A police officer who, according to a judge, lied in a search warrant affidavit 3 years ago is still with the Durham Police Department, which says its internal investigation "remains pending."

He's gotten $10,000 in raises in the interim and has been moved to administrative duty in the department's recruiting division.

The affidavit, which a state judge described as "simply not true" based on video evidence the officer had in hand, has sparked multiple lawsuits and raised questions about leadership at the State Bureau of Investigation.

It also derailed a state Alcohol Law Enforcement officer's career, since investigators found a bag of counterfeit Viagra in his official vehicle when they served it.

The story is a convoluted one, and it begins in a Durham parking lot.

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In January 2017, a woman told the Durham Police Department a horrific story: That she'd been raped on the hood of her car by an Alcohol Law Enforcement agent while his colleagues watched in gas station parking lot.

DPD Detective Jesus Sandoval was assigned the case, and because Alcohol Law Enforcement was under the State Bureau of Investigation, he met with SBI Director Robert Schurmeier to review gas station security footage and identify the agents.

"There is no evidence from anyone, not even hearsay, that the video in any manner confirms the story told by the complainant," Administrative Law Judge Donald Overby wrote in March 2018, as one of several legal fights played out in the aftermath. "If anything, the video completely discounts the victim's story."

Nevertheless, Sandoval had sworn out a search warrant against ALE Agent Donald Ray Richardson, telling the judge who signed it that the rape was "seen in the surveillance cameras" at the Kangaroo.

More than a year later, as Richardson fought the suspension that came from all this, Overby wrote that this was "simply not true, and Sandoval would have known it was not truthful."

What did happen that night was eventually pieced together from sometimes conflicting statements and laid out in Overby's order, as well as other court documents.

Richardson and three other ALE agents said they parked at the Kangaroo that night and saw a woman asleep in her vehicle. ALE enforces North Carolina's alcoholic beverage regulations, and agents some times stake out licensed stores. They have full arrest powers.

Richardson approached the woman's vehicle and later said she told him she'd been snorting pills. When she got out of her vehicle, ALE Agent Jack Cates saw a plastic straw and digital scales inside, according to court files.

Those were taken, but the agents filed no charges. They left the woman in the parking lot, told her not to drive, pointed to a parked Durham police car across the street and, crucially, didn't do any paperwork on the seized straw and scales.

It's not clear whose responsibility that paperwork was, but in the ensuing inquiry other agents pointed to Richardson because he approached the woman first, making him the lead agent in their eyes.

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A week later Richardson, Cates and the other two ALE agents were called to SBI headquarters and told they were under investigation.

SBI investigators served Sandoval's search warrant on Richardson, and Richardson complied with it until officers asked for his personal cell phone. He called his attorney and eventually allowed investigators to copy data from it.

SBI Assistant Director Kanawha Perry was there for these proceedings, as was ALE Assistant Director Rodney Beckom.

Beckom would complain about the investigation and the way his agents were paraded, fingerprint ink on their hands, through SBI headquarters. Perry would later acknowledged that he'd never seen an agent brought to headquarters like that to be fingerprinted and photographed.

Beckom was eventually demoted, and his pay cut by $15,000. He fought that demotion and pay cut through the same administrative procedures Richardson used to fight his own suspension, but eventually Beckom dropped the case and said in a legal filing that he settled with the bureau.

Perry had already seen the security video, and he testified in one of Richardson's suspension hearings that he didn't see any sexual assault in it. He's since been named head of the state's Office of Special Investigations, overseeing internal complaints.

"Perry would have known even prior to the search warrant being signed ... that it was based on false information," Overby wrote when he overturned Richardson's suspension. "The problematic search warrant put everyone in a bad spot."

Through a spokeswoman, SBI officials declined interview requests for this story, citing pending litigation. But the SBI has appealed Overby's decision on the suspension, and Schurmeier took issue with it publicly after its release, writing a letter to the editor in 2018 in response to The News & Observer's coverage.

"It has been reported that various SBI personnel were untruthful," Schurmeier wrote in part. "The SBI strongly disagrees with these reports and any such findings made by the administrative law judge."

Schurmeier also seemed less than convinced by what the video showed. Overby paraphrased him in his decision as describing it as dark and from a distance, and saying it didn't clearly support or discount the allegations.

Regardless of the warrant's ultimate validity, SBI brass told Richardson he should have complied with it immediately and given up his phone.

"Your actions have exposed the SBI and yourself to serious repercussions," Schurmeier wrote in a June 2017 discipline letter. "In addition, you have demonstrated behaviors which indicate your willingness to bring discredit to the SBI and ALE."

Richardson was suspended 10 days without pay, and he was banned from working in Durham County until Overby overturned both punishments. The SBI's appeal on those issues has been pending before the N.C. Court of Appeals since April 2018.

