It was the December of Bryson Butterfly’s first full year as a professional jockey. The lanky 17-year-old, flashing a broad smile soon after getting his braces removed, was competing for five- and six-figure purses at the historic Laurel Park racetrack.

“Here you are with this fabulous career, grabbing all kinds of attention and headlines,” the host of a horse racing streaming show gushed to him in an interview.

Barely six months later, in July 2023, Butterfly was behind bars, arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Elias Cieslak, a 17-year-old Parkville High School student.

Butterfly pleaded guilty last year to a lesser charge and agreed to testify against two others.

He’s scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in Baltimore County Circuit Court. Prosecutors are seeking 20 years in prison for a crime that Cieslak’s father told The Banner has torn his family apart. Butterfly’s defense attorney will ask for supervised probation.

For a time, Butterfly was living a dream. He had risen from the Colville Indian Reservation in a remote corner of Washington state to the competitive world of Maryland horse racing, in a sport where few Native riders ever made it big. Then everything unraveled.

“It’s kind of tough to talk about,” Butterfly told The Banner during a series of phone conversations this month from the Baltimore County Detention Center. “I know I did something wrong. I never meant for this to happen.”

‘He was going to ride racehorses’

Some 2,600 miles away, the Colville reservation stretches across 1.4 million acres of forested mountains and open range in rural north-central Washington. Butterfly spent much of his childhood here, following three generations of his family.

His parents were jockeys. His father, Roger Butterfly, who rode nearly 500 races throughout the Northwest, was incarcerated for much of Bryson’s life. His mother, Amy Nelson, raced a handful of times in western Canada, then shifted to training horses when she became a single parent to Bryson and his older sister.

Butterfly’s talent for riding was apparent early. At a year old, he could sit on a horse by himself. Before he reached kindergarten, he could train a pony to follow simple commands and gallop on rodeo horses through the fields. By 10, he’d collected dozens of rodeo competition belts that lined the walls of the family’s double-wide trailer.

“It always came natural to be on horses,” Butterfly said. “Big horses, little horses — it never mattered.”

Under his mother’s tutelage, Butterfly learned to race, first against neighborhood kids in the sand dunes of the reservation, then in Indian relays, where a rider runs a lap with one horse, jumps down and leaps onto the next horse.

At 12, he entered a four-furlong gate race on the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana. Though it was his first time riding a horse out of a starting gate, he held the lead from start to finish and won. His mother wept with pride.

From then on, Butterfly knew he wanted to be a professional jockey. He and his family began to picture a life beyond the reservation, which they described as plagued by drugs, crime and limited job opportunities.

“A lot of people get stuck there,” Butterfly said. “For me, this was my way out. This was how I was going to make it.”

Over the next few years, Butterfly made a name for himself. He and Nelson crisscrossed the West, racing — and often winning — unsanctioned fair events, head-to-head match races and short-distance quarter horse sprints.

In 2021, with his mother’s blessing, he dropped out of high school to start riding professionally. He was 16 years old and had just completed the ninth grade. Since he was a minor, Nelson agreed to sign his jockey license.

“I knew what his passion was, and I knew where he was going to go with his career,” Nelson said. “He was going to ride racehorses.”

Butterfly began his career in Oregon as the youngest rider in the jockey colony at Grants Pass Downs racetrack. He won his first pro race in June, weeks after his 16th birthday. Over the next few months, he and Nelson moved to Arizona, Kentucky and Indiana, chasing higher-profile opportunities and bigger purses.

That fall, a prominent agent invited Butterfly to ride at Laurel Park in Maryland, an established proving ground for young apprentice jockeys.

He jumped at the opportunity, though this time Nelson didn’t come with him. Her teenage son would be on his own.

“It’s not easy to be taken seriously as a rider if you have your mom following you around,” Nelson said. “So I had to make that sacrifice.”

‘I felt like I couldn’t fail’

When Butterfly arrived in Maryland in October 2021, he moved into a house in Laurel with others in the horse industry. At the track, he found mentors who offered tips on riding and welcomed him into their homes for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

Within days, Butterfly recorded his first victory: a commanding 7 1/4-length win in a lower-tier claiming race. A month later, he overcame 24-to-1 odds to win aboard his best horse, Double Fireball, in a mid-level allowance race that proved he could hold his own against tougher competition.

