COSTILLA COUNTY — Kim Wisdom and her husband packed up a trailer and their belongings from the Western Slope, plopping down on a 10-acre plot of arid land in the San Luis Valley with views of the towering 14,000-foot Blanca Peak.
The couple dreamed of filling the property with animals and building their retirement home alongside their son and his family. But in November, someone broke into their trailer, making off with a 1,500-gallon septic tank, a solar generator, a carport and thousands of dollars worth of tools.
They spotted their stolen property at a neighbor’s, but Costilla County Sheriff’s Office deputies didn’t obtain a search warrant for nine days, Wisdom said. By then, much of the haul was gone. The district attorney, meanwhile, never received evidence to prosecute the case. As a result, Wisdom said, the DA might have to drop the charges.“This was our life’s savings,” Wisdom said. “What frustrated us most is that we did everything we were supposed to do and they dropped the ball.”
The mishandling of criminal cases has been a common occurrence in Costilla County for years, prosecutors, attorneys and former sheriff’s office employees say. So they weren’t entirely surprised when the San Luis Valley district attorney in March announced the indictment of half the department, including the sheriff and undersheriff, on charges related to abusing a corpse and assault.
The arrests rattled this small southern Colorado community, a place where the same families have been living on the same land for generations. But the charges, to many in the area, represented the culmination of years of negligence, incompetence, unethical behavior and, at times, illegal activity perpetrated by the people sworn to serve and protect the community.
“The law just doesn’t exist in Costilla County,” said Augustine Esquibel, a former county commissioner whose family has lived in the valley for six generations.
Multiple prosecutors say they have never worked with a department like the one in Costilla County. District attorneys have been forced to dismiss serious cases due to a lack of cooperation from the sheriff’s office. At times, they even have to subpoena the department for records that are supposed to be turned over during the normal, friendly exchange between law enforcement entities.
Five former Costilla County sheriff employees told The Denver Post that they received scant training for the job. Many deputies never completed reports after crimes, they said. Evidence in a murder case went missing. Other critical items obtained during investigations sat untouched for months on filing cabinets in unsecured areas that the public could access, these workers said. Records reviewed by The Post show the department also engaged in questionable financial practices, including spending public funds on party supplies and pregnancy tests.
“I have never said, ever, that I do not trust a police agency, and I do not trust the Costilla County Sheriff’s Office,” Anne Kelly, the San Luis Valley district attorney, told county commissioners last year.
Kelly’s office continues to investigate the sheriff’s office. Meanwhile, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office launched its own probe of the troubled department.
‘We do our own thing.’
Costilla County spans more than 1,200 square miles in the San Luis Valley, stretching southeast of Alamosa and to the New Mexico border.
It prides itself on being the , with recorded history dating back to 1540, the year the Spanish conquistador explored the Southwest. The county seat is San Luis, the oldest town in the state.
The area also stands as one of the poorest in Colorado, where the and 21% of its residents live below the poverty line.
Many of the county’s 3,600 people have family histories in the valley that extend back generations. Leadership here, as a result, consists of a tangled web of intra-family connections that can make county business a deeply personal endeavor.
“The conflicts of interest in Costilla County are beyond words,” Esquibel said.
Concerns about law enforcement are nothing new here.
Esquibel became a county commissioner in 2016. During his tenure, money, guns and drugs disappeared from the sheriff’s office, he said. Policies and procedures were not up to date. Esquibel, as a commissioner, even had to file open records requests to get financial records from the department, he said.
Byron Miller, a defense attorney in Alamosa, recalled once going to see a client in the Costilla County jail. While he was there, he realized there wasn’t a single locked door between him and the outside world. There was an ethos down here, he said: “We do our own thing.”
Nearly all the cases he witnessed in the county never went to trial, Miller said. There are clans here, and everyone knows everyone. Trust in the cops and prosecutors, he said, remained low.
“It’s almost impossible to convict someone in Costilla County,” he said.
Prosecutors in the San Luis Valley have run into similar issues when dealing with the sheriff’s office.
Robert Willett, who served as DA until 2020, said the reports generated by officials there “were less than a good product.” He tried to do trainings with the department, but “it just didn’t seem like it made much of an impact.”
Often, Willett said, he would have to reduce charges or outright dismiss cases due to their shoddy work.
Soon after becoming the district attorney in 2022, Anne Kelly noticed that the Costilla County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t complying with laws surrounding body-worn cameras. Deputies wouldn’t turn them on or they’d forget them at the station, she said in an interview. Other times, personnel wouldn’t upload the footage or send it to her prosecutors.
