He sent the same YouTube music video to his ex-wife 10 times, and now he's back in jail

A former Valley Center police sergeant awaiting trial on sex-crime charges was booked into jail Wednesday after his bond was revoked because he contacted his ex-wife, who is one of the witnesses in his case, records say.

Some of Thomas Delgado's alleged crimes also have led to an ongoing lawsuit against the city of Valley Center.

Delgado, 50, was booked into the Sedgwick County Jail on Wednesday morning for failing to comply, jail records show.

A judge issued a warrant for Delgado’s arrest and ordered that he be held with “no bond allowed,” a court document says.

On March 30, prosecutors asked that the bond under which Delgado had been released be revoked because his ex-wife had received unwanted emails from an email address belonging to Delgado. On March 29, the ex-wife received about 10 emails from his address, with each containing the same link to a YouTube music video, an assistant district attorney said in a court document.

On March 30, a Sedgwick County sheriff’s detective found that the unwanted emails came from an account assigned to Delgado by his Colorado employer, the document says.

A protective order in effect since May 2017, after Delgado was charged, prohibited him from having any contact with witnesses in the case against him, including his ex-wife. Otherwise, he would violate the bond upon which he had been released.

Delgado faces a jury trial on April 23.

The seven charges he faces: sexual exploitation of a child, sexual battery, attempted sexual battery, official misconduct and three counts of harassment by telecommunications device, a court document says. The charges list four different victims by their initials. The harassment charges against Delgado involve text messages that were lewd or obscene, the charges say.

Delgado had been released after his arrest in late 2016. The day of his arrest, he resigned as a Valley Center police sergeant.

The alleged crimes occurred from February 2015 to December 2016, charges say. All of the charges involve alleged crimes that occurred after Valley Center hired Delgado in April 2014. Before he worked on patrol in Valley Center, the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office had moved him from his patrol beat in southeast Sedgwick County to a job in the offender registration unit.

One of the counts, sexual exploitation of a child, is a felony. The rest are misdemeanors.

The felony charge of sexual exploitation of a child says that around June 13, 2016, Delgado had a “visual depiction” in which a child under 18 “is shown or heard engaging in sexually explicit conduct with intent to arouse or satisfy the sexual desires or appeal to the prurient interest of the defendant or any other person.”

One of the alleged victims in the criminal case filed a lawsuit in September against the city of Valley Center, alleging that it was negligent in hiring and overseeing Delgado. The lawsuit seeks damages of more than $75,000.

The lawsuit says that when Delgado worked as a Sedgwick County sheriff's deputy in 2011, he acted sexually inappropriately with a 16-year-old girl and was formally disciplined for it. When Valley Center hired him as a patrol officer in 2014, it didn't check his sheriff's personnel file, the lawsuit contends.

By the spring of 2016, while on duty and in uniform in Valley Center, Delgado was having an increasingly inappropriate relationship with a teenage girl and being physically affectionate toward her when she rode with him, the lawsuit alleges. That June, the father of the girl in the 2011 incident called the Valley Center police chief and told what happened years earlier, the lawsuit says. Despite that, Valley Center failed to investigate those concerns. By the fall of 2016, Delgado "had repeatedly sexually-exploited, sexually-battered ... " the teen, the lawsuit says.

Lawyers for Valley Center have denied the lawsuit allegations, saying in their answer that Delgado's alleged actions "(if they occurred) were outside the course and scope of his employment with defendant and unknown to defendant."

Valley Center "had no knowledge of any alleged misconduct by Thomas Delgado and any such misconduct was unforeseeable," the lawyers for Valley Center said in their answer to the lawsuit.

This story was originally published April 4, 2018 at 11:40 AM with the headline "He sent the same YouTube music video to his ex-wife 10 times, and now he's back in jail."