In a lawsuit loaded with political intrigue, former DA investigator Joshua Keheley is suing Mariposa County, claiming the county’s top officials retaliated against him because he was a whistle blower and friends with the former district attorney, Mike McAfee.
Sheriff Jeremy Briese, Supervisor Jennifer Kiser and former DA Walter Wall are specifically named as defendants in the lawsuit.
The 44-page complaint, filed in Mariposa County Superior Court on Aug. 13, attempts to reframe the resignation a year ago of McAfee as district attorney amid drug allegations as something more like an opportunistic palace coup, with Keheley’s career becoming collateral damage.
Keheley resigned as an investigator in the DA’s office on Jan. 5, saying he needed to “protect his career.”
McAfee is Keheley’s lead attorney in the lawsuit and Keheley works as an investigator in McAfee’s private legal practice in Merced.
In March, Mariposa County rejected similar legal claims made by Keheley and a request for $4 million in damages.
The follow-up lawsuit is packed with family connections, bold faced names and tangled relationships in Mariposa County that go back decades. Even the Mariposa Gazette gets name checked.
As he sues the county, Keheley’s wife, Kristina, as director of Mariposa County Health & Human Services Administration (HHSA), remains one of its top officials.
Her father, and his father-in-law, is Jim Allen, who over a 36 year career in Mariposa County served as sheriff, county administrator and county supervisor.
The lawsuit is so juicy with local drama, Mariposa County’s two sitting judges recused themselves from the case the day it was filed.
Those named in the lawsuit — Wall, Briese and Kiser — declined to comment for this story or about the pending litigation. They will likely have very different stories to tell if and when this lawsuit gets to trial, which could take years.
In the meantime, pull up a chair, because as the kids would say, this lawsuit is serving tea.
‘Fiscal Irregularities’
Keheley served as a deputy in the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office for four years, from May 2014 until May 2019, when he became an investigator with the Mariposa County District Attorney’s Office.
In the lawsuit, Keheley says he was under a microscope for suggesting there were “fiscal irregularities” and “conflict-of-interest violations” within the Victim-Witness Unit. He says in the summer of 2025, then-DA McAfee ordered an outside investigation.
Keheley says he suspected a supervisor was giving contract work to her domestic partner and that gift cards purchased for crime victims from federal and state grants were being misused.
When Wall returned as DA in August 2025, Keheley says Wall made statements to him that were “intended to chill his further cooperation” with the investigation.
Wall relayed to Keheley that a sheriff’s captain had warned him against “airing out the laundry” of the investigation, because Keheley had purchased a mobile radio and Wall had received office furniture through the funds and “that would all come out.”
Keheley says he “reasonably understood this as a threat,” an “implicit warning” that he “would be targeted if the investigation continued.” Keheley said the radio purchase and his use of an office vehicle were approved.
In August 2025, the Mariposa Gazette requested information about any investigation of the DA’s Victim-Witness Unit from the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) under the California Public Records Act (CPRA).
For the last year, CalOES has told the Gazette it continues to review documents for material that is confidential or exempt from disclosure.
The agency has not provided a single document.
A 700-page investigation by the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office was submitted to the Tuolumne County District Attorney’s Office. A source tells the Mariposa Gazette two attorney’s reviewed the case and declined to submit charges.
‘The band is back together’
Keheley claims former DA McAfee was “effectively forced from office,” when McAfee resigned on Aug. 11, 2025.
The chain of events began four days earlier, Aug. 7, when Mariposa Gazette editor Greg Little provided Sheriff Briese with text messages the newspaper received from a Merced man, Gary Schisnewsky.
Schisnewsky claimed over a two year period he sold the drug methamphetamine to McAfee. The text messages purportedly referenced those transactions.
That weekend, Aug. 9-10, there were discussions between and among Briese, County Administrative Officer Joe Lynch and then County Counsel Walter Wall.
Briese also contacted the California Attorney General to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, he has said.
By Monday, Aug. 11, McAfee, who had been appointed DA eight months earlier, got a visit from CAO Lynch, and his former boss, Walter Wall, who had resigned as DA in December 2024 to become county counsel.
The lawsuit claims Wall handed McAfee an already drafted resignation letter but also presented the alternative of a threeday administrative leave.
It is not clear from the lawsuit why McAfee chose to resign.
Keheley claims within two hours, Wall phoned him in an “excited and chipper tone” to discuss Wall’s anticipated return to the DA’s office.
Wall had a plan to hold both the DA and the county counsel positions at the same time, the lawsuit claims, with an “intent to secure a salary increase.”
“Wall stated, among other things, that ‘the band is back together,’ and that he wanted to be seen ‘as the hero’ for ‘saving the day’ because ‘the old DA went down on corruption,’” the lawsuit says.
Wall, Keheley says, made “lurid allegations of drug use that Wall claimed had been ‘corroborated.’”
In fact, McAfee has never been charged with a crime. An investigation initiated last year by the California Attorney General with the assistance of Merced County Sheriff’s Office drug unit, MAGNET, appears to have been closed without any charges.
