Code of silence claims La. officer
Grieving families come up against police secrecy
On the afternoon of May 2, 2013, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police kicked in the door of 6349 Flag St., a faded blue shotgun house set atop cinder blocks and surrounded by a chain-link fence and scorched grass. The neighborhood, an unincorporated sliver east of Airline Highway, is almost entirely Black. One in 3 live below the poverty line. There are a couple of churches, a dollar store and a high school spread among the low-flung homes.
Fifteen narcotics detectives and patrol officers – foot soldiers in America’s Sisyphean war on drugs – were looking for a local man who, one informant had assured them, was trafficking crack cocaine and armed with an assault rifle.
Police in SWAT gear stormed the house. Neighbors gathered along the fence, blocked by a phalanx of cops. They heard a commotion from inside, then muffled screams, then nothing.
Less than 15 minutes after police went inside, paramedics came out with a 32-year-old Black man on a stretcher and carried him into an ambulance. The man’s mother looked on from behind the fence, shocked and confused, pacing as she begged for one of the officers to explain what had just happened. She received no answers.
Around 2 a.m., a local television station reported a statement from the Baton Rouge Police Department: A man “was in distress” after swallowing drugs when detectives arrived to execute a search warrant, and he had died. “No foul play is suspected,” said the sheriff’s office, the agency investigating the case.
Police did not announce what their raid had yielded from the house that day: one marijuana blunt, two cellphones, $231 in cash
and “one small suspected crack cocaine rock.” The critical facts about what happened in those 15 minutes were held close by police and would go unexplained for years.
The narcotics officers who had answers knew better than to speak about them publicly. But in private conversations at police headquarters, in jokes among those who were in the house, that day had a name:
The Flag Street Massacre.
The weeping prophet from Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Jeremiah Ardoin is the son of a sheriff’s deputy and an oilman. His mother, Annette, wore the badge, and his father, Horace, was a technician inside one of the refineries that rise above Louisiana’s bayou with bellowing smokestacks and lights like skyscrapers.
They named Jeremiah after the Old Testament “weeping prophet,” who warned that Jerusalem faced destruction because of the sins of Israel’s high priests and kings. The prophet is known for having the courage to deliver unwelcome news even though he was reluctant to do so.
Jeremiah grew up in 1980s Baton Rouge, the Deep South capital of Louisiana, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. The city is steeped in segregation and tension among the mostly Black population and mostly white police force.
In the decade before he was born, civil rights demonstrations at Southern University in Baton Rouge turned deadly when police killed two unarmed Black students. Afterward, in 1980, a federal civil rights investigation found the Baton Rouge police department was discriminating against Black people looking to become cops. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a consent decree to force the department to diversify.
After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, out-of-state troopers who came to help with recovery efforts quickly left the state after witnessing rampant racism and misconduct in Baton Rouge law enforcement. They said officers there harassed Black residents who had fled from New Orleans, wantonly sprayed mace into crowds, went into homes without warrants and, in one case, offered to let a visiting trooper beat an inmate as a thank you gift.
More recently, in 2016, Baton Rouge police shot and killed Alton Sterling, a Black man selling CDs. Protests enveloped the city. Less than two weeks later, a gunman ambushed and killed three officers, wounding another three.
The fraught relationship between the people and those who police them is as much part of Louisiana’s DNA as the oppressive humidity.
In such an environment, Jeremiah’s parents raised their three children to be self-sufficient. Horace taught them how to hunt. Annette taught them to cook. They steered their kids clear of the street by sending them to private elementary and middle schools.
In high school, Jeremiah told his mom he wanted to follow in her footsteps and be a police officer. “I’ve wanted this all my life,” he said. Annette quit smoking the day he graduated from the academy in 2008, a bargain she made with God to keep her boy safe on the job.
Jeremiah went to work for the Baton Rouge Police Department. The uniform was a tight fit around his barrel chest. His arms are roped with tattoos showing the Freemasons symbols and his four children, including a baby girl who died hours after she was born.