The next year, at age 17, Butterfly had 32 wins in 369 starts and topped $1.3 million in earnings, of which he kept a small percentage. He recorded two second-place finishes on Jim McKay Maryland Million Day, a high-profile day of stakes races with $1 million in total purses.

Butterfly said the success brought money, fame and industry attention. He would make as much as $10,000 in a single weekend of racing, much of which he spent on cars, gaming systems and trips to amusement parks.

Trainers took notice and invited him to more prominent races. Soon he was competing across the mid-Atlantic: Pimlico, Delaware Park and Virginia’s Colonial Downs, among others.

But Butterfly said success came with challenges.

The racing community’s adulation felt fragile, as if teetering on how he performed that day at the track. With each race, he felt pressure to justify the hype. Otherwise, he worried people would move on.

“Part of the time, you’re the greatest rider, you’re the greatest thing that ever walked the face of the planet,” Nelson said. “And then all of a sudden you’re just no good.”

Butterfly also carried the weight of his own hopes and expectations. For years, he’d pinned his future to his success as a rider.

“It had to work,” Butterfly said. “All I knew was horse racing. I felt like I couldn’t fail.”

The teen navigated this thousands of miles from his mother, who had relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where she continued training horses.

Though they spoke on the phone every day, Butterfly said, it wasn’t the same as having her by his side.

The pressure at the track and the distance from his family contributed to depression and anxiety, Butterfly said. He kept many of his feelings to himself as he cultivated an image of a fearless rider.

Butterfly said he smoked marijuana as one way of coping with the stress. While competing in Maryland, he smoked two or three times a day.

The Maryland Jockey Club, which operates Laurel Park, declined to comment. Butterfly’s former agent, Marty Leonard, did not respond to a request for comment.

Soon, a marijuana sale would bring Butterfly together with three others on a night that changed everything.

A marijuana deal, a shooting

In spring 2023, Elias Cieslak was 17 years old and looking ahead to graduating from Parkville High School.

He pitched and played center field for his travel baseball team. He collected tennis shoes and Hot Wheels cars. He loved fishing, Peruvian food, riding his bike and video games.

After graduation, he planned to work with his father as a carpenter.

“He was overly caring about others,” his father, Juan Cieslak, said in an interview. “In all his pictures, he just screamed joy and happiness.”

Butterfly said he met Elias Cieslak in 2022 while smoking together at a party. Cieslak mentioned that he sold marijuana. From then on, Butterfly purchased drugs from Cieslak every few weeks.

The following account of their final encounter is based on information stated in court proceedings.

On April 22, 2023, Butterfly, then 18, sent Cieslak a SnapChat message asking to buy four pounds of marijuana, much more than usual. Cieslak agreed to the sale for $8,500.

They met the next evening in a McDonald’s parking lot at the corner of Rossville Boulevard and Belair Road in Parkville. Cieslak arrived with his father and said he had to meet a friend.

Cieslak entered Butterfly’s Subaru sedan, carrying a green duffle bag. His father waited for him at a Taco Bell across the street.

Butterfly drove the Subaru to a service lane behind the McDonald’s and parked. He began counting money for the deal, later revealed to be counterfeit bills he bought on Amazon.

Two people emerged from a black Infiniti sedan parked on Rossville Boulevard, walked down a hill and approached the Subaru.

One of them, 17-year-old Marcus Powell, opened the rear driver’s-side door, pointed a handgun at Butterfly’s head and demanded money and marijuana. Powell was adjudicated as an adult.

The other, 32-year-old David Lofton, a relative of Powell’s, opened Cieslak’s door, armed with a rifle. He attempted to steal the green duffle bag containing the marijuana, but Cieslak fought back.

Butterfly fled and ended up at a Golden Corral restaurant next door. He forgot to put the Subaru in park, causing it to roll backward and crash into a dumpster.

Cieslak tried to resist the two robbers on his own, but Powell grabbed the duffle bag and ran up the hill towards the Infiniti.

As Cieslak chased after him, Powell turned and fired a single shot. It struck Cieslak in the hand and chest. He dropped to the ground and slid down the hill.

Powell jumped in the Infiniti, followed by Lofton. They sped away, carrying the marijuana and cellphones belonging to Butterfly and Cieslak.

