According to court records and the girl’s lawyer, a former school resource officer for the Aurora Police Department is being charged with a crime for reportedly sending inappropriate texts to a 16-year-old girl while he was still on the job.
A 26-year-old man named Egide “DJ” Ndagije was charged with three counts of official misconduct in March. He was accused of doing something wrong while working as a school security officer at Aurora Central High School, according to court records.
An internal review by the Aurora Police Department found that Ndagije took a picture of a girl without her permission, sent her inappropriate texts, and used a police database to find the girl and her family.
A spokesman for the Aurora Police Department, Matthew Longshore, said in a statement Tuesday that he quit on Oct. 26 rather than being fired while the probe was still going on. Ndagije started working as a school security officer in August 2022, after being hired in March 2021.
The exact charges against Ndagije are not spelled out in court records. They only say that he “knowingly committed… an unauthorized exercise of his official function and/or violated a statute or lawfully adopted rule or regulation relating to his office.”
But Matthew Haltzman, an attorney in Fort Collins, showed that Ndagije sent inappropriate texts to Haltzman’s client, a girl who met the officer when she was a student at Aurora Central High School and was 16 years old at the time.
Since the girl is a minor, The Denver Post is not naming her. She said she met Ndagije when she was a junior in high school and became close to him by spending free time in his office. The girl told The Post on Tuesday that she and her friend saw him as a “trusted adult” and that he sometimes bought them lunch. She is now 17 years old.
His wife got his cell phone number when her family moved to Fort Collins and told her to always call him if she needed help.
After a few months, she did. The Post looked at 29 pages of text messages and found that the girl texted Ndagije for help in October when her ex-boyfriend from when they were teens was bullying her.
The text chain shows that over the course of two days, Ndagije answered the girl’s questions about what legal steps she could take to stop the harassment. He then turned the conversation more personal, asking the girl about her sex life, what she was doing at the time, how well she slept, and how she dealt with stress.
He told her he was her “friend” and told her not to tell anyone or the Fort Collins cops that they were texting. To keep their talk safe, he told her to switch to end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp and that she “looked great” and didn’t need to lose weight.
The girl said Tuesday that the texts made her feel bad. She said, “It felt like he was trying to take advantage of how weak I was.” “It made me sick because I trusted that person and was close to him.”
Don Sisson, Ndagije’s lawyer, refused to say anything about the criminal charges on Tuesday.
A representative from the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office was not able to give more information about the criminal charges. There will be a hearing for Ndagije in court on May 31.
The girl told her parents about the texts, and they told Aurora police about them. This is when the internal affairs investigation into Ndagije started. Longshore said that Art Acevedo, who was chief at the time, also asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to look into the officer’s possible criminal behavior.
According to the internal investigation, Ndagije took a picture of the girl while she was visiting him in his Aurora Central High School office and she didn’t know about it. A police investigation found that Ndagije looked up the girl’s personal information and that of her family in a database to show her how it worked during one of those office trips.
A summary of the investigation says that the internal affairs study also found things in Ndagije’s bag that should have been given to the property and evidence unit.
Ndagije can’t be a police officer in Colorado anymore. On March 15, he lost his Peace Officer Standards and Training certification because the board found that he had lied during the internal affairs probe.
The Post asked Corey Christiansen, a spokesman for Aurora Public Schools, if the school told parents and students about the accusations against Ndagije. Christiansen did not answer.
Haltzman said that as far as he knew, the school had never told parents about the claims. He thinks that more girls were targeted and that more victims may come forward.