Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [125]
After she was sure Frank and LaCaze had left, Chau crawled into the dining room. Her cell phone was in her purse on a shelf beneath the bar. She saw Ronnie Williams’s body on the floor.
“I saw Ronnie was lying with all the blood around him. That’s when all my confidence was gone because the person that protects us was lying right there,” Chau later said. Chau grabbed her cell phone and scrambled back into the cooler. She dialed 9-1-1 but couldn’t get through. She called a friend and begged him to call the police for her. The friend asked what had happened, but the battery in Chau’s phone died. Quoc slipped out the back door and ran to a friend’s house to call the police. On the way out, he passed the blood-soaked bodies of his brother and sister. Several blocks away, Antoinette Frank was fuming. “One of the bitches got away,” she told LaCaze. Frank had seen Chau and Quoc inside the restaurant when she and LaCaze went in, but she’d lost sight of them and couldn’t find them again.
After dropping LaCaze off at his apartment on Cindy Place, Frank drove to the Seventh District. There, she hopped into a patrol car and raced back to the restaurant. She had a second gun—a .38-caliber revolver—tucked into her waistband. Sgt. Eddie Rantz, who supervised the homicide investigation, says, “There’s no doubt in my mind; she went back there to kill the rest of them.” Whether that was Frank’s intent or not, she never got the chance.
Chau hid in the cooler until she saw police officers in the parking lot; then she bolted out the front door and dove into the arms of Det. Yvonne Farve. Frank stayed at the restaurant. She caught a break because Chau was so scared she would only speak Vietnamese at first. In the initial confusion at the crime scene, lead investigators Rantz and Det. Marco Demma had no idea that the young Seventh District officer was one of the shooters. They thought they had caught a break because one of their witnesses was a trained police officer.
When the detectives questioned her, Frank told them she had been in the kitchen getting something to drink when she heard gunshots in the dining room. She said she tried to push all the employees out through the back door.
Ha and Cuong wouldn’t leave, Frank said. They stayed in the kitchen. Frank told Rantz she drove to the Seventh District station to report the shooting. But Frank had a cell phone and a police radio with her. Why didn’t she call it in instead of wasting time driving to the station? Rantz asked. Why did she leave everybody, including a wounded police officer, behind?
“That’s when she started talking about Rogers LaCaze,” Rantz says. Frank wasn’t a witness, the veteran detective realized. She was a suspect. “I wanted to vomit,” Rantz recalls. A little while later, Chau calmed down enough to tell her story in English. Quoc returned to the restaurant and also told the detectives what had happened.
Rantz and Demma had heard enough. Rantz approached Supt. Richard Pennington, who had just started, in the parking lot. Pennington, a veteran detective himself, had been on the scene for a while. “I told the chief, ‘We’re about to book this motherfucker with three counts of first-degree murder,’” Rantz says. Later, at police headquarters, with a tape recorder in front of her, Antoinette Frank confessed to shooting Ha and Cuong Vu in the kitchen of Kim Anh Restaurant. Her justification was simple: Rogers LaCaze made her do it.
The robbery, Frank said, was all LaCaze’s idea. He’d been talking about it for a couple of weeks. She just went along with it because she didn’t know what else to do. Although ballistic evidence later proved the same 9mm pistol was used to kill all three victims, Frank refused to admit to shooting Williams. She blamed that murder on LaCaze.