Roger Murtaugh

Murtaugh is a veteran Homicide sergeant with a wife and three kids, and he gets a suicidal partner as a gift. He distrusts Riggs until he sees the man is truly suffering. When an old war buddy, Michael Hunsaker, asks for help with his daughter, her death leads the pair to Shadow Company. The villains kidnap Murtaugh's daughter, Rianne, and force him to give himself up. In the end he and Riggs save her and share Christmas dinner.

Two years on, Murtaugh suffers a home invasion and ends up guarding the witness Leo Getz with Riggs. Consul Rudd shields himself with diplomatic immunity. When killers attack the house, Murtaugh takes down both with a nail gun, but Leo is taken. He is willing to drop his badge to back his partner, and goes to the harbor to save Leo. In the final gunfight he aims at Rudd and says his immunity has just been revoked.

A week before retirement, Murtaugh and Riggs fail to defuse a bomb and go back to uniform. In the Jack Travis case, he kills a young man in a shootout and later finds out he was a friend of his son Nick. Grief freezes him until Riggs consoles him on the boat. At the end he tosses the armor-piercing gun to Riggs and watches Travis fall. At his retirement party, Murtaugh announces he won't sell the house and stays on the force beside Riggs.

Rianne is pregnant and won't say who the father is. Murtaugh shelters the Hong family at home, and the triad torches the house, but Ping frees everyone in time. The reveal comes through the dentist's laughing gas: the father is Detective Lee Butters, whom he wouldn't approve of. Murtaugh impales the villain Ku with a rebar, is knocked out, and recovers in time to pull Riggs out from under a chunk of concrete. His granddaughter Victoria is born, and he accepts Butters as a son-in-law.

Murtaugh was written with no set ethnicity in the script, and casting director Marion Dougherty suggested Danny Glover alongside Mel Gibson. In the Fox series, Damon Wayans plays Murtaugh across all three seasons, but announced his exit in October 2018.