LOS ANGELES — Nearly six years after a jury awarded him $8.1 million in a lawsuit alleging he’d been harassed for reporting misconduct within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Deputy Andrew Rodriguez has been left empty-handed.

When the award came down, the Sheriff’s Department said it planned to “vigorously appeal.” Three years later, a California appeals court ordered a new trial, deciding the original judge had erred by giving the jury instructions that were too broad.

Last week, four days into a retrial, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Armen Tamzarian dismissed the case — at the request of Rodriguez’s attorney.

The reason? He said that his client had made a mistake while testifying and that the higher court’s 2022 ruling made it impossible to correct without turning the jury against him.

The lawyer, Alan Romero, called the request to dismiss the case a “difficult decision” in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. He noted that the appeals court had “found that evidence existed to support all” of his client’s claims even though the justices said the allegations relating to illegal policing were governed by a different law, which Romero said had a shorter statute of limitations.

The lawyer representing the county, Mira Hashmall, took a dimmer view of Rodriguez’s allegations, which she said had “collapsed” under scrutiny this time around.

“The evidence showed he repeatedly violated department policy and made false statements to his supervisors,” Hashmall, a partner at Miller Barondess, told The Times. “Rodriguez voluntarily dismissed his entire lawsuit with prejudice during the fourth day of trial.”

In an emailed statement, the Sheriff’s Department similarly lauded the dismissal, calling the claims “baseless” and saying there were “no harassment or retaliatory actions.”

“The Department enforces strict policies against retaliation, harassment, and discrimination, and does not tolerate such conduct,” the statement said.

The claims at the center of the case date to 2013, when Rodriguez — who’d spent several years working in the county’s jails and courthouses — started training to be a patrol deputy at the City of Industry sheriff’s station.

During his training, Rodriguez started to believe that his training officer was pulling people over without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, according to the description of the case laid out in the appellate court’s decision. Once, Rodriguez said during his first trial, the training officer instructed him to lie on an arrest report — an allegation she denied in 2019, as The Times reported.

According to the appellate court, Rodriguez’s next training officer told him that anyone on the street after dark was “up for grabs,” meaning that they could be detained unlawfully.

After that, Rodriguez worked with another deputy who allegedly said he wanted to punch Rodriguez in the face. When Rodriguez reported the threat, he was transferred to work at the station’s jail, according to the appellate court.

In August 2014, the court said, Rodriguez met with the station’s top cop, then- Capt. Tim Murakami, who threatened to open an internal investigation into him if he didn’t quit or go back to working the jails.

A few days later, Murakami sent a letter to the captain of personnel management, asking whether Rodriguez could be forced to undergo a psychological evaluation to determine his fitness for duty, citing a “pattern of behavior indicating an integrity issue and/or underlying medical/mental health problem.”

When he testified at trial in 2019, Murakami said the allegations against the training officers had no merit, and he denied retaliating against Rodriguez. An attorney for the county told the jury Rodriguez was simply unprepared for the rigors of patrol training.

In October 2014, Rodriguez went on medical leave. While he was out, the department opened multiple internal investigations into him. One related to repeated absences, while another focused on the allegations that he’d worked an unapproved outside job at Disneyland while on medical leave.

A third centered on concerns about whether, while relieved of duty in 2015, he’d undertaken policing action when he detained someone who appeared to be huffing gas from an air-conditioning unit near his home.

According to the appeals court, the Sheriff’s Department investigated and suspended Rodriguez, sent investigators to his home, told his neighbors he was in trouble, stationed undercover cars outside his home, told a Disneyland manager he was in trouble and visited his doctor’s office to get his medical records.

“The jury could reasonably conclude that these acts were not necessary to personnel management and instead constituted severe and pervasive harassment,” the court wrote.

But Rodriguez sued under the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, which the court said bans harassment based on disabilities but not harassment based on retaliation for objecting to illegal police activity.

“During the 2025 retrial on the remaining disability claims, Andrew Rodriguez truthfully testified that Undersheriff Timothy Murakami unlawfully threatened to fire him with no legal basis,” Romero told The Times. “Rodriguez testified that this threat took place in September 2014. Rodriguez immediately realized that he had misspoken and that the firing threat took place in September 2013, and the court was promptly notified.”

Because the higher court said the jury couldn’t consider the retaliation claims, the trial judge could tell the jury only that the testimony was not true, but couldn’t explain in what way, Romero said. That left the jury “with the indelible impression” that Rodriguez “had fabricated the firing threat entirely,” prompting Romero to request a dismissal.

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