The lawsuit describes a scene shortly after McAfee resigned, with Wall placing phone calls to both Supervisor Kiser and Sheriff Briese.
Wall, the lawsuit says, placed both calls on speakerphone and failed to tell Kiser or Briese that Keheley was listening to the conversations in the background.
“Wall relayed to the sheriff a rumor that plaintiff (Keheley) was planning to run against him,” the lawsuit says.
When Kiser was on the phone call with Wall she allegedly “expressed her dislike of CAO Joe Lynch.”
In Keheley’s telling, Wall repeatedly told him Supervisor Kiser was “after” him, “out for him,” or “hates” him and his wife.
A few days later, on Aug. 18, Wall allegedly called Keheley into his office, “visibly furious,” and accused him of disclosing the speakerphone conversation to CAO Lynch, which Keheley does not dispute in the lawsuit.
Wall told him that it was “a fireable offense for breach of confidentiality,” and also threatened to fire him for leaking information to McAfee.
Facebook ‘likes’
Keheley says the retaliation escalated after social media posts from McAfee a month after he resigned as DA that would appear to disparage Wall and Briese.
On Saturday, Sept. 6, McAfee made a cryptic post on Facebook about accountability and “the scales of justice.” He didn’t identify anyone by name, but it seemed to refer obliquely to the circumstances of his resignation as DA.
“I assure you all that I will correct the imbalance the injustice has momentarily created,” the post said. “Those who have used false weights will have to own that action and pay for the damage it has caused.”
Keheley liked the post, as did his wife Kristina, and her father, former Mariposa County Sheriff Jim Allen.
McAfee also posted a cartoon image on Instagram of Sheriff Briese and DA Wall in jail stripes. Keheley did not comment on the image.
The fallout, Keheley says, was quick.
The lawsuit claims, without evidence, that Briese telephoned DA Wall that evening, and told Wall to “get his people under control” and to terminate Keheley and another DA investigator, Chris Boehm.
On Monday, Sept. 8, Wall allegedly told the head of county human resources, “I have to fire Josh,” because of his Facebook activity.
That evening, Wall called Keheley and Boehm into a conference room and allegedly told them “the sheriff called me on a Saturday” and had “taken me to task.” He then repeatedly stated “I can fire you for this,” and that Keheley was “lucky” he wasn’t taking action.
Keheley says he pointed out that there was no social-media policy, Wall said he didn’t need one, that what was important was his “perception” that it negatively affected the office.
From ‘Chief’ to ‘Lead’
The next day, Sept. 9, Keheley says Wall changed his title on the office letterhead from “Chief Investigator” to “Lead Investigator.”
That morning, Wall attended a board of supervisors meeting and handed out a new mission statement for the DA’s office on the new letterhead.
The lawsuit says, “This act was intended to publicly signal to Kiser and the board that Wall had taken formal action against plaintiff (Keheley) in response to the expressed hostility of Kiser and the sheriff.”
But by the lawsuit’s own admission, the county never classified Keheley as “chief investigator,” or compensated him accordingly.
Kehely was hired in May 2019 under the job classification of “District Attorney Investigator II.”
Keheley says Wall repeatedly told him, “You’re our chief. You’re the head. You’re the supervisor of this unit. That’s your role.”
And yet Keheley was paid substantially less than the $97,000 to $118,000 recommended by county human resources for the chief investigator classification.
Interim Directive 25-01
On Sept. 10, four days after McAfee’s Facebook post and Kehely’s ‘like,’ Sheriff Briese issued Interim Directive 25-01, which is included in the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office policy manual.
That directive banned investigators from the Mariposa County DA’s office from accessing “employee-only areas” at the county sheriff’s offices, including the detective’s unit. Exceptions were to be made for scheduled business meetings.
The directive said any request for sheriff’s dispatch assistance should be directed back to Keheley and the DA’s office. All requests for information from the DA’s office needed to be submitted via email, the directive said.
The directive did not apply to any other county employees.
While the directive explicitly says it is not intended to hinder the sheriff’s office from “working collaboratively” with the DA’s office, it is also clear that, whatever the reasons, there was a chill in the air.
Keheley claims the effective ban from the sheriff’s offices “materially impaired” him from doing his job and “was issued by an elected sheriff in direct retaliation for plaintiff’s (Keheley) constitutionally protected social-media activity.”
Directive 25-01 is still listed in the sheriff’s 700-page policy manual. It is the very last page.
Scales, again
The first court hearing in the lawsuit is scheduled for Feb. 9, 2027.
In a text message Sunday night, McAfee told the Mariposa Gazette he anticipates adding defendants to the lawsuit and hinted there may be other litigation to come.
He echoed his old Facebook post nearly a year ago about the scales of justice.
“The wheels of justice may move slow, but we anticipate they will be moving in the right direction and bring some light to what is happening in local government. It should not be a surprise how self serving and reckless those individuals are.”
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