The problems snowballed. Evidence requested by Kelly’s office would come in late. She met with the sheriff several times. She drafted letters and emails.
But the situation turned dire, Kelly said, when she learned that the sheriff’s office last year lost evidence collected from an autopsy in a homicide case.
With this incident fresh in her mind, the DA took the highly unusual step of making her concerns public.
During a on July 9, Kelly laid out a laundry list of concerns that she said she could not overlook.
Her office had to subpoena the sheriff’s office to get reports or body-camera footage. She was forced to dismiss four cases that week as a result of not receving information in time. She even tasked one deputy with “making sure our Costilla County docket is salvegable.”
Kelly detailed allegations she’d heard that sheriff’s office employees were using drugs and aiding drug dealers. She lamented the lost evidence in the homicide case, calling it an “unprecedented” situation.
“I have never said this about a law enforcement agency before,” Kelly told the commissioners. “It breaks my heart that I cannot trust the sheriff’s office to provide me with the information that we need.”
Eight months after the meeting, Kelly took even more drastic action.
A grand jury in March indicted Sheriff Danny Sanchez and four of his employees, including his son, on a host of felony and misdemeanor charges. Prosecutors say Sanchez failed to investigate skeletal human remains found in the county, allowed a deputy to collect the person’s skull in a used paper grocery bag, and failed to collect all the evidence or follow up on the case.
In a separate incident, the grand jury indicted Undersheriff Cruz Soto, Sgt. Caleb Sanchez and Deputy Roland Riley for allegedly deploying their Tasers on a man in the midst of a mental health crisis as he was attempting to walk away.
Danny Sanchez resigned following the indictment, and the county commissioners , Joe Smith, to run the department until the next election in November.
Attorneys for Danny and Caleb Sanchez and Soto did not respond to requests for comment. Riley’s attorney declined an interview request. Michael Hartmann, a lawyer representing former deputy Keith Schultz, who was also charged in connection with the mishandled remains, said the “motivations for what is happening are not purely altruistic.”
“There were some shenanigans going on with some individuals involved,” he said. “For a lot of years, this is the way things are done in Costilla County; we’ll look the other way for a lot of years. When Anne Kelly came in, that motivated her to pursue some things that needed to be looked into. There’s some overreaction on her part with some of these charges that are part and parcel of a political prosecution.”
Lack of training and missing evidence
But those who worked for the sheriff’s department say they have witnessed their coworkers or bosses break the law for years. The Post spoke with five former department officials, who provided testimony and photos about the agency’s practices.
The sheriff’s office appeared to have no system for properly documenting and storing evidence, these employees said.
Evidence would be housed in a small room the size of a walk-in closet. Half the time, the light didn’t work. Items taken from crime scenes were stacked from floor to ceiling in no particular order, these former workers said. Some materials had been there for decades, despite the statute of limitations having long run out on these cases.
“Think of a child’s room, where they took out all their toys, and you’re trying to look for a penny in there,” said Marcy Baker, who worked for the sheriff’s office between 2024 and 2025.
She recalled once desperately searching for a DNA swab that the prosecution and defense needed before an upcoming murder trial. She looked in the evidence fridge, where she found only butter and other food items. Baker was able to locate a knife and some clothing connected to the case, but not the swabs that were needed to connect the victim to the blood found at the scene.
Sheriff Sanchez and Undersheriff Soto asked her how things went. After she told them that the public defender and investigator had taken pictures of the evidence room, she says Soto responded: “You shouldn’t have let them take pictures. Tell them to get a warrant.”
Baker was shocked.
Photos provided to The Post by former employees show unlabeled brown bags with evidence lying on top of file cabinets in the office. One photo, from December 2024, shows evidence from a possible homicide sitting on top of one of these file cabinets, in an area accessible to the public. It had been there for six months, said Nobel Havens, a former Costilla County deputy and Baker’s husband. It was still there five months later.
In another photo, a rifle confiscated from a suspect appears in the corner of a supervisor’s office, between a bookcase and a couch filled with papers. Havens says the weapon was never properly documented and the DA had to dismiss the case.
Former deputies say their training almost exclusively consisted of online courses, including firearms work.
The sheriff and underhseriff never kept up with the laws for training purposes, Havens said — aka “the proper way to do things as a peace officer in the 2020s.”
When he did do firearms training with other sheriff’s personnel, Havens found only a few deputies were actually able to meet the standards.
Sometimes, deputies would conduct training their own way.
