A former Ohkay Owingeh police officer will spend up to 15 months in prison after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice for tipping off a person being investigated by the feds that a person they were talking to was an informant.
Justin Aguino pleaded guilty on April 9 in federal magistrate court in Albuquerque. Without the plea agreement, he would have faced a maximum sentence of 20 years on the charge, if convicted. The plea agreement, signed by prosecutor Niki Tapia-Brito, sets his sentence at 0 to 15 years, but carries no other agreements. Sentencing is set for Aug. 11.
In the plea agreement, Aguino admitted to calling “J.M.” on Feb. 26, 2020, while he was an Ohkay Owingeh officer.
“I told J.M. that a person J.M. was in contact with ‘got the feds on him’ and that the person in question ‘snitch like (expletive),’” according to the plea deal.
The plea deal does not specify what J.M. was being investigated for.
“As a police officer, I also knew that it was dishonest, wrongful, and corrupt, to disclose this type of sensitive law enforcement information about an informant or cooperating witness to a person who could be under law enforcement investigation,” according to the plea deal. “Disclosure of this sensitive law enforcement information had the purpose of obstructing, influencing, or impeding the due administration of justice.”
According to an FBI press release for his absconding, Aguino was working as an officer with the Ohkay Owingeh Tribal Police in 2020 when he “impeded” a federal grand jury investigation “by disclosing information about an ongoing investigation being conducted by Homeland Security Investigations and the Drug Enforcement Administration to an individual outside of the investigation.”
FBI agents confronted him with the allegations on May 24, 2022, when he was working for the Pojoaque Tribal Police Department.
A federal grand jury indicted Aguino on charges of obstruction of justice and making a false statement on June 13, 2023 and a summons was issued for him.
The FBI offered a $5,000 reward for information on his whereabouts in December 2025, after he absconded from his pretrial release. He was arrested in Ohkay Owingeh a day later. The reward for information was put out after Aguino had been on the lam for more than a year.
According to court documents, Aguino stopped communicating with his pretrial services officer in August 2024, after the officer tried to talk to him about an Isleta Tribal Court warrant for failure to appear for a child support hearing.
His attorney at the time he stopped talking to pre-trial services, Britany Schaffer, filed a motion, which was granted, to remove herself as his attorney. She wrote that he stopped talking to her around the same time he stopped responding to calls from Federal probation officer Joann Griego in 2024.