The Weber Boys: Day 2 of Indian Health Services Serial Sexual Assault Trial

Around the Pine Ridge Indian Health Services (IHS) hospital they were well known. A rotating cast of teenagers and pre-teens — most of them from broken homes, without father figures or even adult supervision, in and out of the juvenile justice system — who hung out with pediatrician Stanley Patrick Weber. They worked around his house and in his garden. Had raucous parties at his house on federal hospital grounds. They called and showed up at the hospital at all hours asking for “Pat,” and Weber — who spent many years as the head doctor, acting clinical director of the hospital — told staffers to put them through to him immediately.
These boys were “groomed,” according to federal prosecutors: coached and cajoled, bribed and flattered, bullied and intimidated by Weber, who preyed on them sexually. In Browning, Montana on the Blackfeet Reservation, where Weber worked from 1992 to 1996, and then for 20 years in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
The government kicked off Day 2 of its multiple-count child sexual assault case against Weber with alleged Browning Victim 2 (per yesterday’s Day 1 trial update, these alleged victims’ names are public record, but I’d rather not put them in print here), part of an earlier group of “Weber Boys” in Browning in the early 90s.
The victim met Weber, he said, “through some friends who were already hanging out with him at his house right by the hospital.” The place was always stocked with ice cream, snacks, and pop. The boys played video games and Weber’s “badass sound system.” Sometimes Weber was there, he said, but other times he let them stay when he got called in to the hospital, and “showed us which door to use,” to get into the house when he wasn’t around.
There was alcohol too. “He had a lot of wine around. Vodka.” Sometimes Weber offered drinks to the boys, the alleged victim said, but more often they just poured drinks themselves; they were welcome to it. Weber was generous with his money as well, giving them cash “to go buy weed,” and other things.
The alleged victim was playing video games on Weber’s couch by himself, he said, when Weber approached him. “He was intoxicated…he asked me to give him oral sex and held his hand like he was gonna unzip his pants,” said the victim. “I said fuck that and headed out.”
Later, he said, Weber asked him if he had told anyone what had happened. He told Weber no, and the doctor gave him $20.
Another time, said the victim, when he was about 14 or 15 years old, he passed out after drinking and woke up to find Weber — naked except for a shirt, holding his own erect penis — stroking the boy’s penis, through his jean shorts. “He stepped back like he was surprised I woke up….He walked away, to his room or something. I took off,” he said, into the dark, to walk around all night alone, confused and a little scared and not wanting to go home to his grandmother’s house.
Why didn’t you tell anybody, defense counsel Harvey Steinberg asked him. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You tell me, did I?” the alleged victim shot back, somewhat combatively, but also genuinely, as though he was asking for guidance. “What should I have done? What would make him do that?” Counsel did not answer.
Following that testimony, the younger brother of alleged Browning Victim 1 took the stand, wearing prison stripes and ankle shackles like his brother the day before.
He would be sent to Weber, he said, when got in trouble at school, almost as a form of counseling. “I didn’t like having to talk to him. Didn’t like being sent to him,” he said. “Because he made me feel uncomfortable…it was like he was trying to make me cry..then hugging me and touching and rubbing up on me and telling me it was going to be alright.”
After some legal haggling, the prosecution called two alleged victims from Pine Ridge as well. One of them was penetrated by Weber with one finger, he said, during a hospital visit. The second time, he said, “He put his two fingers in my butt. He had his hand on my penis. Playing with it. Stroking it. It didn’t last long cuz I was just a little guy at the time.” It was, he said, the first orgasm he’d ever experienced. Another time “he…he used his penis…in my butt.”
He never told Weber to stop because “I didn’t know how,” and he never told anyone until his wife, many years later. He hated his mother, who brought him to those doctor visits and waited out in the hall, “because she wasn’t in that room with me.”
There were other boys called to the stand, all of them now grown men. Some were victims, they said, and some not. There was a psychologist colleague of Weber’s from Browning who saw Weber out at a Pizza Hut with a group of boys. Weber was “dressed like them, with a sideways hat and baggy clothes,” he said. The psychologist and his wife reported their suspicions to hospital administrators and “for their troubles, were transferred,” as prosecutor Lori Suek said during opening statements.
Defense counsel Steinberg tried to poke holes in victim’s stories, citing criminal records, drug and alcohol use, specific dates and orders of events and hospital room designs. PLanting seeds of detail to perhaps be brought up later.
Around 4 in the afternoon, the prosecution rested its case. Tomorrow the defense will make theirs, and it will go to the jury to decide who is lying and who is telling the truth.