Jan. 3—A former Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office deputy was sentenced to federal prison and house arrest on Friday for tipping off a drug trafficker that federal agents were going to raid his North Valley home in 2021.
U.S. District Judge James Browning sentenced Kyle Linker to eight months of imprisonment, with 30 days to be served in federal prison and the remaining seven months on house arrest.
In September, Linker, 33, pleaded guilty to a felony obstruction of justice/aiding and abetting charge in thwarting the Drug Enforcement Administration investigation. He resigned from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office in 2022.
In the plea agreement offered to Linker by prosecutors, they recommended he be sentenced to probation. In Friday’s sentencing, Browning ordered prison time first.
Linker’s attorney Robert Cooper told the Journal he will also have to serve three years of supervised release. He said Linker was given 60 days to voluntarily surrender to start his prison sentence.
“I know that Kyle is disappointed with having to serve the 30 days, but he also recognizes why Judge Browning imposed the sentence he did, and we believe that it was a fair and just sentence,” Cooper said.
He said Linker, who joined BCSO in 2015, “has no intention of ever becoming a law enforcement officer again.”
“That was kind of sad. It was a career that he absolutely enjoyed. I think that this caused him basically to lose that career,” he said. “… Kyle just looks forward to moving on with his life, so he’s glad that this chapter is behind him at this point.”
Linker’s alleged accomplice, former BCSO deputy Paul Jessen Jr., is still awaiting trial on charges of obstruction, conspiracy and lying to the FBI.
Jensen was initially put on leave by former Sheriff Manuel Gonzales when the allegations surfaced in March 2022, but Sheriff John Allen brought him back to work light duty in July 2023. Allen placed Jessen on leave in September when the charges were filed against him.
Linker, in his plea agreement, said he and Jessen were on a federal task force in 2021 when they made an informant out of a Los Ranchos drug trafficker. Linker said when he learned DEA agents were going after the informant, he foiled the initial raid by warning the man.
The DEA then became suspicious and used the informant to gather evidence against Linker and Jessen, according to the plea agreement. Linker was placed on leave by BCSO after the allegations surfaced, and he told Jessen to ask the trafficker if he was cooperating with the DEA.
The plea agreement states that, by January 2022, Jessen had lied to the FBI when questioned on the matter, saying he “had no personal knowledge” that Linker had obstructed the DEA’s investigation.
It took more than two years after that for the pair to be criminally charged. The informant is awaiting sentencing on federal drug charges.
There has been no explanation why the pair of deputies would risk their careers to tip off the informant and there are no allegations that either deputy received any benefit, financial or otherwise, for doing so.
At the time, there had been a rivalry between the sheriff’s office and the DEA: Linker and Jessen wanted to keep the informant as their own; the DEA took actions to try to arrest him on federal charges.
Sheriff Allen said in a news conference after the indictments that he had never worked with Linker but thought of Jessen as an asset to the agency. At the time, Allen said he planned an internal affairs investigation into the deputies’ actions, but that it would be put off pending the outcome of the criminal cases.