In April 2023, Alameda County prosecutors made headlines when they charged Oakland homicide detective Phong Tran with bribing a witness and committing perjury.

But OPD’s internal affairs investigation of Tran, completed the previous year, had found no wrongdoing. Five months earlier, OPD had cleared him to go back to work.

That decision was controversial, as it came in the wake of a state judge’s decision to overturn two murder convictions that had depended on Tran’s detective work, and it sparked a major internal review by Oakland and its police watchdog agency to determine whether internal affairs had properly investigated Tran. The review ultimately implicated eight officers, including high-ranking staff, for violating multiple department policies while conducting and overseeing the Tran investigation. The eight officers faced serious discipline. One was terminated.

Now, two of the officers who were found to have mishandled the internal investigation claim that the department has to revoke their discipline after missing a state-mandated deadline. 

One, the officer who was fired, has demanded she get her job back.

If the officers prevail, it could be a blow to OPD’s internal affairs unit, which has struggled in the past to meet important investigative deadlines and ensure the integrity of its work. The suit arrives at a critical moment for OPD, which is on track to end two decades of federal oversight next month — but only if it can sustain reforms, including showing that it can police itself.  

According to the officers’ lawsuit, Oakland decided to suspend one of them, a lieutenant, and fire the other, a sergeant, in February of this year, but OPD failed to serve them with the proper paperwork within 30 days, as required by a state law. Both claimed that when they were first served, the papers had “clerical errors” and that the corrected paperwork was filed too late.

The lieutenant is demanding that OPD rescind a two-day suspension he received, while the sergeant who was fired is demanding that the department reinstate her.

The lawsuit against the city doesn’t name the plaintiffs, but the officers’ attorneys did cite a specific internal affairs case number allowing The Oaklandside to identify them as Sgt. Mega Lee and Lt. Jason Skrdlant. 

Attorneys for the lieutenant and former sergeant filed suit on August 14 in state court. The city has yet to file a formal response. 

The city attorney declined an interview request. Attorneys who represent the officers did not respond to interview requests from The Oaklandside. Lee and Skrdlant did not respond to interview requests by phone and email. All were alerted that we had identified Lee and Skrdlant as the Jane Roe and John Doe who filed suit; none commented.

Allegations of bribery and perjury against homicide detective Phong Tran

Although Lee and Skrdlant’s lawsuit is thin on details, it does identify the internal affairs case the city found they had mishandled by its OPD-assigned case number, 22-1102. 

A copy of this case file, obtained by The Oaklandside, shows Lee as the sole investigator and Skrdlant as her direct supervisor, the person who reviewed and approved her report.

Case 22-1102 had to do with the allegations against Tran, a veteran OPD homicide detective. Tran is the officer the Alameda County district attorney charged in 2023 with bribing a witness and perjuring himself in a murder trial years earlier. Tran has pleaded not guilty on all charges; one of the charges related to the alleged bribery was dropped in late 2023.

The charges against Tran stem back to an incident in 2011 when two men were charged with killing a third, Charles Butler, after he bumped into their car while attempting to park in West Oakland. Tran was assigned the case, and a key breakthrough came in 2013 when he identified a witness who said she could ID the shooter and his accomplice. 

That witness, Aisha Weber, eventually testified that a man named Cartier Hunter was the gunman, and another, Giovonte Douglas, was the getaway driver. Her testimony helped send both men to prison. Their convictions were later overturned on appeal after Weber recanted her testimony, saying she hadn’t in fact witnessed the killing; both men were released in 2022 and have not been retried.

The district attorney’s office contacted OPD to let the department know that a state judge had overturned Hunter and Douglas’s convictions and accused Tran of committing perjury when he testified about his relationship with Weber at the two men’s trial.

As an internal affairs investigator, Lee’s job at the time was to determine if Tran had violated department policies, either by paying Weber or by offering untruthful testimony at trial.

Her investigation, completed in December 2022, found that Tran did pay Weber as much as $2,000. Tran admitted as much to Lee, but he said that since Weber was being threatened by people connected to the defendants, he viewed these payments as an act of welfare rather than a bribe in exchange for her testimony. The DA’s office made even more substantial payments to Weber through the California Witness Relocation and Assistance Program. Lee’s investigation found that it was a practice of other OPD investigators to pay witnesses, sometimes out of their own pockets. 

On the question of whether Tran’s gifts of money to Weber had violated department policy by compromising a criminal case, Lee’s determination was that the allegation was “unfounded.” While Tran had admitted making the payments, Lee concluded that Tran “in no way interrupted or improperly influenced the legal process nor did Tran pay Weber with the intent to interfere with the criminal investigation, charging, or prosecution.”

The question of whether Tran perjured himself during the murder trial hinged on an answer the detective gave to a single question. When he was on the stand being questioned by a defense attorney, Tran was asked if September 2013 was the first time he’d had any contact with Weber. That was when Tran said Weber stepped forward and gave an interview identifying Hunter and Douglas.

Tran answered yes on the stand. But Tran had actually known Weber since 2011, when she was the victim of a shooting he’d investigated, according to court records and Lee’s internal affairs report. He told Lee he’d seen Weber around and considered her a “citizen informant.”

