El Paso County settles wrongful termination lawsuit with prosecutor fired in Walmart case fallout

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El Paso County Commissioners Court on Monday approved a wrongful termination suit brought by John Briggs, a veteran prosecutor who said he was fired in 2022 because he refused to participate in activities involving the Walmart mass shooting case that eventually led to the resignation of District Attorney Yvonne Rosales.

The terms of the settlement haven’t been made public because it still must be signed by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone. But as part of the settlement, County Commissioner Iliana Holguin read a statement saying Briggs should never have been fired. 

“The county of El Paso appreciates the long record of service that John Briggs has provided to the office of the district attorney. Mr. Briggs should not have been terminated from his employment with the office of the district attorney by the district attorney in place at the time of his termination. The county is pleased that he is serving its citizens once again,” Holguin said.

Briggs said that statement was the most important part of the settlement to him.

“It wasn’t about money. I didn’t want money in exchange for them wrecking my reputation out there. I just wanted a little vindication. And, so, I’m very happy that the lawsuit has turned out the way it has, because at least there’s going to be that vindication at the end,” Briggs said in an interview with El Paso Matters.

Rosales didn’t respond to a request for comment from El Paso Matters.

The settlement agreement came as a result of mediation agreed to by the parties.

Briggs, 55, had worked at the El Paso District Attorney’s Office for 25 years when he was fired Aug. 22, 2022. In his lawsuit filed in 2024, Briggs alleged he was wrongfully terminated because he refused to engage in what he viewed as illegal actions by Rosales and her top assistants and advisors.

The wrongful termination lawsuit was filed against the county government because Rosales served as the county’s final policy maker on hiring and firing decisions in the District Attorney’s Office. Briggs said Rosales wasn’t included as a defendant in the lawsuit because she had strong government immunity protections.

The lawsuit filed in El Paso federal court outlined illegal activity around the prosecution of the 2019 Walmart mass shooting, and the eventual collapse of Rosales’ two-year tenure in office, which Briggs called a “colossal disaster” in the lawsuit. Briggs had been the lead prosecutor on the mass shooting case before he was fired.

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The lawsuit cited actions by Rosales, First Assistant District Attorney George Al-Hanna, assistant district attorneys Curtis Cox and Scott Ferguson, and Roger Rodriguez, a municipal judge in the village of Vinton, Texas, who had no official role in the District Attorney’s Office but was a constant presence there. They were not named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit includes many of the allegations Briggs made under oath during hearings around the Walmart case in late 2022, after he was fired. 

The lawsuit and Rosales’ eventual resignation in late 2022 were tied to a series of actions in the summer of that year that threatened to derail the prosecution of the gunman in the Aug. 3, 2019, mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart that killed 23 people and wounded 22 others.

On July 1, 2022, District Judge Sam Medrano harshly criticized Rosales for making public statements saying she would be ready to bring the case to trial the following summer. In Texas, judges set trial dates, usually in consultation with defense and prosecution attorneys.

Medrano criticized Rosales for doing little to move the case forward. He issued a gag order prohibiting parties to the case, including potential witnesses like relatives of those killed, from making public comments from the case.

After the hearing, Briggs told the family members of the Walmart victims who were at the hearing that the gag order prevented them from communicating with the media. Rodriguez then told the families that prosecutors would get Medrano removed from the case and file grievances against him, Briggs said in the lawsuit and in his previous testimony. 

On Aug. 5, 2022, members of the news media received an email purporting to be from the son of Alexander Gerhard Hoffmann, a Juárez man who was among those killed in the Walmart shooting. The email criticized Medrano and Amanda Enriquez, a former prosecutor who was a possible candidate against Rosales in the 2024 election.

Medrano ordered an investigation into whether his gag order was violated. Hoffmann’s widow, Rosa Maria Valdez Garcia, and their son, Thomas Hoffmann, were at the July 1 hearing when the gag order was issued. 

The judge appointed El Paso attorney Justin Underwood to represent Hoffmann’s family in that investigation.

Briggs said he was fired because he refused to cooperate with an effort to get Medrano to end his investigation. He said Cox came to him on Aug. 18, 2022, and asked him to sign an affidavit that said he hadn’t told the Hoffmann family they were subject to the gag order, which could have meant they didn’t violate it by sending the email.

“That’s false, because I clearly told them,” Brigg told El Paso Matters. Signing the affidavit would have amounted to aggravated perjury, and he refused, he said. 

“When I read those emails, I was like, ‘This sounds like they were written by Roger (Rodriguez).’ And I think when I voiced that, and it turns out I was right, and he knew that, I think he left my office, and he was probably thinking to himself, ‘This is going to be a problem because not only is he not going to help us out of this jam unwittingly by committing perjury, he knows (who wrote the email). He figured it out,’” Briggs told El Paso Matters.

An investigation by El Paso Matters later revealed that the recipient list on the email matched the media email distribution list maintained by the District Attorney’s Office. 

Underwood discovered that the email was typed by Rodriguez’s wife, Anne, using an email list provided by Rodriguez.

Hoffmann’s family said they had been approached by Rodriguez after the July 1 hearing, where Medrano criticized Rosales. They said they grew to distrust him and began recording their conversations, which included threats against Medrano and others, and false claims that multiple gunmen were involved in the Walmart shooting.

Underwood’s investigation also found that recordings made by the family showed that Rodriguez and members of the district attorney’s staff tried to keep the Hoffmann family from coming to El Paso for a hearing on whether the gag order had been violated.

“Thankfully, the Hoffmans have the sense to record the conversations. Thank God, because you wouldn’t have believed it. No one would have believed their story were it not on tape,” Briggs told El Paso Matters. 

Rosales faced a legal petition seeking to remove her from office on the grounds of incompetence, with the efforts to use the Hoffmann family to target Medrano and people viewed as critics of Rosales. She resigned in November 2022.

After being fired, Briggs took a job in September 2022 as a prosecutor in Odessa at about half the salary he had been making in El Paso, according to the lawsuit.

Hicks, who was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to replace Rosales, rehired Briggs in February 2023. James Montoya, who defeated Hicks in the November 2024 election, retained Briggs as chief of a trial division.

The Walmart gunman, Patrick Crusius, pleaded guilty to a variety of federal and state charges after prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty, and is serving multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. His defense lawyers had argued that the actions by Rosales and her aides amounted to prosecutorial misconduct that should lead to dismissal of charges or a prohibition against seeking the death penalty.

Briggs said he believes that Rosales and her key aides and advisors – Al-Hanna, Cox and Rodriguez – had a sense of impunity.

“It was, ‘We can do what we want because we’re the authority. We’re the chief prosecuting authority in this jurisdiction. Who’s going to stop us? Who’s going to find out?’”

Disclosure: El Paso Matters CEO Robert Moore was among those threatened by Roger Rodriguez in recorded conversations with the Hoffmann family.