Driver Wrongly Charged in Traffic Death of Phoenix Police Officer Will Sue

A woman who was arrested on homicide charges after the death of a traffic cop and subsequently had the charges dropped is now suing the city Phoenix, Arizona’s ABC 15 reports.

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The ordeal started on March 21, 2019. Phoenix police officer Paul Rutherford was out in traffic after responding to an accident. Rutherford then darted into traffic without looking both ways, according to ABC15. That’s when Nubia Rodriguez hit him with her vehicle. Bodycam footage from other officers on the scene show a frantic Rodriguez screaming, “Why did he do that?!”

From that day forward Rodriguez was bothered by what happened. “I mourn and cry for this man that lost his life even though I never met him,” she said. But she never heard anything else about the situation until a year and a half later. She received a letter that she thought was junk mail. Except it wasn’t, it was a letter saying that a jury was indicting her on negligent homicide. From that moment forward her life changed.

She worried who would take care of her daughter if she went to prison, while foster children she cared for were taken from her. But it took a good attorney and two years for the case to come back in her favor.

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Rodriguez’s attorney Larry Wulkan, didn’t like what he was seeing in the case, mainly with the issues and inconsistencies that were given to the grand jury that indicted Rodriguez. There were a number of them, like detectives on the force allegedly withholding evidence. But the main thing that worked in her favor was video surveillance that showed that Officer Rutherford just ran into traffic without looking. This was further backed up by the department’s own traffic reconstruction expert. “It needs to be considered that [Officer] Rutherford could have also avoided the collision if he had stopped and looked west down the two-way left turn lane prior to entering it,” he said.

Then in the summer of 2022, a Maricopa County Superior Court Judge ruled that the department and its prosecutors issued misleading testimony to a grand jury; a subsequent judge tossed the case and charges.

But that wasn’t enough, especially after what Rodriguez went through. Now she’s suing. And it’s about accountability, she says. “I don’t like attention. You can ask anyone who really knows me, I shy away from it. But this conversation needs to happen. Because just how it happened to me, and the freedom they took to paint a picture of something that really wasn’t, is really scary,” she said. If the city doesn’t settle, her and her lawyer said that they’ll file a federal suit. And they have ammo to help their case: in 2020, the Phoenix Police Department essentially did something similar when they tried to charge BLM protestors as gang members.