JUST IN: Corrupt U.S. Police Officer Antoinette Frank To Be Executed — She Heard Sirens She Caused…
A former New Orleans police officer on death row. Three decades after Antoinette Frank was sentenced to death for a triple murder in New Orleans East, a judge granted the former NOPD officer a new day in court. The death row inmate was arrested for shooting and killing a fellow police officer and two others during a robbery in March of 1995.
She heard the siren she caused and drove toward them. She was the one who called it in. She was also the one who did it. On March 4th, 1995, three people lost their lives inside a Vietnamese restaurant on Bullard Avenue in New Orleans East. One of them was a fellow police officer. The woman responsible worked the same shift he did. She wore the same badge.
And when backup units arrived at that crime scene, she was already standing there in full uniform acting like she had nothing to do with what had just happened inside. What you are about to hear is not speculation. Every detail in this documentary is drawn from court records, trial testimony, police reports, and verified investigative findings.
This is a case that shook the New Orleans Police Department to its foundation. A case that exposed the cost of institutional failure. And a case that 30 years later is still moving through the courts. This is the case of Antoinette Frank. Every week on this channel, we cover new cases with deep investigation. Every name, every fact, every court document verified and presented in full.
No filler. No speculation. Just the truth of what happened and how the system responded to it. If that is the kind of true crime documentary you have been looking for, subscribe now and turn on the bell. We release new cases every single week and you will not want to miss what is coming next. Now New Orleans, 1993, and a decision that should never have been made.
Antoinette Renee Frank was born on April 30th, 1971 in Opelousas, Louisiana, the second of four children raised by Adam and Mary Ann Frank in conditions defined by poverty and instability. Her father, Adam Frank, was a Vietnam veteran receiving treatment from the Veterans Administration and prescribed antipsychotic medication.
VA clinical records dated October 1973 documented Adam Frank admitting to physically harming his 2-year-old daughter. A follow-up entry 14 days later noted the situation was worsening. The VA recommended the children be removed from the home. That recommendation was never carried out. Growing up, Antoinette was remembered by those who knew her as unusually withdrawn.
Her mother, Mary Ann, later told reporters the family lived in severe poverty and that her daughter simply did not socialize. Her brother, Adam Frank, Jr., was a fugitive wanted on two counts of attempted manslaughter and a probation violation. Two months before the Kimble murders, NOPD detectives arrived at Antoinette’s home searching for him.
Through all of it, one ambition stayed constant. She wanted to be a police officer. She joined the Opelousas Junior Police Program as a teenager, later the New Orleans Police Explorers Post 560, and graduated from Opelousas High School in 1989. On April 30th, 1991, she applied to the NOPD for the first time and failed the psychological examination.
She hired her own private psychiatrist, obtained a more favorable evaluation, and gained entry to the academy. While there, her father reported her missing after finding a note in which she described herself as “doomed since the day I was born.” She returned and continued. She applied again in 1993, submitting a recommendation letter purportedly signed by Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, who later denied ever signing it.
She had also been fired from a Walmart in Opelousas for personality conflicts and told the NOPD she had been transferred, not dismissed. According to author Chuck Hustmyer, who documented the case in Killer with a Badge, the department’s own investigator found these discrepancies and still rated her acceptable. Dr.
Philip Schuria evaluated her across 14 characteristics relevant to police work and rated her unacceptable or below average on most. His written recommendation was clear, do not hire. The NOPD hired her on February 7th, 1993. At her 1995 penalty phase, Marion Frank took the stand, described her daughter as a good child, and pleaded for mercy.
She made no reference to abuse of any kind. In November 1994, Officer Antoinette Frank responded to a shooting call in New Orleans East. The victim was Rogers Lacaze, 18 years old, a known drug dealer with a documented history of street violence. Most officers would have taken the report and moved on. Frank did not.
Within weeks, something that should have triggered immediate departmental concern was playing out in plain sight. Lacaze was seen driving Frank’s personal red white Ford Torino. He was spotted inside her marked police cruiser at an active crime scene. When colleagues asked questions, Frank introduced him trainee. On other occasions, she called him her nephew.
She denied any romantic involvement in every formal interview she gave. Investigators later confirmed the two were in a sexual relationship. It did not stop there. Witnesses later testified that Frank and Lacaze were using her uniform and her patrol car to pull over motorists and rob them. These were not minor allegations. They pointed to a pattern of criminal conduct carried out under the cover of a police badge.
Not one of those claims was formally investigated while Frank remained on the force. Then came February 4th, 1995. One month before the murders. Two men, John Stevens and Anthony Wallace, encountered Lacaze at a party. A physical confrontation broke out. Lacaze produced a TC-9 semi-automatic weapon. Former civil sheriff Ervin Bryant arrived on scene, witnessed the situation, and moved to intervene.
