NEW ORLEANS — The woman who ran toward the flashing lights of a police cruiser in the early hours of March 4, 1995, was not running to safety. Chieu Vu had just spent agonizing minutes hidden inside a walk-in cooler at her family’s Kim On restaurant, listening to gunfire echo through the kitchen. When she finally emerged and saw the patrol unit pull into the empty parking lot, she hesitated.
The reason was not fear of the unknown. It was recognition. Standing a few steps behind her was Antoinette Frank, a uniformed officer with the New Orleans Police Department.
Chieu knew exactly who she was. She also knew that Frank had already been inside the restaurant that night, and that the badge on her chest did not mean protection.
The first officers on the scene at 1:52 a. m. saw a chaotic tableau.
Chieu Vu was frantic, pointing toward the building. Officer Wayne Farve recognized Frank immediately. She was one of his own, a fellow NOPD officer who had graduated from the academy just two years earlier.
Frank calmly told Farve that an injured officer and the attackers were in the back of the restaurant. But Chieu’s account was different. She had hidden inside the cooler with her brother Quoc and another employee, watching through a small window as Frank and a male companion moved through the restaurant, searching for money.
They had heard more shots. They had seen the two leave. And when Chieu finally ran out, she knew the woman approaching her was not there to help.
Inside the Kim On restaurant, investigators found a scene of unimaginable violence. Officer Ronald Williams, 25, was dead near the bar. Ha Vu, 24, and her brother Quang Vu, 17, were found in the kitchen area, both killed by gunfire.
The three victims had been shot multiple times. The restaurant, a family-owned Vietnamese establishment in New Orleans East, had been a place of business and community. The Vu family had hired off-duty police officers for security, paying them to keep the premises safe.
Ronald Williams had been working that detail. Antoinette Frank had frequently filled in for him. She knew the family.
She knew the layout. She knew where the money was kept. And on that night, she used that knowledge to walk in and out of the restaurant three times before the killing began.
The timeline of that night is now part of the official record. Around 9:00 p. m.
, Frank called the restaurant and asked if she was needed for security. Chau Vu told her no, that Williams was scheduled to work. Frank finished her NOPD shift at 11:00 p.
m. and then arrived at Kim On with a man she introduced as her nephew. They asked for cold drinks, said they were going to a midnight movie, and left.
At 12:51 a. m. , Frank called again and ordered food.
She returned with the same man, and they sat down to eat inside, even though the food had been packed to go. Quoc Vu noticed the man staring at him while he swept the floor. The pair left without finishing their meal.
Then they came back a third time.
Chau Vu saw Frank approaching the glass door and knew something was wrong. She gathered the restaurant’s cash and hid it inside a microwave in the kitchen. Frank pushed her toward the back, saying they needed to talk.
Quoc heard gunfire from the bar area where Williams was standing. Chau and Quoc ran deeper into the building with another employee, shutting themselves inside the walk-in cooler and turning off the lights. Through a small window, they watched Frank and her companion search the restaurant.
They heard more shots. When the two finally left, the cooler door remained closed. The three people left behind were dead.
Frank did not flee the area. Instead, she drove back to the 7th District station, exchanged her personal car for a police patrol unit, and returned to the restaurant. She parked nearby and waited.
When Officer Farve arrived, Frank approached him and told him the injured officer and the attackers were in the back. Chieu Vu, still terrified, later testified that she stayed inside the cooler even after hearing the first patrol car because she knew Frank was police. Only when more sirens approached did she finally run out.
Frank then asked her where she had been hiding and what had happened. Chieu’s response was direct: “You was there. You know everything.
Why you ask me that?”
Frank was taken into custody at the scene. Within hours, she was formally arrested. The investigation revealed that Frank had formed a close association with an 18-year-old named Rogers Lacaze, a young man with a criminal history.
Court records show they had been seen together repeatedly in the months before the murders. Lacaze had been seen driving Frank’s personal car and moving her police unit. During one police call, Frank introduced him as a trainee.
At other times, she called him her nephew. Prosecutors would later argue that Frank and Lacaze acted together in the robbery and killings. Lacaze was indicted on three counts of first-degree murder and tried separately.
He was also sentenced to death, but in December 2019, he was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Frank’s death sentence remained.
The trial of Antoinette Frank began on September 5, 1995. The surviving members of the Vu family testified. Dr.
Philip Scurry, the psychiatrist who had evaluated Frank before she was hired, also took the stand. Scurry had rated Frank unsuitable for police work in 1992, citing concerns about her impulse control, maturity, and insight into her own behavior. He noted that she had lied about being fired from a previous job.