In one instance, Schultz, one of the deputies charged in March, used an inmate to simulate a traffic stop as training for another deputy. He unloaded his weapon and gave the gun to the inmate to practice the scenario, said a former deputy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still hope to work in law enforcement.
Another former deputy said she once asked the sheriff if she could take courses to become a Taser instructor. Sanchez replied that she couldn’t take on that role because she was a woman, this individual said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she still works in law enforcement.
“That was one of the most sexist things I’ve ever experienced,” this woman said.
The Post reviewed another photo in which Soto, the undersheriff, sent the entire office a picture of his scrotum on their internal messaging system.
Questionable spending practices
Financial statements and testimony from the former sheriff’s office employees also point to questionable spending practices in Costilla County.
Kirk Taylor, one of the candidates running for sheriff, first started filing open records requests earlier this year from the county so he could familiarize himself with the department’s budget. As a law enforcement outsider, Taylor wanted to learn everything he could about the office he might soon lead. When he started getting back the receipts, however, he was stunned.
Taylor found the department, every month, was using public funds earmarked to buy food for the jail to instead purchase prepaid Visa gift cards from Walmart. The jail in Costilla County isn’t even operational; it was only used to house inmates briefly until they could transport them to another county.
Yet the department was sometimes spending as much as $1,500 a month on these Walmart gift cards, according to a spreadsheet compiled by Taylor and shared with The Post.
“I was blown away,” Taylor said. “I thought they’d hide it better.”
Former deputies say Soto had a drawer full of these gift cards and would hand them out so workers could pay for gas and food on their hours-long trips to transport inmates. But they also said Soto would use the money to buy food and other items for himself.
Receipts shared with The Post show the sheriff’s office bought hair spray, birthday candles, fabric dye and pregnancy tests, among other non-food items. The Post requested the same receipts provided to Taylor; the county says those are now in the district attorney’s possession as part of its investigation.
Law enforcement experts say they have never heard of a department using prepaid Walmart gift cards as spending money.
Rebuilding the department
Smith, the interim sheriff, now has the unenviable task of keeping the department afloat amid the investigations and deep public distrust.
Soon after taking the job, Smith initiated an audit to review the department’s evidence practices, discovery policies, and vehicles. He contracted with a retired state patrol evidence technician to implement best practices.
But he’s running into obstacles: Former department leadership wouldn’t give him the code to the safe, Smith said, forcing him to hire a locksmith to break into the vault. The department had to create a new Facebook account because the previous admin wouldn’t give them access.
“If you’re truly innocent, why fight something like that?” Smith said.
For the first week after the arrests, Smith was the only person in the office who could respond to calls. He has since hired an interim undersheriff, Hunter Velasquez, but the search for candidates to replace the departed deputies has been a struggle. He has no advertising budget and no idea what he’s allowed to pay his new hires.
Some of the people who have applied aren’t certified by the state to be a peace officer, Smith said. One candidate couldn’t even read or write.
“This isn’t Walker, Texas Ranger,” Smith said.
Despite the drastic changes, questions remain about how Smith’s personnel will differ from that of the previous administration.
Velasquez has run afoul of the law multiple times in the past 10 years, court records show. In 2015, he was arrested in Alamosa and charged with felony burglary and multiple counts of theft after stealing money from a nonprofit dog shelter. He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft ($750 – $2,000), with prosecutors dropping the felony charge. A judge sentenced Velasquez to community service, nine months probation and two days of jail, though he was given credit for time served.
A year later, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and received a year of probation, records show. Velasquez allegedly sent messages to an individual in which he threatened to hurt or kill him, according to a police report. The man later sought a restraining order against him after Velasquez went to the man’s house one night and banged on his door.
Smith said he was under the impression that the DA had dismissed all the charges against Velasquez. Still, he said, misdemeanors committed at a young age don’t preclude someone from working in law enforcement.
“People make mistakes,” Smith said.
Recently, a posted to social media appears to show Velasquez, before he started working for the sheriff’s office, wielding a gun as people screamed and ran for cover.
In a Facebook post, Velasquez said he was responding after being told an adult hit a child. He said he was surrounded by multiple people, punched in the face and had a gun pointed at him. That’s when he says he drew his own weapon.
“I didn’t go looking for problems that day,” Velasquez wrote. “I was a parent responding to a situation involving my family and reacting to an immediate threat in front of me.”
The sheriff’s office, in a subsequent , said it is reviewing the incident and that no charges were filed related to the fracas. Smith told The Post that Velasquez will voluntarily step down as undersheriff and instead take on a sergeant role.
“The Sheriff’s Office remains committed to transparency, professionalism, and maintaining the public’s trust,” the department said.
