The New Orleans Police Department had many problems, including a starting salary (if memory serves) of 13, 500 a year. With you paying for all your equipment. That insured you will get the worse possible candidates and here she is, Antoinette Frank.
20 years ago: Restaurant killings rocked city, NOPD
It was a crime that shook New Orleans to its core - 20 years ago Wednesday. A female New Orleans police officer – Antoinette Frank – was arrested for shooting and killing a fellow officer and the two children of a family whose New Orleans East restaurant she helped protect.
About 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, March 4, 1995, police said Frank, then 23, and an accomplice, Rogers Lacaze, 18, entered the Kim Anh restaurant on Bullard Avenue to rob the place. Frank had worked paid details while off-duty at the Vietnamese family-run restaurant.
"The motive of the murder was robbery. An undetermined amount of cash was taken," then-New Orleans Police Supt. Richard Pennington said the morning after.
But a far worse crime was committed: three people were shot and killed, including the children of the restaurant's owners - 17-year-old Cuong Vu and his sister, 24-year-old Ha Vu, along with 25-year-old New Orleans Police officer Ronald Williams II. He was off duty and working a police detail at the business, as Frank had done at the restaurant many times herself.
"I was left somewhat speechless by the events which were reported to me," former Mayor Marc Morial said at the time.
Frank initially had told police she was on the scene that night but not involved in the killings and went for help when she found out what had happened. She then was back on the scene when the officers arrived. Police became suspicious while questioning her and determined she was involved.
The two young people died on the scene. Williams died later at Charity Hospital, Pennington said in a morning news conference the next day.
The fact that the victims were people Frank knew well, made the crime all the more cold-blooded. It came on the heels of one of the most violent years in the city's history and as the mayor and police chief launched efforts to reform the NOPD.
"We're going to continue to clean the department up of corrupt police officers, officers that are involved in criminal activity," Pennington said.
But that was little comfort to the families of the victims, including the Williams family and Officer Williams' wife and two young sons – one of whom was born just a week before his father died.
At separate trials later that year, Frank and Lacaze were both convicted for their roles in the murders and sentenced to death. It took the jury just 22 minutes to reach a guilty verdict in Frank's case.
The pair remains on death row 20 years later, though they continue to appeal. In 2007, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Frank had been properly sentenced to die. Lacaze is awaiting a judge's ruling on his most recent request for a new trial.
Almost twenty years since the pair was sentenced to death, there is not even an execution date set or looks like it will be set. The Vu and Williams family have waited far too long for justice. It has been proven, and proven, and proven, and proven again they did it and they have had full access to the judicial process. This is justice denied.
I've attended the election of two executions in the past year, in January 2014 and February 2015. The execution chamber of Louisiana is not as active as the one in Huntsville, but this is too much. Time for both of those two waste of human sperm be put down like the rabid animals they are.
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