Antoinette Frank

Antoinette Frank
Mugshot of Antoinette Frank.
Born	(1971-04-30) April 30, 1971 Opelousas, Louisiana
Occupation	Police officer
Criminal status	Incarcerated at Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, St. Gabriel
Criminal charge	Triple murder
Penalty	Death

Antoinette Frank (born April 30, 1971) is a former New Orleans police officer who was convicted of the robbery of a restaurant where a fellow officer (who was her police partner) worked as a security guard was murdered by her and two young children who were shot execution style, while they were on their knees praying to God that their lives be spared. Frank is one of two females on Louisiana's death row at the Louisiana Correctional Institute in St. Gabriel, Louisiana.

Early life

Frank had wanted to become a police officer since she was a small girl. According to author Chuck Hustmyre, a former federal agent and author of a book about Frank, Killer with a Badge, when Frank applied to become a police officer in Louisiana, she lied.

Police career

Antoinette Frank
Police career
Land	Vereinigte Staaten
Department	New Orleans Police Department
Service years	1993–1995
Rank	Sworn in as an officer (1993)
Other work	Convicted of 3 counts of first-degree murder

Frank applied with the (NOPD) in 1993. Several red flags turned up during the hiring process. She'd been caught lying on several sections of her application and had flunked two standard psychiatric evaluations. Psychiatrist Philip Scurria examined her and advised in no uncertain terms that she not be hired, saying she was "shallow and superficial".

Despite this, the NOPD was chronically short-handed and desperate to get more people on the force. There were also affirmative action laws - quotas - that if the force didn't abide by they, would find themselves facing lawsuits. Even with this shortage the department did not hire anyone who doesn't live in New Orleans (still does not to this day). Accordingly, she was hired on February 7, 1993. She graduated from the Police Academy on February 28, 1993.

On November 25, 1994 Frank handled a shooting incident in which Rogers Lacaze, a known drug dealer, was one of the suspects. The DOC Department of Public Safety and Corrections investigator believes this was the first contact between the two, although in her statement, she claims that they met some eight months before the murder. The association between them became close and constant. Other police officers witnessed Lacaze driving her car and even observed him moving her police unit at the scene of an accident she was investigating. Victims would later testify that the both of them would pull cars over while in a police car, then rob them among other crimes. On one occasion, Lacaze accompanied her on a complaint call and she introduced him as a “trainee.” There were other times when Lacaze was introduced as her nephew. Frank refused to discuss her relationship with Lacaze during the DOC investigation, except to say that she was trying to help him. It was later revealed that the two had a sexual relationship. When asked why she would continue the relationship knowing that Lacaze had been involved in dealing drugs and in a shooting, she claimed that she would not disassociate herself from him just because of his past. The investigator also questioned Frank about trying to buy 9mm ammunition for Lacaze at Wal-Mart on the day before the Kim Anh murders. She stated that she was a police officer and that there was nothing wrong with her buying ammunition. According to her statement, she claimed that she and Lacaze were not dating and had never been intimate. Frank refused to discuss anything regarding Officer Williams, the Vus or the murders. Every time the investigator asked her a question, she told him to “look it up in the record,” or asserted her innocence. However, during her interview with the DOC investigator, Frank did claim to have had a man suitor, but refused to go into specifics because he works for the police department.

John Stevens and Anthony Wallace testified in court that they met Rogers Lacaze at a party on February 4, 1995. As the two were leaving the party, a verbal altercation between Stevens and Lacaze ensued. Wallace suggested that they leave and the two men got in a car and drove several blocks. At that time, a police vehicle pulled the car over. Frank, in police uniform, exited the squad car and told both Wallace and Stevens to get out and go to the back of the car. At that point Wallace saw Lacaze and noticed that he was holding a weapon. According to Stevens, Wallace then rushed Lacaze and the two men began fighting. At that point, both Stevens and Frank also jumped in the fray and the gun went off. Stevens began running and then another man appeared and grabbed both Lacaze and Wallace. Frank then told the bystander that, “Lacaze was the good guy,” that Wallace was the one causing the problems. Wallace was restrained until a back-up unit arrived on the scene. He was subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder and armed robbery.

