The 911 call came in at 1:50 in the morning. A shooting at the Kim Anh restaurant. By the time police arrived, three people were already dead inside. One of them was a New Orleans police officer named Ronald Williams.
The other two were siblings, 24-year-old Ha Vu and 17-year-old Quoc Vu. They had been shot execution style, forced to their knees before the trigger was pulled. And standing at the crime scene, wearing her police uniform, was another officer from the same district. Antoinette Frank.
The surviving Vu siblings pointed at her immediately. “Why are you here? ” one of them screamed. “You were here the whole time.
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Antoinette Frank was an officer of the law. She was also one of the killers. Born in 1971 in a small town called Opelousas, Antoinette grew up in a house full of fear. Her father, a Vietnam veteran, came back from the war broken and volatile.
He painted the windows and told the children to stay inside. He went on hysterical rampages. He broke property. He was abusive, and the aggression was constant.
Crime ran through the family. Her older brother had been in and out of prison for armed robbery. But Antoinette seemed determined to break the mold. From a young age, she wanted to be a police officer.
She said it was because she wanted to help others, to make sure no one suffered what she had suffered. She got involved with the police auxiliary in high school. She took a part-time job at Walmart and was fired over conflicts with coworkers. She struggled to see things from other people’s perspectives, and that seemed to be where she clashed with everyone.
When she was 21, still living with her father, she applied to the New Orleans Police Department. The department did not want her. She failed two psychological written tests. Then she was sent for an in-person interview with Dr.
Phil Scharria, the psychiatrist responsible for evaluating new recruits. Dr. Scharria noticed Antoinette immediately. She was dressed inappropriately for an interview, like she was going to a cocktail party.
She answered his questions with shallow, rehearsed answers. When he asked if she had ever been fired from a job, she said no. Dr. Scharria already knew she had been fired from Walmart.
He wrote in his report that Antoinette was superficial, lacked insight into her own behavior, and would not make a good candidate for the police force. But Antoinette did not accept rejection. She appealed the decision. She found another psychiatrist who evaluated her and cleared her.
She was accepted into the police academy. Dr. Scharria never found out. Not until the day after the murders.
In early 1993, Antoinette disappeared from home for a short time. She left a note that read: “I was doomed since the day I was born. I hate myself and my life. ”
Her family was worried.
She eventually returned home. Two weeks later, she was hired by the New Orleans Police Academy. By late February 1993, she was officially a police officer. She had achieved her childhood dream.
But things did not go well for her. She was not popular with the other officers. No one wanted to partner with her. Her partners said she was a compulsive liar.
Instead of admitting mistakes, she covered them up with lies. She felt alienated. The same feelings she had tried to escape from childhood were back, surrounding her again. In 1994, almost two years into her role, Antoinette was called to a hospital to respond to a crime scene.
An 18-year-old named Rogers Lacaze had been shot during a drug deal. Instead of arresting him or guiding him toward a better life, Antoinette took an interest in him. She befriended him. She developed a romantic relationship with him.
She was a few years older, and he was flattered by the attention of a police officer. Instead of pulling him out of a life of crime, she got pulled into it. Together, they became reckless. They robbed people while riding in her police car.
She brought him along on her shifts, sometimes pretending he was a trainee or an informant. She was getting away with it. She was enjoying the risk. She also worked as a security guard at a modest, family-owned Vietnamese restaurant called Kim Anh.
The Vu family ran it. The mother had four children, two in their early 20s, two teenagers. Antoinette became friendly with them. They fed her.
They trusted her. She used that trust to destroy them. On the night of March 3, 1995, Antoinette was off duty. She and Rogers went to the restaurant to scout the scene.
They left, then came back. They insisted on sitting down to eat, even though it was closing time. The 18-year-old cleaning the floor noticed Rogers staring at him. They left without finishing their food.
They came back a third time. By then, the Vu siblings suspected something was wrong. They had seen Antoinette come and go too many times. Chau Vu hid the night’s earnings.
But it didn’t matter. Antoinette forced two of the children, Chau and her brother Kwok, toward the back of the restaurant. Rogers stayed outside. Officer Williams was in the front with 24-year-old Ha and 17-year-old Quoc.
Then came the gunshots. Chau and Kwok ran into the walk-in freezer. Through the window, they saw Antoinette running back and forth. They heard more gunshots.
Their sister and brother were on their knees, begging for their lives, before Antoinette shot them execution style. Officer Williams was shot in the back of the head. He wasn’t facing his killers when he died. The two siblings stayed hidden in the freezer for 15 or 20 minutes.
When they finally came out, they found their brother and sister dead on the kitchen floor. Officer Williams was dead out front. Antoinette Frank and Rogers Lacaze fled with the cash. But instead of running, Antoinette went home, changed into her police uniform, got a patrol car from her district station, and returned to the restaurant as a first responder.
She thought she could talk her way out of it, like she had done with everything else. It didn’t work. The surviving Vu siblings were hysterical. They identified her immediately.
Antoinette Frank was arrested at the scene, only hours before Rogers Lacaze was arrested as her accomplice. When asked why they did it, Rogers said Antoinette wanted revenge against the Vu family and Officer Williams because she believed they had done something wrong to her. Mostly, she thought she was being underpaid. The trials were brutal.
Rogers faced trial first in July 1995 and was found guilty. He was sentenced to death. Antoinette’s trial began a few months later. Jurors were in tears.
Antoinette sat emotionless. She barely spoke, barely cooperated with her attorneys or the psychologists who examined her. In Dr. Scharria’s words, she was a silent enigma.
The jury took just 22 minutes to find her guilty of all three counts of first-degree murder. On October 20, 1995, she was sentenced to death. A month after her sentencing, a sniffer dog led police to human bones under the house where Antoinette had lived. Her father had been missing for years.
Some thought the bones were his, but no formal identification was ever made. No charges were brought. She was already on death row. In 2019, Rogers Lacaze’s death sentence was overturned.
He was resentenced to life in prison without parole. Antoinette’s appeal was not successful. She remains on death row to this day. When Antoinette walked out of Dr.
Scharria’s office that day, he never heard her name again. Not until the day after the murders, when he heard she had shot her colleague and two members of the Vu family in cold blood. He ran to the record room and pulled her file. He was relieved to see he had written that she was not suitable.
No one knows what flipped inside Antoinette Frank. She was a woman who wanted to be a police officer to help others, but somewhere along the way, she became the killer within.