Frank was standing there in full uniform. She told Bryant that Lacaze was with her and ordered him released. Bryant was never formally questioned by police afterward and never gave an official statement. The following day, Frank purchased 9-mm ammunition at a local Walmart. When investigators later asked about it, she said she was a police officer and saw nothing unusual about the purchase.
What investigators also discovered was that in the weeks leading up to the murders, a 9-mm pistol had been released from the NOPD’s own property and evidence room on an order bearing the signature of Judge Frank Marullo. The same judge who would later preside over both trials. Marullo denied the signature was his.
He claimed it had been forged. The Kim Son Noodle House sat at 4952 Bullard Avenue in New Orleans East. It was not a large establishment, but what it represented was significant. It was built from nothing by a family that had crossed an ocean to start over. Bich Vu immigrated from Vietnam to the United States in 1981.
His wife, Nguyen Thi Nguyen, and their children followed a decade later in 1991. Together they built the Kim Son into a neighborhood fixture. A restaurant that served pho and Vietnamese cooked meals with a small grocery section attached. It was a family operation in every sense. By March 1995, four of their children were working there regularly. Ha Vu was 24 years old.
She had expressed her intention to enter religious life as a Catholic nun. Her younger brother Quang was 17, an altar boy at St. Bridget Catholic Church, a high school football player, and someone who had spoken openly about becoming a priest. Chau Vu was 23. Quoc Vu was 18. Also on duty that night was Vu Vu, a 45-year-old waitress who had worked for the family for some time.
The restaurant employed two off-duty NOPD officers for security. One of them was Antoinette Frank. The other was Ronald Austin Williams II, known to those close to him as Ronnie. He was 25 years old, raised in New Orleans East, and a graduate of Brother Martin High School. He had married his high school sweetheart, Mary Burris, whose family had lived directly across the street from the Williams home.
Ronnie joined the NOPD in 1992 and picked up the Kim on security detail to supplement his income. One week before March 4th, 1995, Mary gave birth to their second son, Patrick. Their first son, Christopher, was 6 years old. Ronnie Williams and Antoinette Frank had worked the same platoon at the 7th District for over a year.
The Vu family trusted both of them. They considered Ronnie part of their extended circle. On the second visit Frank and Lacaze made to the restaurant that night, after they left, Williams pulled Chau aside. He told her directly that he did not trust Frank. He acknowledged he had only continued working alongside her because other officers were rarely available for the detail. Chau heard him.
She would not forget it. The evening of March 3rd, 1995 began like any other shift for Antoinette Frank at the 7th District Police Station. At approximately 9:00 p.m., she picked up the phone and called the Kim On Restaurant. Chau Vu answered. Frank asked whether her security services were needed that night. Chau told her that Ronald Williams was already there.
Frank said nothing more and ended the call. Her shift finished at 11:00 p.m. She left the precinct, went home, changed out of her uniform, and collected Rogers LaCase. The two drove to the Kim On in Frank’s red white Ford Torino. This was their first visit of the night. Frank went inside alone while LaCase waited in the car.
She ordered cold drinks, made conversation with Nguyen and Williams, and briefly brought LaCase inside, introducing him as her nephew. She told them the two were heading out to a midnight movie screening. They finished their drinks and left. At approximately 12:15 a.m., Frank called the restaurant again. This time to place a food order.
She and LaCase returned together for the second visit. At some point during these two visits, Frank took the front door key from Quoc Vu without him realizing it was gone. After the second visit, Nguyen decided to close early. Business had been slow that night. She left the restaurant in the hands of her four children and Vu Vu.
Before walking out, she left $10,000 in cash on a table in the staff section. Money set aside for upcoming plumbing work and parking lot expansion. Shortly before 2:00 a.m., Chau was in the kitchen when she looked toward the parking lot. The red white Ford Torino was pulling in for the third time. She remembered what Williams had told her.
She trusted her instincts. She grabbed the $10,000 from the table and placed it inside the microwave. Then she waited. Frank used the stolen key to enter through the front door. She moved through the restaurant quickly, directing Chau, Quoc, and Vu Vu toward the kitchen. Ronald Williams, who had been seated on a bar stool in the dining area, stood up and moved to follow them. He never made it.
Lakese had positioned himself at the rear of the building. He intercepted Williams and fired three times. Ronald Williams II, 25 years old, 1 week into fatherhood, died on the floor of the restaurant he was there to protect. Inside the kitchen, Chau reacted fast. She pulled Quoc and Vuoi Vu into the walk-in cooler, shut the door, and turned off the lights.
Through a small glass window in the cooler door, Chau and Quoc could see Frank moving through the kitchen carrying Lakese’s weapon, searching the area where the family typically kept their cash. Frank also took the restaurant’s cordless phone from the bar, cutting off any landline access for anyone still inside.