When asked by Lee about the apparent discrepancy, Tran said it boiled down to semantics: he said he thought he was being asked about the first time he’d seen Weber in relation to the Butler homicide case. He didn’t interpret the scope of the question to include any prior contact with her.

Lee found it “reasonable that Tran did not make mention of his prior contact with Weber on the stand based on the semantics of the line of questioning” and concluded that the allegation that Tran lied on the stand was also unfounded.

Skrdlant, then an acting lieutenant, and Captain Kevin Kaney, who oversaw internal affairs, both signed off on Lee’s report in December 2022. 

The findings allowed Tran to return to work. But four months later, in April 2023, he was charged by the Alameda County District Attorney with perjury and bribing a witness in connection with the Hunter and Douglas murder trial. Since then, another murder conviction in which Tran played a central role has fallen apart. In December 2025, the defendant, Steven Buggs, claimed in court that Tran had engaged in misconduct to extract false identifications at the heart of his 2015 murder trial; a state judge found those claims material and credible. Rather than retry the case, the DA’s office dismissed it, and Buggs was freed from prison after serving 10 years of a 75-year sentence.

The criminal charges related to Tran’s payments to Weber and statements during the trial of Douglas and Hunter are still pending. That case may go to trial later this year.

OPD investigated itself over the handling of the Tran case

Around the same time the criminal charges were filed against Tran, OPD opened a new internal affairs case — this one to investigate how Lee and Skrdlant and their supervisors handled the Tran case. Instead of having its own internal affairs investigators review the work of their colleagues, the city hired an outside law firm.

The August 14 lawsuit includes few details about the investigation the plaintiffs were the subjects of, but it does identify the case by its number: 23-0459.

By speaking with several sources familiar with the investigation and reviewing past meetings of the Oakland Police Commission along with other records, The Oaklandside previously confirmed that this 2023 case was an examination of how OPD’s internal affairs division had dealt with the Tran investigation the year before. 

Later, in 2023, the civilian-run Police Commission had ordered its investigative arm, the Community Police Review Agency, to independently investigate how OPD handled the Tran case. A CPRA investigator eventually found that eight officers had engaged in serious violations, including obstructing the internal affairs case. A ninth officer was investigated and exonerated. The CPRA also found that commanding officers and supervisors had failed to properly oversee their subordinates and carry out their duties. One officer was found to have lied. These findings largely overlapped with the review carried out by the law firm.

Based on CPRA documents, court records, and the sources familiar with the investigations, The Oaklandside has determined that the list of those found to have violated department rules included former Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, his successor Interim Police Chief Darren Allison, Deputy Chief Drennon Lindsey, and Lieutenant Hamann Nguyen, as well as Kaney, Lee, and Skrdlant. 

The case was a big enough deal that it temporarily disrupted OPD’s attempts to come into compliance with its federal court reform program. The internal affairs division’s performance in the Tran case led federal Judge William Orrick, who oversees OPD’s reforms, to order a reorganization of OPD in September 2024, making it so that the head of internal affairs reports directly to the chief.

“OPD leadership just wanted to sweep these issues under the rug because they liked the officers involved or wanted to conceal this from the monitor and the court because of how it might affect the NSA,” or negotiated settlement agreement, Orrick said about the Tran case and others during a 2024 court hearing.

OPD allegedly made costly clerical mistakes

Lee and Skrdlant’s lawsuit names Richard Coglio, a lieutenant in internal affairs, saying he contacted Skrdlant in February 2026 to let him know he had paperwork to serve for the internal affairs case. The complaint said the notice of discipline Skrdlant was handed incorrectly identified the reason he was being suspended for two days. The complaint doesn’t specify what that reason was.

Skrdlant pointed this out to Coglio, who, the suit claims, told Skrdlant to raise the error in a future administrative appeal. But after Skrdlant and Coglio saw that OPD’s case tracking system also had the same error in it, the lawsuit claims, Coglio took back the notice of discipline and told the lieutenant words to the effect of “consider yourself unserved.”

Skrdlant alleges that Coglio didn’t serve him with the corrected papers until May 11, 2026, more than two months later, well past the statutory 30-day deadline. According to a copy of the corrected notice, Skrdlant was found to have violated OPD’s rules around “Supervisors-Authority and Responsibilities.” 

A similar mistake undermined OPD’s attempt to fire Lee, according to the lawsuit. 

After she was shown the disciplinary paperwork for her termination, Lee claims she noticed it listed three violations instead of the two that had been found against her. According to Lee’s lawsuit, Coglio acknowledged this error and said she should expect to hear from him in the coming weeks about service. The sergeant was not served with the corrected notice until May 8, the suit claims, again well past the one-month deadline. The complaint doesn’t explain the nature of the violations, but according to the corrected paperwork, Lee was found to have violated OPD’s rules around truthfulness and obstructing the internal affairs process. 

We contacted OPD seeking an interview with Coglio. A department spokesperson told us OPD does not comment on pending litigation and said that “because this is an active Internal Affairs investigation, OPD and our members cannot share additional details at this time.” Coglio did not respond to an email seeking an interview. 

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