue the work on the case but said he can’t share the details of the ongoing investigation. However, he said he and his partner in the MMU have made progress on other cases.
MMU was established in 2021 to solve cases of human trafficking, missing and murdered Indigenous people, according to its website.
Agents in Mount Pleasant are also a part of the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, investigating predatory crimes, said William Horton, MMU’s regional agent in charge. Last week the agents received the first charge for one of the predatory crime cases from the region, he said.
MMU has 26 offices and about 40 agents across the United States. Even though Mount Pleasant’s office has two of those agents, they don’t just cover the city, but also work on cases from across Michigan, Wisconsin and other northeastern Tribes, Horton said.
“We have great relationships with the tribal and local communities, so we chose [Mount Pleasant] to be our hub to focus on all these surrounding states also,” Horton said.
Deplonty said he started working with the unit in Mount Pleasant in the spring of last year. Before that, he worked with CIA and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
“I felt like the mission is very important to me and it's the type of work that I wanted to do for my professional life,” he said.
“I feel like even though working cold cases are very much specific niche, ... I never know when I get to the office what the day may hold. I may be assisting an agency with an acute missing person or assisting a state police task force with the execution of a search warrant, or on the other side of things that may be spending a lot of time in the office doing a lot of reading a lot of reports.”
But the need for MMU’s work and even the case of Floyd in Mount Pleasant is a part of a bigger issue.
In 2024, FBI data shows 10,248 cases were entered that were of Murdered and Missing Indigenous People (MMIP). BIA estimates 4,200 missing and murdered cases are unsolved. It also reports that 84.3% of Indigenous women experience violence in their life.
Victoria Humphreys, public affairs specialist with BIA, said the MMIP crisis is complex and is rooted in the history and federal policies.
“This is something that has expanded since the very beginning when we had people landing in or coming over and landing in Virginia,” she said. “So we do say that the story of Pocahontas, which of course was not her real name, she is our first missing and murdered Indigenous woman.”
Something that can help battle the issue, Humphreys said, is community cooperation.
“We need to hear from the community, we need to hear from the public,” Humphreys said. “It's a complex issue. It's nationwide. ... We put everything out there. ... We have various means to be able to get those tips in, but without those tips, there's not information to move forward.”
