A member of the United States Air Force has been charged with the murder of a South Dakota woman who went missing last year, authorities announced over the weekend. Sahela Sangrait, 21, had been missing for nearly seven months before a hiker discovered her decomposing remains in early March, according to the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office.
Sangrait was killed at Ellsworth Air Force Base, near the woman’s home in Box Elder, western South Dakota, according to a statement released Saturday by the sheriff’s office. Quinterius Chappelle, an active-duty airman stationed at the base, is facing federal charges of second-degree murder in her death.
Chappelle is being held for the US Marshals Service at the Pennington County Jail, according to booking records. The sheriff’s office reports that the case will be prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office.
CBS News contacted Ellsworth Air Force Base, but did not receive an immediate response. A base spokesperson told The New York Times that Chappelle was an aircraft inspection journeyman assigned to the 28th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron who joined the Air Force in 2019.
Sangrait went missing on August 10 and was last seen with a friend in Eagle Butte, a city on the Cheyenne River Reservation about 150 miles northeast of the Ellsworth base, according to a missing persons poster. When she left Eagle Butte, Sangrait stated that she intended to pick up some of her belongings in Box Elder before traveling to California, but the woman became uncontactable after that, according to the poster.
The poster identified Sangrait as Native American. In the United States, Native American women are disproportionately targeted in murders, sexual assaults, and other violent acts, both on reservations and in nearby towns, to the point where the rate at which they go missing or are murdered has been dubbed a national crisis.
In 2016, there were more than 5,700 reports of missing Native women and girls, according to RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organization that uses National Crime Information Center data.
According to a recent estimate by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, approximately 4,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people remain unsolved. Several dozen Indigenous women are currently missing in South Dakota alone, according to the state’s missing persons website.