Ha and Quang Vu had not reached the cooler in time. Frank and Lakese confronted them in the kitchen and demanded to know where the money was. Neither of them knew where Chau had hidden it. Frank struck Quang in an attempt to force an answer. She then found the cash herself inside the microwave. Ha Vu and Quang Vu were both shot and killed.
Frank and Lakese left the building together. Frank dropped Lakese at his brother’s apartment in Gretna. Approximately 45 minutes after leaving the restaurant, Lakese used Ronald Williams’ Chevron credit card to buy $15 worth of gas at a station three blocks from that apartment. Frank, meanwhile, drove to the 7th District Police Station.
It was there that she heard the dispatch come through on her portable police radio, “Officer down at the Kim Long Restaurant on Bullard Avenue.” She drove back to the scene. At 1:52 a.m., a second police vehicle arrived carrying Officers Wayne Farve and Reginald Jacque. A third vehicle followed with Officer Yvonne Farve.
As the officers approached the building, Chau ran out toward them. Frank came out behind her, identifying herself to the arriving officers as a responding officer. In the presence of Officer Yvonne Farve, Frank turned to Chau and asked what had happened. Chau looked directly at her and told her she had been there. That she knew exactly what had happened.
Detectives Eddie Rantz and Marco Demma arrived shortly after and took control of the scene. Detectives Eddie Rantz and Marco Demma separated Frank and Chau immediately, questioning each of them at different tables inside the restaurant. Frank’s account of events shifted under questioning. When Rantz presented her with a specific detail, the back door of the restaurant was locked from the inside, which made it physically impossible for any outside perpetrator to have entered or exited that way, her story changed. For the first time, she
named Rogers LaCase. Despite telling investigators she was unarmed, a loaded .38 caliber revolver was found on her person during the search. Frank was transported to police headquarters. With a tape recorder running, she gave a formal confession. She stated that LaCase had shot Ronald Williams and that she had shot Ha and Quang Vu.
She claimed LaCase had forced her to participate under threat to her own life. Investigators pressed her on one point she could not answer. Her police radio, which was capable of reaching units across the district, was found in her private vehicle. At no point during the events inside the restaurant had she used it to call for help or raise an alarm.
Forensic analysis of the crime scene produced three significant findings. Ballistic testing confirmed the same 9 mm pistol was used in all three shootings. A boot print recovered from the scene matched Frank’s uniform boots. Blood was also found on her clothing. LaCase was arrested later that night at his brother’s apartment in Gretna.
He told investigators he had spent the evening playing pool with his brother at a local billiard hall. The owner of that hall confirmed he had not been there. The morning of March 4th, 1995, Mayor Marc Morial and Police Superintendent Richard Pennington stood before reporters at a press conference. Both men were visibly shaken.
Pennington stated the motive was robbery and that an undetermined amount of cash had been taken. Outside the courthouse that same day, Ronald Williams Sr., Ronnie’s father, and his son Shawn Williams were photographed leaving after the initial proceedings. Frank and Lacaze were formally indicted by an Orleans Parish Grand Jury on April 28th, 1995.
In 1993, 18 months before the events at the Kim Anh restaurant, Antoinette Frank filed a missing persons report with police. The person she reported missing was her own father, Adam Frank. She told investigators he had been staying with her at her home on Prentice Avenue and had disappeared without explanation.
No follow-up investigation was opened. No search was conducted. In a city dealing with a severe crime crisis, one missing adult drew little attention. That report would not resurface until after the trial. In November 1995, 1 month after Frank was sentenced to death, a neighbor’s dog began digging persistently beneath the foundation of her house on Prentice Avenue.
Police responded and excavated the area. What they found were human remains, a skull, an arm, a leg, and sections of spine. Forensic examiners determined the remains belonged to a man approximately the same age as Adam Frank. A bullet hole was identified in the skull. Formal DNA testing was never completed or publicly confirmed.
In a 2005 retrospective, author Chuck Hustmyre noted that authorities had made no serious effort to formally identify the remains in the decades since their discovery. The state filed no charges. Frank was already on death row for three counts of first-degree murder. What investigators and mental health professionals pieced together over the years that followed painted a deeply troubling picture of what Frank’s life had looked like long before she ever put on a badge.
VA clinical notes from 1973 documented Adam Frank’s worsening treatment of his daughter from the time she was a toddler. A fellow police recruit who knew both of them recalled observing Frank and her father interacting at social events in ways that struck those present as deeply inappropriate. Three independent mental health experts, Dr. Sarah Deland, Dr.
Leslie Liebowitz, and Dr. Frederick Sattler, each separately evaluated Frank and arrived at the same diagnosis: PTSD and dependent personality disorder. Their findings directly linked her psychological state to prolonged abuse beginning in early childhood and continuing into her adult years. Two jurors from her 1995 trial later submitted sworn affidavits to the court.
