A 13-year veteran of the Kearney Police Department resigned and surrendered her law enforcement certification Thursday after she was convicted of official misconduct in Buffalo County Court for allegedly lying to criminal investigators last March, according to court filings and other public records.
Jennifer Caudillo was ordered to pay $121 in fees and required to resign from the central Nebraska city's police force as part of a deal that saw the 39-year-old plead no contest to official misconduct, a class 2 misdemeanor, at a hearing Thursday morning, according to the court filings.
Prosecutors with Nebraska's Attorney General's Office had charged Caudillo in December with false reporting, a class 1 misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
The charge stemmed from an incident in March 2022, when Caudillo "furnished material information she knew to be false" in an attempt to impede an ongoing investigation, Deputy Attorney General David Bydalek alleged in the complaint filed in December.
It's unclear what false information Caudillo is accused of providing criminal investigators. Since the 39-year-old was never jailed for the crime, the state was not required to file a probable cause statement for her arrest, meaning the specific allegations weren't made public.
A spokesperson for the Attorney General's Office said Friday that Caudillo lied to Nebraska State Patrol investigators who were looking into allegations against her that did not yield their own criminal charges.
In a change-of-status form filed with the state's Law Enforcement Training Center on Friday, Kearney Police Chief Bryan Waugh said Caudillo resigned before "initiation or completion of an internal affairs investigation into allegations that, if founded, could" have resulted in termination.
Kearney Police officials were not available for comment Friday.
Caudillo had been on "civil leave" from the Kearney Police Department since sometime last year, according to minutes from Nebraska's Police Standards Advisory Council meeting in March.
She joined Kearney's police force in 2010 after graduating from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2007 and working for several years as a recovery specialist at Richard Young Hospital in Kearney.
Her attorney, Kearney-based lawyer Charles Brewster, declined to comment on Caudillo's behalf Friday.