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other tabbed Operation Winter's End, on Fort Berthold.
• Purdon said there are no plans to cut back on investigations on reservations, despite shrinking budgets.
• "First and foremost, we're committed to this. We're going to do whatever it takes to work with our tribal partners to make their communities safer," Purdon said. "All I can control is how we allocate the resources we're given and how hard we work. We're doing more cases. We're focusing on removing the most violent predators on the reservation."
• One of those cases ended on Monday when a federal jury found Valentino "Tino" Bagola, 20, guilty of two counts of felony murder for the May 2011 slayings of 9-year-old Destiny Jane Shaw-Dubois and her 6-year-old brother, Travis Lee DuBois Jr., in St. Michael.
• That case has been a rallying cry for reform at Spirit Lake, where the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs took over the child protection system about a year ago after complaints about rampant abuse of children. Purdon assigned four of his attorneys to the Bagola case, which was complicated by an early confession from the father of the children.
• "That shows that we're willing to take on the hard cases and make sure that justice gets done for those victims," Purdon said.
• Purdon said his office has been involved with prevention programs on the reservations, such as town hall meetings, consultation conferences, and student programs. He said there are plans in the works to help with an intervention plan for offenders returning home from federal prison.
• However, Purdon said his staff can only do so much on the front end of potential violent crimes.
• "We can't run the tribal government, we can't run the various programs on the tribe, we don't even control the people who police the tribe," he said. "In the end, when things are bad and people get hurt or sexually assaulted or murdered, we come in and try to deliver some measure of justice to those victims."
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