Both stated that had they been presented with this background and these clinical assessments during the trial, they would have voted for a life sentence rather than death. Frank’s jury heard none of it. Not one mental health witness testified on her behalf at any point during the guilt or penalty phases of her trial.
Rogers Lacaze went to trial first. His case was heard before Judge Frank Morrell from July 17th through July 21st, 1995. Lead prosecutor Glenn Woods and co-prosecutor Elizabeth Teel presented the evidence methodically. The most damaging piece came down to a single transaction. Lacaze had used Ronald Williams Chevron credit card at a gas station in Gretna within minutes of leaving the Kim Anh restaurant. The jury found him guilty.
He was sentenced to death. Antoinette Frank’s trial began on September 5th, 1995, also before Judge Morello. Early in the proceedings, the jury was taken on a physical tour of the Kim Anh restaurant. Detective Marco Demma walked them through the kitchen and identified exactly where the bodies of Ha and Quong Vu had been found.
Defense attorney Robert Jenkins did not call a single witness. He had subpoenaed 39 of them. He called none. His closing argument rested entirely on placing the blame on Lacaze. Prosecutor Elizabeth Teel addressed that argument directly. She pointed out to the jury that Frank had possessed both a firearm and a functioning police radio throughout the entire course of events inside that restaurant.
She had used neither to intervene or call for assistance. The jury deliberated for 22 minutes. Guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder, at the time the fastest verdict capital case in New Orleans history. The following day, the same jury deliberated for 45 minutes before recommending the death penalty. On October 20th, 1995, Judge Morello formally sentenced Antoinette Frank to death by lethal injection.
She was transferred to the Louisiana Correctional Institute for women in St. Gabriel, where she became the only woman on Louisiana’s death row. Glenn Woods still keeps a photograph of Ha and Quong Vu in his office. Elizabeth Teel has described these two trials as the most difficult of her entire career. The legal proceedings that followed the conviction stretched across three decades and tested the boundaries of Louisiana’s justice system at every level.
In 2002, Lacaze’s attorneys argued before the Louisiana Supreme Court that he had an IQ of 71 and should be considered intellectually disabled at the time of the crime. The court rejected the argument. Lacaze was 18 years old when the offense occurred and the recognized threshold for mild intellectual disability is an IQ of 69 or below.
In 2015, retired Judge Michael Kirby vacated Lacaze’s conviction entirely. His ruling was based on the discovery that one of the jurors in Lacaze’s original trial had been a commissioned law enforcement officer, a status that legally disqualified him from jury service and which he had concealed during selection. That ruling was overturned in January 2016 by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal.
The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed that decision. In 2019, under Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, Lacaze’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole through a post-conviction arrangement. Rogers Lacaze is alive today. Antoinette Frank remains on death row.
In 2023, Governor John Bel Edwards publicly stated his opposition to capital punishment. Frank’s clemency petition was one of five granted a formal hearing before the State Parole Board. The board voted two to two. Under Louisiana rules, a tied vote constitutes a denial. Board member Alvin Roche Jr. voted against clemency, citing disciplinary records from Frank’s time in prison and the risk that a reduced sentence could eventually make her eligible for parole consideration.
In 2025, Louisiana carried out its first execution in 15 years. Frank was not among those scheduled. Her post-conviction appeal remained active and under court review, which legally prevented any execution date from being set. On May 15th, 2025, Criminal District Judge Kim Y. Holmes granted Frank a formal evidentiary hearing scheduled for December 2025 to present evidence that was never introduced at her original trial.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry moved to take control of the case from Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams and sought to block the hearing from proceeding. Judge Holmes rejected both motions, ruling that state law did not provide the Attorney General authority to intervene. Landry appealed. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5 to 2 in her favor, granting her office the authority to participate going forward.
Frank’s lead counsel, Nyla Campbell, stated publicly that the post-conviction investigation had produced evidence confirming facts that were never presented to the original jury. The December 2025 hearing took place. Its outcome remains pending as of this recording. Ronald Williams Sr. has been present at every court proceeding connected to his son’s case since 1995.
Chau Vu has said publicly that what happened on March 4th, 1995 will stay with her for the rest of her life. Bich Vu led his family in rebuilding the Kim Son restaurant twice, first after the murders and again after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the original Bullard Avenue location in 2005. The restaurant now operates in Harahan.
The family resettled in Metairie. Antoinette Frank remains the only woman on Louisiana’s death row. That is the full documented case of Antoinette Frank. Every verified fact, every name, every decision that led to the night of March 4th, 1995, and every legal development that has followed in the 30 years since.
If this is the kind of thorough, fact-based true crime documentary you have been looking for, subscribe now and turn on the bell so you are notified the moment the next case is released. Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Does what came before that night change how you see what happened inside that restaurant? I will read every response.