By 2013, he was five years into the job with a house in Baker, a small suburb that borders the northern edge of Baton Rouge. He was making $80,000 a year and started investing in livestock that he butchered and sold to neighbors. Goats, chickens, pigs and turkeys plodded through mud in his backyard, vying over patches of shade to keep cool.
On May 2, 2013, the day his colleagues kicked in the door on Flag Street, Jeremiah was working a detail at Baton Rouge General Medical Center. At 5:21 p.m., paramedics rushed the 32year-old Black man they’d pulled from the blue house through the emergency room doors, flanked by multiple narcotics officers. The man on the gurney was Dontrunner Robinson.
Jeremiah looked down at Robinson and saw a mash of blood and swollen flesh, with an open gash the size of an apple slice above his left eye. His upper body was mottled with bruises. Too many to count.
Police told doctors that the bedroom
door had hit Robinson’s face when they kicked it in.
In the moment, Jeremiah did what’s expected of police in situations like this: nothing.
State secrets
After the paramedics took her son from Flag Street to the hospital, Casa Robinson Bean left the chain link fence and drove off to pick up Robinson’s 2year-old – her grandson – from day care. Casa, a God-fearing woman who calls everyone “baby” and swallows up near-strangers in hugs goodbye, didn’t want the boy to be with anyone else.
On the way back from the day care, a family friend called from the hospital: Dontrunner’s dead. Casa pulled over and wept until she was out of breath. She climbed into the backseat with her grandson.
“I just held him for a minute,” she recalled.
Casa found a frenzy of neighbors, kin and family friends waiting for her at the hospital. The officers there would not let Casa see her son’s body before they sent him to the coroner. It’s evidence, they told her.
Casa sent her brother-in-law, Lester Ricard, a pastor, to the funeral home to identify the body. If the swelling hadn’t gone down by the time he arrived, Ricard said, he may well have not recognized his nephew. He spoke with the mortician, who explained how much work it would take to prepare Robinson’s face and head for an open casket funeral.
“The family already went through enough,” Ricard replied. The funeral was a closed casket.
Casa had only clues about what happened inside the house on Flag Street. Robinson’s widow, Alaysha Robinson, had been in the bedroom. There, Alaysha said, four officers barged in and pounced on her husband before repeatedly punching him in the face and chest. Where is it? they barked. One officer struck Robinson with the butt of his rifle and dragged him off to the living room, according to Alaysha. They turned over furniture, cushions and drawers throughout the house.
Photographs the family took of the scene afterward show blood smeared on the walls and door jambs, and pooled on the tile.
Casa and Alaysha filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2014 against the city of Baton Rouge and the officers who raided the house on Flag Street. But the case languished. Their attorney didn’t file motions to move the case forward for more than three years.
In court, Baton Rouge attorneys denied that the officers on the raid did anything wrong. “At no time was Dontrunner (Robinson) beaten, kicked, or abused,” they said in one filing. “No
deadly force was ever utilized.” After three years, a judge agreed to dismiss the suit after the city argued the family’s attorney had abandoned it. It is still officially pending.
Casa and Alaysha learned virtually nothing about Robinson’s death. They said the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office – which conducted an investigation of the incident – and Baton Rouge police did not release any records to the family or the public. Casa and Alaysha hoped to hear from the state attorney general or maybe even the FBI to tell them they were looking into possible civil rights violations. But the calls never came.
Eight years later, Casa struggles to understand how other cases of police brutality and in-custody deaths garnered nationwide protests and reform efforts while she couldn’t get basic information about what happened to her son. George Floyd was painted on city streets and tweeted by professional athletes. But nobody outside her family and the neighborhood seemed to know her son’s name.
***
Across Louisiana, mothers and other loved ones seeking answers have been on the wrong side of police secrecy for years. When I visited last summer, word spread through an unofficial network of grieving families and local activists that a reporter was looking into some cases. They hoped an outsider might be able to shake loose new evidence.
