Kathryn Sinkevitch (PCSO)

 

A former co-worker of Kathryn Sinkevitch testified Monday overhearing her say “it would be better” if the victim in her first-degree murder trial “wasn’t around.”

Sinkevitch is accused in the shooting death of 31-year-old Michael Agerter on Dec. 16, 2016. Agerter, her ex-boyfriend, was shot and killed in the garage of his rental home in Rancho El Dorado. The two lived separately but had an infant son together.

Jared Cook, now living in Show Low, said he worked at the mortgage company where Sinkevitch was employed at the time of the murder. He was a loan processor but switched to join the support team and worked directly with her.

He told the jury he often heard Sinkevitch talking to her friend Bridget Hopkins about Agerter, the father of her child.

He said Sinkevitch would tell Hopkins, “It would be better if he wasn’t around.” He claimed the two had conversations like this almost daily and sometimes they appeared to be quite serious and it would “make him uncomfortable at times.”

He said he talked to Sinkevitch about shooting guns once at work, and Sinkevitch said she owned a gun.

The day of the murder, he recalled, Sinkevitch and Hopkins were talking a lot in the morning and then she was gone for a while. Cook said Sinkevitch didn’t say where she was going when she left for lunch but said she was gone “two or three hours.”

Cook added a normal lunch break was 30 minutes on a Friday because they were so busy “trying to get work done before the weekend.”

He said when she returned the afternoon of the murder, she was quiet, which was unusual for her.