A Pine Ridge Reservation man has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for using a baseball bat to beat death a sleeping man last summer on the reservation.

Prosecutors had reduced the charge against 22-year old Kyle Yankton of Pine Ridge to 2nd-degree murder as part of a November plea deal.

Yankton will also be required to pay $9,000 in restitution to be shared by a victims advocacy group and the family of his victim, 23-year-old Pablo Galindo. Both families reported in court that they had received death threats from the other in the months after the murder last June.

Galindo was the boyfriend of Yankton’s ex-girlfriend and was sleeping in her home when he was killed. Yankton admitted in court that jealousy was a factor in the crime, and that he didn’t want Galindo…who had 2 young daughters…raising Yankton’s young son.

Galindo was an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who’d moved from Nebraska to Pine Ridge just two months earlier to help out his grandparents.

His mother, Lorna Galindo, says she doesn’t think the 30-year sentence is long enough and that he should have been given life. She says Yankton showed no leniency to her son and should have been shown no leniency by the court