Tara Snearl said she can’t find anyone at the Port Allen police department willing to discuss her son’s cold case homicide or the bungled investigation that followed in 2017.
“They won’t even tell me who the lead detective is,” Snearl said.
The department refused to release investigative files. A Port Allen police official emailed that the chief “is declining all interviews” concerning the case.
Breka Peoples, an activist in Shreveport, said the local police department is covering up multiple in-custody deaths and at least one rape in the back of a patrol car. Families are left with little recourse. “They don’t have anywhere to turn,” Peoples said. “And no one is held accountable.”
Earlier this year, the Associated Press published videos showing Louisiana State Police troopers beating, stunning and dragging Ronald Greene, an unarmed Black man, after a car chase in 2019 outside Monroe. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded, blood splashed on his skin and clothes. “I beat the ever-living f--- out of him,” one officer said in an audio recording. Greene stopped breathing soon after.
For almost two years, troopers lied to Greene’s mother, Mona, by saying her son had died in a car crash. They had refused to release the videos revealing the truth.
“We’re lost in this evil,” she told me recently.
The episode and the coverup that followed were particularly alarming considering the agency’s role. When there’s an in-custody death or deadly shooting, local Louisiana police departments often rely on the State Police to find out what happened and determine whether officers were at fault. Since the Greene scandal broke, critics have argued the agency is not equipped to hold itself accountable, let alone others.
Carl Cavalier was one of a cohort of troopers inside the State Police who worked to leak information about Greene’s killing. He collected email and other documents showing the department brass blocked internal investigators when they wanted to arrest one of the troopers responsible.
Cavalier went public this past summer and sat down for local TV interviews, in a suit and bowtie, to explain the documents.
Federal prosecutors are now probing whether State Police leaders obstructed justice to protect the troopers, as well as the abrupt disbanding of an internal panel that was supposed to be investigating other incidents of excessive force against Black motorists.
In the meantime, State Police commanders suspended Cavalier and sent him a letter saying they intend to fire him for disloyalty to the department and for making unauthorized public statements, among other infractions. Cavalier has since filed a lawsuit against the department, alleging discrimination and retaliation.
I met Cavalier for lunch in New Orleans in June. He had been using a pseudonym over the phone, Elijah Steele, the name he used during undercover operations, because he was wary of outsiders connecting his name with the department’s leaks. He showed up to the restaurant two hours early to make sure nobody was watching or listening.
Cavalier told me he leaked information about the Greene case because the oath he took when he became a police officer requires him to help a mother in distress like Mona.
“I didn’t seek this trouble out,” Cavalier said. “I deserve to keep my job.”
Lamar Davis, who was appointed State Police superintendent in October 2020, said the Greene scandal prompted a raft of reforms, including bystander intervention training and quarterly reviews of body camera footage. “I’m not one that believes in covering up and that blue wall of silence,” he said.
Davis would not discuss Cavalier’s situation specifically. But he said he values transparency and that officers would be within their rights to report misconduct to the FBI or attorney general if they felt the internal grievance procedure had fallen short.
Most department leaders who agreed to interviews for this story said something similar: The code of silence may be a problem in law enforcement, but not in their own agencies. Yet rank-andfile cops and other officials around the state were often terrified to talk openly about police misconduct for fear of retaliation from peers and supervisors. One source insisted on meeting at midnight in an abandoned warehouse. Another left records stashed in a graveyard and on top of car tires. A private detective was sure we were being watched at a coffee shop.
Another former officer said he was so scared after reporting misconduct in 2018 that he sent his wife and children away to live with his in-laws. He installed a motion-sensored camera on his porch and slept on the couch with a rifle across his chest.
“When you come forward with this stuff and you see nothing’s happening, you start getting scared,” said Allen Ordeneaux, a former police officer in Amite. “Because this stuff is fixing to blow up in our face.”