Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [124]
Officer Antoinette Frank—the woman who would become the poster child for police misconduct and the living symbol of a department gone bad—had just met Rogers LaCaze. Just past his eighteenth birthday, LaCaze already had a history of violence and drug peddling. His mother, Alice Chaney, kicked him out of her house when he was seventeen. “Rogers had become a dope dealer,” she says.
At the end of 1994, LaCaze managed to get himself shot. He told police that he and a friend named Nemiah Miller were just hanging out when another friend, a nineteen-year-old who went by the name “Freaky D,” whipped out a gun and started blasting at them.
Alice Chaney has her own opinion on the reason for the shooting. “It was behind a dope deal,” Chaney says. “Rogers and Nemiah had just scored.” Miller died. LaCaze went to the hospital. One of the investigating officers was Antoinette Frank.
WARNING SIGNS
Frank said she always wanted to be a police officer. Born in Opelousas, she was a member of the Opelousas Junior Police and the New Orleans Police Explorers. When she turned twenty, Frank applied to the New Orleans Police Department. Almost immediately, Frank’s application ran into problems. The applicant investigation unit discovered Frank had been fired from Wal-Mart and had lied about it on her application. Frank also scored poorly on two standardized psychological evaluations. The psychologist who reviewed Frank’s tests recommended a psychiatric interview.
Dr. Philip Scurria, a board-certified psychiatrist, evaluated Frank on fourteen characteristics relevant to the job of a police officer. He rated Frank as unacceptable or below average in most categories. In his report, Scurria wrote that Frank “seemed shallow and superficial.” He concluded by saying, “I do not feel…that the applicant is suitable for the job of police officer.” Apparently depressed over her faltering job prospects, Frank disappeared. She left a halfhearted suicide note addressed to her father. Her father filed a missing-person report with the police department, but Frank turned up the next day. Less than three weeks later, the police department hired her anyway.
A TWISTED DUO
After Rogers LaCaze got out of the hospital he started getting regular visits from Antoinette Frank. She eventually took him shopping for new clothes. She bought him a pager and a cell phone. She rented him a Cadillac. Frank became obsessed with him, LaCaze says. She started driving him around in her police car. She even answered calls with LaCaze and introduced him as her trainee. Two officers from the Seventh District once saw LaCaze driving Frank’s patrol car. Then Frank and LaCaze started hatching a plan to rob the Kim Anh restaurant.
Frank had been splitting the security detail at the family-owned Vietnamese restaurant with Ronnie Williams for months. During that time, the Vu family, who owned the restaurant, grew close to Frank and Williams. They treated Frank almost like a member of the family. “The Vus took a real liking to her,” Frank’s former Seventh District partner says. “I mean, they were in love with this girl. They bought her presents for this, presents for that. Anything she wanted, anything she needed, they gave her.” Frank knew the Vus distrusted banks. She also knew they kept all their money in cash.
During the weeks leading up to the robbery, Frank acquired a 9mm pistol from the NOPD evidence room. Two weeks before the murders, she reported the gun stolen. LaCaze was with Frank when a police officer arrived at her house to take the report about the stolen gun. LaCaze later told detectives that the report was bogus. The pistol hadn’t been stolen. Just hours before they robbed the Kim Anh and murdered three people, Frank and LaCaze stopped at a Wal-Mart to buy a box of 9mm bullets. Frank was on the clock, wearing her police uniform and driving a patrol car.
CRIME SCENE CHAOS
As soon as they heard the explosion of gunshots from the dining room, twenty-three-year-old Chau Vu and her eighteen-year-old brother, Quoc, ran into the restaurant’s walk-in cooler.