Former Parlier Police Chief Jose Garza won his retaliation case in court against the city on Monday.
The decision comes three years after he was fired by the city.
Flashback: Garza was let go by the city on April 5, 2021, following a closed session city council vote days earlier.
- That vote came in spite of around a dozen people voicing their support for him during the council meeting, including multiple officers who threatened to quit their jobs.
Driving the news: Garza was the Parlier Police Chief from 2017 to 2021 and launched his civil retaliation lawsuit shortly after he was fired.
- He argued that he was let go by the city because he refused to call off an investigation into a city employee for embezzlement.
- During the trial, Garza claimed that Parlier Mayor Alma Beltran and former City Manager Sonie Hall tried to interfere with the embezzlement investigation.
- Garza had hired a third-party investigator, but Hall told the investigator to stop all work and provide whatever he had generated to the city. Hall said in the January 2021 memo that the city should not be communicating with the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office without concrete evidence of theft, given that it was a personnel matter.
- At the end of March, Garza wrote a letter to the city council saying Beltran and the city’s human resources director were interfering through micromanagement and undermined his authority and leadership.
The big picture: The trial took two 10 days in September, capped off by a two-day deliberation by the jury.
- Garza is seeking $1.1 million in damages.
- Parlier’s defense attorney made a motion for a mistrial because of incomplete jury instructions, but Fresno County Superior Court Judge Jonathan Skiles rejected it.