A second psychiatrist saw similar traits but reached a different conclusion, and Frank was hired on February 7, 1993. She graduated from the police academy three weeks later. Scurry later said he had no inkling from his interview that Frank could be a murderer.
But the jury in her trial saw the evidence differently. On September 12, 1995, they found Frank guilty on all three counts. The deliberation took approximately 22 minutes.
The jury unanimously recommended a death sentence, which was formally imposed on October 20, 1995.
Frank’s legal fight has lasted more than three decades. In 2001, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed her convictions but sent part of the sentencing case back for further proceedings. The death sentence was reviewed again and affirmed in 2007.
The U. S. Supreme Court declined to take her case in 2008.
Her lawyers continued pursuing post-conviction claims, including arguments about mitigation and mental health evidence that they said had not been fully developed for the original jury. In 2009, they filed a counseled post-conviction supplement containing 18 claims. In 2024, they added six more.
The state of Louisiana objected to the newer claims, arguing that the 15-year delay between the filings made it substantially harder to respond. Witnesses had died. Records had disappeared.
Some material had been destroyed.
On March 31, 2026, the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered a dedicated hearing on one question: whether the delay had materially prejudiced the state’s ability to answer the newer allegations. That hearing took place on June 3, 2026, before Judge Kim Y. Holmes.
She is expected to rule on the issue on October 9, 2026. That ruling is not an execution order. It is a procedural decision about whether the newer claims can proceed.
But the case has drawn renewed attention because of what it represents. Antoinette Frank remains the only woman on Louisiana’s death row. Her case is one of the most unusual female death row cases in the United States.
The victims’ families have watched the legal process with frustration. Mary Williams, the mother of Officer Ronald Williams, has spoken publicly about her son and the long delays. “We want to make sure that everybody remembers my son, Ronnie, and the contributions he made,” she said.
“The legal system is getting mired down in too many trivial things.” The Vu family has also expressed anguish. The restaurant where the killings occurred became a permanent part of their memory of that night.
The building itself was a crime scene, and the family’s grief has been compounded by the decades of appeals.
If Frank’s post-conviction litigation eventually ends in the state’s favor, Louisiana now has an execution system that looks very different from the one that existed in 1995. The state currently authorizes three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution, and nitrogen hypoxia. The condemned prisoner does not select the method.
Louisiana law gives that decision to the Secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Once the Department receives a death warrant, the Secretary must provide written notice of the chosen method within seven days. The leading candidate today would be nitrogen hypoxia, the method Louisiana used in March 2025 when it resumed executions after a 15-year pause.
Jesse Hoffman was executed at Angola using nitrogen. It remains Louisiana’s most recent execution and its clearest modern precedent.
Whichever method is chosen, Louisiana law requires the execution to take place at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. A condemned woman housed through the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women would be transferred into the execution process at Angola. Several days before that transfer reaches its final stage, Frank would be asked to make a personal decision about her last meal.
Louisiana’s current protocol tells the warden to secure the prisoner’s last meal request approximately five days before the scheduled execution. Angola has a history of Louisiana-style requests. In 2010, Gerald Bordelon’s last meal included fried sac-au-lait topped with crawfish étouffée, a peanut butter and apple jelly sandwich, and chocolate chip cookies.
Leslie Martin’s final meal in 2002 included boiled crawfish, crawfish stew, salad, oatmeal cookies, and chocolate milk.
If Frank follows that tradition, the most plausible menu would be built around Louisiana comfort food: fried catfish or sac-au-lait, crawfish étouffée over rice, fried shrimp or oysters, potato salad or french fries, french bread, and something simple for dessert. The timing of that meal could vary depending on the execution method. Louisiana law requires executions to occur between 4:00 in the afternoon and 9:00 at night.
Under the current nitrogen hypoxia protocol, the last meal has to be served no later than noon on execution day. For a 6:00 p. m.
execution, that means a six-hour gap. Lethal injection runs on a different clock, with the last meal served no more than three hours before the scheduled execution.
Frank’s public legal position has remained contested for decades. A dramatic last-minute confession would be a poor bet. A brief statement about her case, or no statement at all, fits the public record much better.
The next expected ruling comes October 9. Whatever the court decides, the fact that brought Antoinette Frank back into the restaurant that morning has never changed. The people inside knew her because they had trusted the badge.
That trust was the foundation of the crime. And it is the reason her case remains a singular chapter in the history of American policing and capital punishment.