TSA worker wanted sex with girl, 11, police say

A TSA worker based at Fort Lauderdale’s international airport is jailed on federal allegations he showed up at a Plantation park expecting to have sex with an 11-year-old family friend who he had sending inappropriate texts and pornography.

Gary Delynn Linder, 27, of Lauderhill, cried during a bond hearing Tuesday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale. He did not speak but quietly wept and looked at his father in the courtroom.

Officials with the Transportation Security Administration at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport said the agency has begun the process of terminating Linder’s employment. Linder worked as a TSA officer since November 2016.

Linder began trying to groom the girl for sexual activity about a month after he obtained her cellphone number in January, prosecutors said.

“Have you hit puberty yet?” was one of the texts he sent to the girl, followed by more inappropriate questions about her body and development.

The girl’s parents saw the inappropriate texts from him in mid-February and turned the phone over to law enforcement.

Investigators assumed the girl’s identity and began responding to Linder’s texts as if they were her.

Linder exchanged more than 1,000 texts in about two months, often reaching out to the girl while she was at school and as late as midnight to 1 a.m., according to testimony from Lee Bieber, a Plantation detective who works on the FBI’s child exploitation task force.

“I responded in kind but he set the tone of the conversation,” Bieber testified about the texts he exchanged with Linder when he posed as the 11-year-old.

During the investigation, Linder sent pornographic images of

adults having sex, as well as photographs of his erect penis, and begged the girl to send him sexual photographs of herself. He gave instructions on how to shoot the photographs but the undercover detective made excuses and did not send photos.

The texts were extremely sexual and included a labelled diagram of female genitals, instructions on masturbation, and graphic descriptions of Linder’s sexual fantasies involving the girl, investigators said.

Linder arranged to meet the 11-year-old girl at 4 p.m. on April 4 at a park in Plantation. Beforehand, he specified that he wanted to have sex with her in his car.

The undercover agent, posing as the girl, told him to bring two glazed donuts with him and to knock on the public restroom door and the girl would come out.

Agents arrested Linder when he showed up for the sexual encounter – along with the glazed donuts.

“In this case, there was a real child – a child that was known to the defendant for a long time … and he took the substantial step of showing up to meet her,” prosecutor Jodi Anton told the judge. “But for law enforcement intervening, you’d have a hands-on offender.”

They said Linder confessed and identified the girl as a family friend whose home he often visited. He also said he was attracted to young girls between the ages of 6 years old to 14 years old, authorites said.

Linder also said he had been communicating with two other minors, girls aged 14 and 16. Authorities said they found two child pornography images on his phone when they searched it.

Linder was arrested on federal charges of using a cellphone to entice a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct to produce child pornography and transferring obscene materials to a minor. If convicted, he could face 15 years to life in federal prison.