MARION COUNTY, FL (352today.com) – The Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) says it has arrested a School Resource Officer (SRO) on charges of lewd and lascivious battery on a juvenile.
The sheriff’s office says detectives arrested 34-year-old Christian Linan on Monday. They say he has been an SRO at Dunnellon High School since August 2022.
Detectives say they found out about the allegations last week after the alleged victim, a former student who is now an adult, confided in a counselor about the relationship between her and Linan.
MCSO says Linan began having inappropriate sexual contact with the victim in 2019 when she was 15 years old. They say the victim reported that she and Linan had sex on multiple occasions while she was a juvenile.
In 2019, when the alleged sexual activity occurred, MCSO says Linan was an SRO at Horizon Academy, and the 15-year-old was a student at Dunnellon High.
In a probable cause affidavit obtained by 352today, it says that it all happened due to an incident in February 2019. The report shows that Linan along with three other deputies responded to a school bus after a student on the bus had threatened to blow it up.
According to the documents, during the incident, Deputy Linan interviewed multiple juveniles about the bomb threat and the victim was one of the students he chose to interview.
During his interview with her, the victim provided Linan with her contact information including her home address. The affidavit says a couple days later, the defendant called her and told her she had given him the wrong address.
“The defendant then asked her to go outside and check the numeric on her house to confirm her address, which she did, though she knew that she had given him the correct information the first time,” stated the affidavit.
A couple months later, in April of 2019, she told authorities she received a message from Linan on Snapchat but did not realize it was him. He later told the victim he was a law enforcement officer. According to the affidavit, the two continued communicate and eventually agreed to meet up in person.
On the first instance, Linan picked up the victim from a stop sign down the road from her home. During this meeting, the two had sexual contact and Linan advised the victim it had to stay between the two, according to the documents.
The victim told authorities that from April 2019 through March 2020, she and Linan met up regularly in person and engaged in sexual contact in his house or in his car.
At the end of 2020, the victim moved away and told authorities they continued to communicate through Snapchat. In July of 2023, according to the affidavit, the victim returned to Florida to visit her family and her and Linan also met up then and engaged in sexual intercourse, with this being the last time she met up with him in person.
The affidavit says Linan told authorities that he believed the victim was 16 0r 17 when they met, and that meant she was of “legal age to consent to having sex.”
The sheriff’s office says Linan has resigned his position. He worked with the MCSO since September 2016 and is now being held in the Marion County Jail with no bond.
“Every day, I have a thousand employees working hard and doing what’s right. So, it hurts each one of us when someone does something like this and casts a shadow over the good that the rest of these deputies are doing,” said Sheriff Billy Woods in a news release. “All of my deputies know the standards I set for the Office of Sheriff. In fact, they take an oath to uphold those standards and they know that I have zero tolerance for this kind of action. I am glad that the victim had the courage to come forward and let us know.”