CHEYENNE, Wyo.—A Honduran man who pleaded guilty to selling heroin in Denver was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years in prison for supplying the drugs that killed a Wyoming young professional bull rider and two other people.
Juan Antonio Bustillo-Perez, 33, told U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson through a Spanish interpreter that he never met the three victims who died from the drugs he provided: 21-year-old bull rider Bryan Guthrie, 34-year-old Valarie Anne Sena and 32-year-old Martin Christopher Gerhold.
“I never saw them,” Bustillo-Perez said. “I never met them. I didn’t know them.”
Johnson responded, “I don’t doubt that. It isn’t as though you put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger.”
But Johnson told Bustillo-Perez that he did essentially pull the trigger on the three victims when he put the drugs into the hands of people who eventually brought them north to Wyoming.
Johnson told Bustillo-Perez that the victims’ families, “will continue to feel a terrible emptiness in their lives because of the loss of their loved ones. That’s a hole in their heart that will not be repaired.”
Johnson said Bustillo-Perez had earlier drug convictions in California and Colorado. The judge said he would request federal immigration officials to start proceedings to deport Bustillo-Perez out of the country at the end of his prison sentence.
Guthrie was ranked as high as third in bull-riding in January 2009 in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. He was knocked out of competition with a leg injury in March 2009.
Guthrie’s death last December shocked Wyoming, where heroin use runs squarely against its ingrained cowboy culture.
The investigation into the overdose deaths uncovered a drug-dealing network that brought heroin from Denver to Cheyenne. It led to arrests in Wyoming, Colorado and Canada.
Johnson said a presentence report on Bustillo-Perez stated he and co-defendant Everg Adonay Lucero-Echegoyen provided the drugs in Denver. Federal prosecutors have said Lucero-Echegoyen is in custody in Canada and is awaiting extradition back to the United States.
Three Cheyenne residents—Kyle Walla, Rhett T. Epler and Joel D. Murdoch, all in their 20s—pleaded guilty this year to federal drug charges in the case. Murdoch received a 21-year prison sentence this summer while Epler and Walla recently received sentences of five years each.
Johnson on Tuesday sentenced Vernon Violas Ellefson Jr., 45 of Cheyenne, serve 20 years in prison. Ellefson pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy to distribute heroin in the case.
Christopher Charles Tyson, 34, of Cheyenne, has pleaded guilty to distributing the heroin and cocaine that killed Guthrie. Tyson also has pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to move the drugs that Sena and Gerhold.
Tyson faces up to 20 years in prison when Johnson sentences him on Friday.