Irvin Bryant, a civil sheriff in 1995, testified that on the evening of February 4, he observed a stopped police vehicle with the lights flashing. He thought that the officer was making a traffic stop, but as he got closer he saw the officer and two black maen fighting on the side of the road. At that time Wallace broke away, ran and picked up a Tech 9 semi-automatic weapon out of the grass. Bryant ordered Wallace to drop the gun, which he did immediately. He then restrained Wallace and Lacaze lunged towards him. He immediately grabbed Lacaze, but Frank informed him that Lacaze was with her and ordered him released. Furthermore, Mr. Bryant was never questioned by police and he never gave a formal statement.

The murders

Kim Anh Restaurant in September 2005, damaged after floods resulting from levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina.

On March 4, 1995, Frank and Lacaze visited Kim Anh, a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans East. After midnight, as the employees cleaned the closed restaurant, Chau Vu, sister of two of the victims, went into the kitchen to count money. She entered the dining room of the restaurant to pay officer Ronald A. Williams II for the night, when she noticed Frank approaching the restaurant.

Frank and Lacaze had been at the restaurant twice earlier in the night to get leftover food to eat. When Chau had let her out on the last visit, she could not find the front door key. With Frank returning again for a third time, Chau sensed something was very wrong, so she ran to the kitchen to hide the money in the microwave.

Frank entered the front door using the key that she had taken from the restaurant earlier, and walked quickly past Officer Williams, pushing Chau, another of Chau's brothers, Quoc, and a restaurant employee into the doorway of the restaurant's kitchen. Williams started to follow asking them what was the problem when shots rang out.

As Frank turned back to the dining room of the restaurant, Chau grabbed Quoc to hide somewhere. Lacaze had been behind Officer Williams and shot him in the back of the neck, severing his spinal cord, instantly paralyzing him. The officer was shot again in the head and in the middle of his back, as he lay on the floor.

Chau, Quoc, and the employee hid in the rear of a large walk-in cooler in the kitchen, turning out its light as they entered. They did not know the whereabouts of Chau's and Quoc's other sister and brother, Ha and Cuong, who had been sweeping the dining room floors when Frank entered the restaurant. From inside the cooler, Chau and Quoc could partially see the kitchen and the front of the restaurant. Chau initially could see Frank looking for something in the kitchen. As Frank moved out of Chau's line of vision, additional gunshots were fired. Quoc next observed Frank searching where the Vus usually kept their money. Quoc saw Frank walk to the part of the kitchen where the bodies of his brother and sister were later found.

Frank and Lacaze were shouting and demanding the money. Ha and Cuong did not know where Chau had hidden the money. Twenty-one-year-old Ha was shot three times as she knelt pleading for her life and seventeen-year-old Cuong was shot six times and pistol whipped. After Frank and Lacaze left the premises, Quoc emerged from the cooler and ran out the back door of the restaurant to a nearby friend's home to call 911 to report the murders. Chau tried frantically to call 911 on her cell phone, but, being inside the cooler, she could not receive a signal.

Frank dropped off Lacaze at a nearby apartment complex, both knowing that there were witnesses left behind. Frank heard the 911 call on her portable police radio saying that an officer was down at the Kim Anh restaurant. She returned to the scene, parked in the rear, and entered through the back door of the restaurant. She made her way through the kitchen to the dining room where Chau waited for help at the front door. As Chau bolted through the restaurant's front door to the safety of arriving officers, Frank immediately identified herself as a police officer. Chau told Frank that she knew what she had done and cried to the officers that Frank had committed the crimes.

Chau and Frank were questioned in detail while seated at different tables in the restaurant. Frank was taken to police headquarters for additional questioning, where she later confessed to the crimes along with LaCaze. Frank and Lacaze were arrested and charged with first degree murder.

