He Raped a Northern Cheyenne Teen, Then Torched His Patrol Car. A Judge Just Gave Him 14 Years.
Late on the night of August 7, 2024, a teenage girl from Lame Deer was drunk at the gas station locals call the Depot. She was in trouble, not in danger. That changed when the cop arrived.
Murrell Douglas Deela was a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer assigned to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He was 29, sober, in uniform, and backed by every bit of authority the federal government issues to its law enforcement.
He took her to People’s Park instead of her grandmother’s house. He turned off his headlights, moved her out of his patrol camera’s view, and raped her.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge William Mercer sentenced Deela to 14 years in federal prison for sexual abuse of a minor and making false statements. The 30-year-old walked into the James F. Battin Federal Courthouse in Billings in jailhouse stripes, flanked by marshals.
Neither the survivor nor her family were in the courtroom. Her mother sent a text. She said she wasn’t capable of even looking at him.
He Tried to Erase It
The morning after the assault, Deela filed a false report. He wrote that he gave the girl a breathalyzer and drove her straight to her grandmother’s house, leaving out the park entirely.
When BIA supervisors notified him the girl had come forward, he wrote another false account. He described the girl as crying hysterically and incoherent, and again left People’s Park out of the story.
He then told supervisors and an FBI agent he couldn’t retrieve footage from his patrol vehicle’s interior camera. Then came an order to bring the cruiser in for inspection.
The cruiser caught fire outside his house before that could happen. Deela called dispatch himself to report the blaze. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigators later determined the fire had been set intentionally.
Deela maintained through his sentencing Wednesday that he didn’t start it. Judge Mercer wasn’t persuaded, describing the destroyed cruiser as just one link in what he called an extensive chain of deception.
The chain didn’t hold. DNA analysis confirmed that semen found on the girl’s pants was almost certainly Deela’s. Experts also recovered footage from the damaged cruiser showing him driving her to the park, touching her, and cutting his lights before the assault.
Federal prosecutors charged Deela in October 2025. Charging documents and reporting from Indian Country Today describe the victim as 15 years old. The Billings Gazette’s sentencing coverage consistently refers to her as 14. The discrepancy may reflect her age at time of crime versus time of charging. Both sources agree she was a minor.
Deela pleaded not guilty at his initial appearance and was released. On April 2, 2026, he changed his plea before Judge Mercer, who asked him plainly whether he had raped an underage girl. “Yes, your honor,” Deela said.
Before the Rape, There Was a Killing
The Northern Cheyenne Reservation had already seen what Deela was capable of. In December 2021, he responded to a trespassing complaint in Lame Deer and shot Arlin Bordeaux twice in the back.
Bordeaux was 29 years old. He was a father of two.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office cleared Deela of criminal wrongdoing in the shooting. Bordeaux’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit, and an expert witness concluded that shooting a kneeling man who posed no immediate threat was an unreasonable use of lethal force. The federal government settled with Bordeaux’s estate for $800,000.
Then, on July 5, 2024, a separate civil lawsuit alleged that Deela punched a teenage girl hard enough to break her orbital bone, just weeks before the rape. Attorneys John Heenan and Timothy Bechtold filed that suit alongside civil rights claims arising from the sexual assault.
The Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council responded to the rape charge in September 2024 by issuing Resolution No. 141, formally banning Deela from the reservation. The resolution expressed serious concerns for community safety if he were allowed to continue working there.
A Nation That’s Been Fighting for Its Own Police
What happened to that girl didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Northern Cheyenne Nation has spent years trying to pull law enforcement control out of federal hands, a fight that sits at the heart of Indigenous self-determination across this country.
In 2020, the tribe sued the federal government, alleging the BIA had failed to provide competent or effective policing on the reservation. The documented problems were serious: unserved warrants, chronic understaffing, and at times just two officers patrolling 440,000 acres of Native land.
The tribe won a partial victory in 2022, securing a contract to manage its own criminal investigations through the Northern Cheyenne Investigative Services. When the BIA rejected a broader proposal for full program management control, the tribe sued again in 2024.
That persistence produced results. On July 21, 2026, a federal judge ruled the BIA must reconsider the Northern Cheyenne Tribe’s proposal to assume authority over law enforcement on their land. It’s a ruling that’s been a long time coming.
In 2024, roughly 150 Northern Cheyenne residents marched through Lame Deer following a child’s shooting death, calling for systemic change and naming their distrust of reservation policing directly. That same year, one of the officers patrolling their streets was raping a teenager in a park south of town.
Deela’s case isn’t isolated. Former BIA officer Dana Bullcoming was convicted in a separate rape case involving a Northern Cheyenne woman, part of a longer pattern of federal law enforcement misconduct in Native American communities that has rarely moved quickly toward accountability.
What Happens Now
At sentencing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Taylor Payne described what Deela inflicted in plain terms. “He was bigger, stronger, sober and clothed with the power of a BIA police officer,” Payne told the court. Crimes committed by law enforcement are especially corrosive, he said, because they corrode public trust in policing, and in American Indian and other vulnerable communities, the damage cuts even deeper.
Defense attorney Ryan Warner asked for five years, arguing Deela had fully accepted responsibility and had a wife and children. When Deela spoke, he said he hoped the girl would someday forgive him, and that protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves had always been one of his core beliefs.
Judge Mercer sided with prosecutors. Fourteen years in prison, followed by five years of supervised release, and a lifetime ban on possessing any weapon.
The Northern Cheyenne Nation is still waiting for the BIA to formally respond to the July 2026 ruling ordering the agency to reconsider tribal control of policing. That’s the same agency that hired Deela, cleared him after the 2021 Bordeaux shooting, and kept him on patrol through the summer of 2024.
The girl wasn’t in court Wednesday. Her mother texted from somewhere else because she couldn’t be in the same room as him.
That’s what 14 years is worth. And it’s why the Northern Cheyenne Nation has been fighting to control its own police long before Deela ever arrived in Lame Deer.
Reporting based on Billings Gazette, Indian Country Today, Montana Free Press, Daily Montanan, U.S. Department of Justice.