During bid for new trial, witness testifies that Rogers LaCaze confessed to 1995 triple murder
By Helen Freund
The Times-Picayune
A new witness claiming to have heard a 1995 jailhouse confession took the stand Friday during a hearing for death-row inmate Rogers LaCaze, who is trying to get a new trial in the triple murder of a police officer and two restaurant employees in eastern New Orleans in 1995.
In a bid to persuade a judge to reject LaCaze's plea for a new trial, prosecutors from the Orleans Parish district attorney's office presented the new witness, who testified that LaCaze told her he was the killer.
The new witness, Kim Carter, contacted prosecutors in June, the day after an eight-day hearing.
LaCaze, now 37, and former New Orleans police officer Antoinette Frank, 42, were charged in the shooting deaths of NOPD officer Ronald "Ronnie" Williams II, 25; Cuong Vu, 17; and Ha Vu, 24, during a robbery at Kim Anh restaurant March 4, 1995. Williams, like Frank, provided off-duty security at the restaurant, and the Vu siblings worked there.
Separate juries in 1995 convicted LaCaze and Frank, and both defendants were sent to death row.
In a packed courtroom in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court on Friday, Carter testified that the day she read about LaCaze's push for a new trial on NOLA.com| The Times-Picayune, she was so disturbed that she couldn't sleep and even went so far as to text a prosecutor acquaintance of hers in the middle of the night to say she wanted to come forward.
"You can't kill people and say, 'Oh, I didn't do it'," Carter said.
Reports show that even though nearly 20 years had passed, Carter had not previously spoken to police, prosecutors or the news media.
Carter, who according to her testimony was friends with LaCaze's family and girlfriend, and even lived with him at one point during the early '90s, described the convicted killer as a violent man prone to outbursts.
She then told presiding judge Michael Kirby what prosecutors are hoping will dissuade the court from granting LaCaze's bid: that during a jailhouse phone call, he told Carter he committed the murders.
"He said he killed those people and he had to get the F out of there," Carter said of her conversation that day with LaCaze.
Carter said she admonished him for talking so candidly on the phone, knowing that they could possibly be recorded.
"He didn't care. He said, 'I don't give a F'."
According to Carter, LaCaze told her that on the day of the shootings, Frank came to pick him up and was upset. Frank, who worked an off-duty detail at the restaurant along with Williams, said she was mad that she was getting fewer detail hours than Williams was, and that she suggested robbing the restaurant to get back at them for what she felt was an injustice.
LaCaze told Carter that he waited in the car, while Frank entered the restaurant.
LaCaze then got out of the car, he told Carter, and knocked on the restaurant's door.
Williams answered, he said. "He said he shot him and he hit the floor," Carter testified.
Carter said LaCaze told her that Frank was "attempting to be Captain Savior" and was in the process of bringing Cuong Vu and Ha Vu to the back of the building when he walked up to her and put a gun to the back of her head, ordering her to shoot the two employees.
"I wasn't going down by myself, so I made that B shoot them too," Carter said LaCaze told her.
"He said, "Antoinette didn't know who the F she was messing with," Carter testified, adding that LaCaze then told her that after Frank shot the brother and sister, he followed suit and shot them both again.
After the murders, Carter told the court, LaCaze fled to his brother's home and asked him to help back up his alibi. LaCaze asked his brother to confirm that the two of them had been at a pool hall on Morrison Road.
Carter told the court that police later found a credit card receipt belonging to Williams, which had reportedly been used at a nearby gas station, a fact that LaCaze's lawyers denied ever happened.
LaCaze's Capital Appeals Project attorneys, Blythe Taplin and Sarah Ottinger, tried to discredit Carter's testimony, painting her as an unstable woman who had an unusual penchant for testifying at murder trials.
In 2011, Carter gave similar testimony in the Houston murder trial of a man who she raised children with. She testified the man confessed to her that he had killed a child more than 10 years earlier.
In that case as well, Taplin pointed out, Carter did not come forward with her testimony until years later. "She has a history of inserting herself into cases," Taplin said.
Taplin said Carter's testimony was "irrelevant" and called her "unstable and erratic," adding that several people who knew Carter said she had told them she was bipolar and was taking medication for her condition.
The defense attorneys also pointed out that the story Carter told the court wasn't feasible because Williams was shot while standing behind a bar on the other side of the restaurant, not near the front door, as Carter claimed LaCaze said.
"What she's describing is impossible," Taplin said.
For their part, LaCaze's lawyers countered with a witness of their own, Darran Reppond, an inmate serving time for a Florida killing. Reppond said he was once housed in the South Louisiana Correctional Center where he met Adam Frank, the brother of Antoinette Frank.
Reppond told the court that Adam Frank had confessed to him that he had killed a New Orleans cop. And Reppond said he cooperated after prosecutors contacted him because, "Frank is a very dangerous man," and "because it's right, nothing more."
Reppond testified that Adam Frank told him that his sister had gotten "messed up in the situation," and that he said that he "ran down an officer and shot him in the head."
Prosecutors Andrew Pinkett and Matthew Kirkham called LaCaze a violent sociopath and argued that Adam Frank's statement to Reppond wasn't credible, as Reppond himself admitted on the stand that Frank was known for making up stories.
"He is right where he belongs to be," Kirkham said, referring to LaCaze.
During the hearing, LaCaze sat quietly between his attorneys. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit and wearing glasses, he chatted during breaks in proceedings and waived and smiled at several audience members prior to the hearing.
The judge is not expected to rule on the case until early next year.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/...ost-convi.html
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