Trial and conviction

Frank and Lacaze were indicted by an Orleans Parish Grand Jury on April 28, 1995. Their trials were severed, and Lacaze was tried first on July 17–21, 1995, found guilty as charged, and sentenced to death. Frank's trial began on September 5, 1995. The evidence against her was so overwhelming that Frank's attorneys did not mount a defense (despite subpoenaing 40 witnesses). On September 12, 1995, the jury returned a guilty verdict on all counts and recommended the death penalty. She was formally sentenced to death on October 20, 1995 and sent to Death Row at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, very near Baton Rouge.

Aftermath and current developments

In 1993, a year and a half before the murders at the Kim Anh, Frank's father had stayed at her home for a time and then she reported him missing. In November 1995, a month after she received her first death sentence, a dog led police to find a human skull with a bullet hole buried under Frank's house. In a 2005 retrospective, Chuck Hustmyre, who wrote a true crime book about the case, said, "As for those human bones unearthed beneath Frank’s house, so far, authorities have made no serious effort to identify them. The 10-year-old case, they say, remains under investigation." According to Hustmyre, shortly before 2005 and several years after her conviction, Frank began to make statements blaming her father for "years of emotional, physical and sexual abuse at his hands," which accounted for her murder of the police officer and the restaurant workers.

On October 18, 2006 Frank's attorneys argued before the Louisiana Supreme Court that her death sentence should be overturned because she was denied state-funded experts to help prepare for the sentencing phase of the trial. On May 22, 2007 the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5–2 that the death penalty should be upheld.

On April 22, 2008 State Judge Frank Marullo signed the death warrant for Antoinette Frank. According to the warrant, Frank was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on July 15, 2008. In May, however, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a 90-day stay of execution effective June 10 pending ongoing appeals.

On September 11, 2008 the day that the state supreme court stay was to end, a new death warrant was signed by the same judge. According to this second warrant, Frank was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on December 8, 2008. In a new round of appeals, defense attorneys argued they had had too little time to review the voluminous record before the deadline for filing appeals. The Louisiana State Supreme Court ruled on the case again. Their decision, made public November 25, 2008 effectively canceled the death warrant signed by Judge Marullo in September.

In September 2009, Frank moved to have Judge Marullo removed from her ongoing post-conviction appeals on grounds of blaming him for bias, given that he had already signed two death warrants for her. Louisiana state Judge Laurie White heard the motion in September 2009 and on January 3, 2010 ruled that Marullo should not be taken off the case. Her attorney stated she would appeal the ruling to the state supreme court (effectively blaming Judge Marullo as well as her father for her murders - because they were men), which had already overruled both of Marullo's death warrants. However, yet another lower court state judge, ruled in October 2010 that Marullo had to be recused from the Frank and Lacaze cases because it was unclear if he had been open with the defense teams about his own surprising connection to the gun used in the restaurant murders. If Frank were to be executed, she would be the first female to be put to death in the state since 1942.

Initially, the Vu family's restaurant in New Orleans East remained open at the site of the tragedy. Hurricane Katrina damaged the restaurant in 2005 and post-storm looters stole jewelry which Ha and Cuong had been wearing when they were killed. After that, Cuoc Vu and his mother Nguyet sold the old location and re-opened in Harahan, Louisiana, moving their residence to Metairie, where they said they felt more safe.

Sources

General sources

• Filosa, Gwen (October 19, 2006). "Kim Anh killer appeals death sentence". New Orleans Times-Picayune. Retrieved October 19, 2006.
• Filosa, Gwen (May 23, 2007). "Death penalty upheld for N.O. ex-cop". New Orleans Times-Picayune. Retrieved May 23, 2007.

External links

• Dittrich, Stacy, (2009), Murder Behind the Badge: True Stories of Cops Who Kill, Prometheus Books).
• Hustmyre, Chuck, Killer with a Badge: The Story of Antoinette Frank, The Copkilling Cop.