Zachariah Juwaun Shorty was a 23-year-old musician and father. In July 2020, he disappeared from a Farmington, New Mexico motel and was later found dead on the Navajo Nation. It took more than five years for anyone to be charged in his death.
On July 21, 2020, Zachariah was at the Journey Inn in Farmington recording music with friends. Around 11 p.m., his mother, Vangie Randall-Shorty, got a call from one of those friends saying Zachariah had gone outside to smoke a cigarette and never came back. He was missing for four days before a runner found his body on a dirt pathway in a field in Nenahnezad, on the Navajo Nation — 13 miles from where he was last seen, past his own home in Kirtland. He had been shot multiple times.
Zachariah was the father of a young daughter he called his "princess." He worked as a cashier and a tire technician, and people who met him even briefly remembered him for his sarcastic sense of humor. He released rap music about grief and his struggles with substance use under the alias Isol8ted, and Vangie has a tattoo on her hand that Zachariah designed for her.
Zachariah's case remained unsolved for years until it was taken up under Operation Not Forgotten, an FBI initiative that temporarily assigned more than 60 additional agents and analysts to field offices working missing and murdered Indigenous persons cases across the country. In November 2025, federal prosecutors indicted three men — Austin Begay, Jaymes Fage, and Joshua Watkins — in connection with Zachariah's death. Begay is charged with first-degree murder, accused of shooting Zachariah with a semiautomatic firearm; Fage and Watkins face charges related to concealing the crime.
Vangie Randall-Shorty waited five years for this moment, telling herself each year that answers would come. Her case is one of many that federal investigators say benefited from a fresh set of eyes and additional resources — proof that sustained advocacy and renewed investigative attention can still bring resolution, even years later.