Cieslak’s father heard the gunshot, hurried back to the McDonald’s and found his son gravely injured. He called 911, crying and screaming his son’s name.

Emergency responders rushed Cieslak to MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center nearby, where doctors pronounced him dead.

Police located Butterfly at the Golden Corral and questioned him for eight hours. Butterfly claimed to be a victim of the robbery alongside Cieslak. He was released and raced at Laurel Park later that week.

But as the investigation continued and police apprehended Powell and Lofton, Butterfly’s account unraveled.

Investigators discovered that Butterfly and Powell were close friends who hung out a couple times a week. Powell had even come to see Butterfly race.

Two days before the crime, Powell showed up at Butterfly’s house with a gun and told him to find someone to rob. Butterfly suggested Cieslak. Powell then brought Lofton into the scheme.

Phone records showed several calls between Butterfly and Powell on the day of the crime, including minutes before the robbery. The two continued communicating days after Cieslak’s murder.

The evidence led prosecutors to believe Butterfly arranged the marijuana deal as part of a conspiracy to rob Cieslak and charged him that summer.

By then, Butterfly had left Maryland. He was living in Harpers Ferry, a few miles from West Virginia’s Charles Town race track, and was competing across the mid-Atlantic. On July 12, he finished seventh, sixth and fourth in three races at Penn National Race Course near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The next morning, he was driving to Charles Town when his mother called: U.S. marshals had surrounded the racetrack. They planned to arrest him on seven counts, including first-degree murder.

Butterfly turned around and arranged to surrender at home.

His mother remained on the line, watching on FaceTime as authorities placed him in handcuffs.

Awaiting sentencing

Butterfly was extradited from West Virginia and booked in the Baltimore County Detention Center, where he has spent more than two years awaiting his case’s resolution.

A year after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of conspiracy to commit armed robbery.

“Instead of having a trial, you’re saying, ‘I admit that I conspired to commit that act,’” Baltimore County Circuit Judge Stacy Mayer said at the plea hearing. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Butterfly replied softly.

In exchange for his cooperation, the state agreed to drop the more serious charges and ask for a sentence of 20 years in prison at Thursday’s hearing, Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger said.

“This was a very premeditated case,” Shellenberger said. “They were setting up a marijuana deal, but with every intention of doing a robbery. And unfortunately, the robbery ends up turning into a murder.”

In interviews from the detention center, Butterfly said the robbery was Powell’s idea. He said he felt pressured to participate after Powell came to his house with a gun and asked him to find someone to rob.

“I didn’t really know what to do,” Butterfly said. “I was very scared because he knew where I worked, he knew where I lived, he knew everything.”

Powell’s defense attorney, Martin Cohen, declined a request for comment.

A few months after Butterfly reached his plea agreement, Powell pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. In March, Mayer issued the then-19-year-old a life sentence with all but 40 years suspended.

At Powell’s sentencing, a number of family members remembered Cieslak as kind, empathetic and funny. They said the years since his death had been marked by unrelenting grief.

“Elias was a bright light to our family,” said Cieslak’s mother, Crystal Maenner. “He also had a big smile, always making us laugh. Our world went dark the day he was murdered.”

Juan Cieslak told The Banner that his family moved because living in their house without Elias became unbearable.

“The past two years feels just like one big, long day,” he said. “I got frozen in time. There hasn’t been a day I haven’t dropped a tear for my boy.”

Lofton’s case went to a bench trial earlier this year, where Mayer convicted him on all six counts, including first-degree murder, and sentenced him to life in prison with all but 50 years suspended.

Lofton appealed the ruling, said his public defender, Sean Coleman.

At the detention center, Butterfly, now 20, said he’s been living on a mental health unit, where he receives therapy and takes medication for anxiety and depression. He earned his GED diploma earlier this year.

He speaks on the phone every day with his mom, who looks after her son’s horses and dog, trying to keep pieces of his life together.

Butterfly broke down in tears when talking about the crime. He said he hopes to apologize to Cieslak’s family.

“I want them to know that I’m truly sorry for what happened,” Butterfly said.

He’d like to race again one day, too, and open a jockey school in Washington, hoping to offer kids a dream beyond the reservation.