During one of his suspension hearings, Richardson acknowledged that he would have arrested a suspect who didn't comply with a warrant.

"It defies logic, therefore, to allow (him) to escape punishment for the very same behavior for which he would have taken someone else’s liberty," the SBI said in its appeal.

Schurmeier and other SBI officials also criticized Richardson for failing to document the drug paraphernalia seizure. And they said none of the agents could give a "valid, legal justification for demanding a citizen get out of a vehicle which was lawfully parked ... and the subsequent warrantless search of that citizen's vehicle."

But that's not what got Richardson fired. What got him fired was the pills.

In October 2016, Richardson helped investigate a counterfeit pill ring through the Secretary of State's Office, which enforces trademarks in North Carolina.

He did at least six undercover buys at two adult stores for counterfeit Viagra pills, according to Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman's office.

When investigators served the rape warrant in January 2017, they found about 135 counterfeit Viagra pills in Richardson's work vehicle. He said they came from a retired highway patrol officer who asked him to hold the pills because his wife had found them and gotten angry.

Freeman was informed and eventually sent the SBI a letter noting "close similarities" between the seized pills and counterfeit pills from the 2016 investigation. She said Richardson insisted they were unrelated, but that stories from him and the retired trooper – who said he purchased the pills and gave them to Richardson – didn't quite line up.

Freeman didn't charge Richardson with anything. But she noted in her letter that, under state law, possession of more than 25 pills creates a presumption of intent to sell. She told the SBI that Richardson had "undermined his credibility as a law enforcement officer" and that she would no longer put him on the stand or prosecute criminal cases he investigated.

Freeman's letter came in May of 2018. Richardson was fired in late October. He's fighting the dismissal much as he fought the suspension, with a case before the Office of Administrative Hearings. In an initial filing, his attorney argued that the SBI "fabricated a complaint" to get Freeman's office involved.

This second case at the OAH is on hold while Richardson's first one works its way through the Court of Appeals.

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In overturning Richardson's suspension, Overby chastised both SBI and the ALE. Among other things, he said the bureau and the agency couldn't agree who should have run the internal investigation that led to that suspension.

"The testimony from the ALE agents and the SBI agents are diametrically opposed, all but calling each other liars," Overby wrote at the time. "There is no middle ground between the two. One side is not telling the truth, and this tribunal cannot discern which side is telling the truth."

Overby called it "incredibly ironic that four ALE agents are being disciplined because they did not make a determination of who the 'lead' was in their investigation, and yet that same leadership of both SBI and ALE who is disciplining them cannot agree which agency is responsible for the investigation."

The N.C. General Assembly voted last year to move the ALE out from under SBI, turning it into its own entity within the Department of Public Safety. Two lawmakers who sponsored the bill said it had nothing to do with this particular fight.

"This case never came up in any conversation I was party to," state Sen. Rich Horner said in an email. "Agencies were a cultural clash."

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Richardson hasn't just pushed these issues through the Office of Administrative Hearings. He filed a lawsuit this month in Durham County Superior Court, seeking damages from the SBI, Schurmeier, Perry and other SBI officials, the Durham Police Department, Officer Jesus Sandoval and the woman who initially accused him of rape.

Cates filed a similar suit this month, but it names only Durham and Sandoval as defendants. Cates is still employed with ALE, according to his attorney, and he recently got a promotion.

Cates used to work at the Durham Police Department, where he was Sandoval's superior and disciplined him, attorney Robert Nauseef said.

"It would make one wonder if there was some sort of lingering bad blood," Nauseef said.

The Durham Police Department wouldn't say much about Sandoval, citing personnel exemptions in the state's open records law. WRAL News attempted to interview Sandoval, and Durham police spokeswoman Melissa Bishop confirmed that she passed along an interview request. She also agreed to pass along a short summary of this story several days before it published.

Sandoval did not respond.

Richardson declined an interview request through his attorney.

When the rape allegation was logged in January of 2017, Sandoval was an investigator making $57,720 a year. He got a $5,465 raise later that month, department salary records show, because the Durham City Council approved across-the-board increases for city police officers.

He got another $10,000 in raises over the next three years thanks to annual 5 percent "pay for performance" increases each October. He makes about $73,000 now, according to the city, which released salary records through the state's Public Records Act.

Bishop said Sandoval is currently assigned to "administrative functions in the recruiting division." She would not say when he was re-assigned from investigative work.

Bishop said "an administrative investigation into the matter remains pending." She said it's not normal for internal investigations to take this long, but the department is waiting on Richardson's first suspension case to work its way through the Court of Appeals.

"The department is waiting for that ruling to determine if it may have any impact on its investigation and conclusions," she said in an email.