JUST IN: Louisiana To Execute Corrupt Police Officer Antoinette Frank — She Heard The Sirens Coming…

More than 30 years after she murdered a fellow police officer and two others inside a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans East, Antoinette Frank is set to become the first woman executed in Louisiana in decades. The state’s highest court has cleared the way for the former New Orleans police officer to face lethal injection, ending a legal saga that has haunted the city since 1995.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry won a pivotal ruling from the state Supreme Court on Friday, granting her office the authority to intervene in the case and set an execution date.

The decision comes after a December 2025 evidentiary hearing in which Frank’s attorneys argued that new evidence—including documentation of childhood 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 and mental health evaluations—should spare her life. Judge Kim M. Holmes of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court had originally granted the hearing, but the state’s top court ruled five to two that Landry could take control of the proceedings from District Attorney Jason Williams.

Frank, 54, has been on death row since October 1995, when a jury deliberated for just 22 minutes before convicting her of three counts of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to death for the killings of New Orleans police officer Ronald Austin Williams II, 25, and siblings Ha Vu, 24, and Quang Vu, 17, during a robbery at the Kim Anh Noodle House on Bullard Avenue. The crime occurred on March 4, 1995, while Frank was off duty but still in uniform.

She used a stolen key to enter the restaurant, shot the victims alongside her accomplice Rogers Lacaze, and then drove to the police station before responding to the scene she had created.

Prosecutors described Frank as a “corrupt cop” who had formed a relationship with Lacaze, a teenage 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 dealer, and used her badge to commit robberies. The case 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 deep failures within the New Orleans Police Department, which had hired Frank despite her failing a psychological exam and submitting a forged recommendation letter from the mayor.

The department’s own investigator had flagged her as unacceptable, but she was sworn in on February 7, 1993—just two years before the murders.

Frank’s attorneys have long argued that she suffered from severe 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 at the hands of her father, Adam Frank, a Vietnam veteran with untreated mental illness. VA clinical records from 1973 documented that Adam Frank admitted to physically harming his two-year-old daughter, and a recommendation to remove the children from the home was never carried out.

Three independent mental health experts later diagnosed Frank with PTSD and dependent personality disorder, linking her psychological state to the 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮. Two jurors from her original trial later submitted sworn affidavits stating that if they had heard this evidence, they would have voted for life in prison rather than death.

At the time of her trial, defense attorney Robert Jenkins called no witnesses despite having subpoenaed 39.

The jury never heard from a single mental health expert. The Louisiana Supreme Court has consistently upheld Frank’s conviction and sentence, but the post-conviction process has dragged on for decades. In 2023, Governor John Bel Edwards publicly opposed capital punishment and granted Frank a clemency hearing, but the state parole board deadlocked two to two, denying her request.

Now, with the attorney general’s office in control, the state is moving swiftly toward execution. “The victims’ families have waited three decades for justice,” Landry said in a statement. “The legal games are over.

Antoinette Frank will pay for the lives she took.” The execution date has not been formally set, but sources close to the case say it could come within 90 days, pending final review by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Ronald Williams Sr.

, the father of the slain officer, has attended every court proceeding since 1995. He told reporters after the ruling that he feels “a heavy relief” but also “the weight of all those years.” Mary Williams, Ronnie’s widow, raised their two sons alone.

“He missed everything,” she said quietly outside the courthouse. “Graduations, weddings, grandchildren. She took that from us.”

Chau Vu, the daughter of the restaurant owners who survived the massacre by hiding in a walk-in cooler, has spoken publicly about the trauma. She watched through the cooler’s glass window as Frank searched the kitchen with a gun. “She was a police officer.

She was supposed to protect us,” Chau said in a recent interview. “Instead, she killed my sister and brother. And now, maybe she will face what she did.”

The case has also drawn attention to the broader debate over capital punishment in Louisiana. The state carried out its first execution in 15 years in 2025, and Frank’s case is seen as a test of whether the state will resume regular executions. Civil rights groups have condemned the decision, pointing to Frank’s childhood 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 and the flawed trial.

“The system that failed her as a child is now going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her as an adult,” said Nyla Campbell, Frank’s lead post-conviction attorney. “That is not justice. That is revenge.”

But for the families of the victims, the ruling represents closure. Ha Vu had planned to become a Catholic nun. Quang Vu was an altar boy who dreamed of the priesthood.

Ronald Williams II had just become a father for the second time. Their deaths shocked New Orleans and led to a major overhaul of the NOPD’s hiring practices. “She wore the same badge as my son,” Ronald Williams Sr.

said. “She betrayed everything that badge stands for. Now, the state will do what must be done.”

Frank’s accomplice, Rogers Lacaze, was also sentenced to death but had his sentence commuted to life without parole in 2019 after a post-conviction agreement. He is alive and incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Frank, meanwhile, remains the only woman on Louisiana’s death row, housed at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St.

Gabriel. Her execution would be the first of a woman in the state since 1946, when 18-year-old Louise Vaughn was put to death for murder.

The legal path to this moment has been tortuous.

In 2015, a retired judge vacated Lacaze’s conviction because a juror had concealed his status as a law enforcement officer, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. Frank’s own appeals have repeatedly failed at both the state and federal levels. The December 2025 hearing was her last chance to present new evidence, but Judge Holmes’s decision to allow the hearing was itself appealed by the attorney general.

The Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling effectively ends that avenue.

Now, the state is preparing for the execution. Officials at the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections have begun the protocol review, including the selection of a lethal injection team and the availability of drugs.

The execution is expected to take place at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, the same facility where the state’s last execution was carried out. Frank’s legal team has indicated they will file an emergency appeal with the U. S.

Supreme Court, arguing that the state’s lethal injection protocol is unconstitutional and that her intellectual and psychological disabilities make her ineligible for execution under the Eighth Amendment.

But legal experts say the odds are slim. “The Supreme Court has been very reluctant to intervene in state death penalty cases, especially when the evidence of guilt is overwhelming,” said Mary Ellen O’Connor, a professor of criminal law at Tulane University.

“Frank’s case is a tragedy on multiple levels, but the law has run its course.”

Outside the courthouse, the mood was tense. Dozens of protesters from both sides of the death penalty debate gathered, some holding signs reading “Justice for Ha and Quang” and others “Stop the Execution.”

The Vu family, who rebuilt their restaurant twice—once after the murders and again after Hurricane Katrina—issued a brief statement: “We have lived with this pain for 30 years. We trust the court to do what is right.”

For Antoinette Frank, the woman who once dreamed of being a police officer and who heard the sirens she caused coming toward her, the final chapter is now being written.

The state of Louisiana, after three decades of legal battles, is preparing to execute her. The question of whether that execution will bring peace to the families or simply end a long, painful chapter remains unanswered. But one thing is certain: the story of Antoinette Frank, the corrupt cop who killed her own, is about to reach its ultimate conclusion.