Five Louisiana law enforcement officers have been charged with crimes ranging from negligent homicide to malice in the fatal 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, a death authorities initially blamed on a car crash after long-suppressed body-camera video showed white officers being beaten, stunned and dragged. The black biker cried: “I’m scared!”
These were the first criminal charges of any kind to emerge from Greene’s bloody death on a rural northeast Louisiana roadside, receiving little attention until an Associated Press investigation uncovered an investigation by top Louisiana state police figures. , a sweeping U.S. Justice Department review of the agency and a legislative investigation looking into what Governor John Bel Edwards knew and when he knew it.
“We’re all excited about the prosecutions but are they really going to pay for it?” said Greene’s mother, Mona Hardin, who has been pressing state and federal investigators for more than three years and vowed not to cremate her “Ronnie” until justice is served. “As happy as we are, we want to stick to something.”
Facing the most serious charges from a state grand jury Thursday was Master Trooper Corey York, who was shown on body-camera footage dragging Greene by his ankles, forcing him down with his legs behind him and leaving the heavyset man face down. Down in the mud for over nine minutes.
Use-of-force experts say the actions could have dangerously restricted Greene’s breathing, and the state police’s own force instructor called the trooper’s actions “torture and murder.” York was charged with negligent homicide in office and 10 counts of wrongdoing.
Others who faced various counts of disorderly conduct and obstruction included a trooper who denied the existence of his body-camera footage, another who exaggerated Greene’s resistance at the scene, a regional state police commander who pressured detectives not to arrest them. Case and a Union Parish sheriff’s deputy were heard on video taunting Greene, saying: “It hurts loud, doesn’t it?”
“These actions are inexcusable and have no place in professional public safety services,” the state police chief, Col. Lamar Davis, charged, adding that his agency has made “reforms aimed at rebuilding trust” in recent years. the communities we serve.”
Union Parish District Attorney John Belton submitted arrest warrants for all five officers, praising the racially mixed grand jury for hearing evidence, and people speaking out.
Belton had long been barred from pursuing state charges at the request of the Department of Justice (DOJ), which is conducting a separate criminal investigation. But as the years passed and federal prosecutors grew increasingly skeptical they could prove the officers acted “willfully” — a key part of the civil rights charges they were considering — they pushed Belton to convene a state grand jury this spring.
That panel considered extensive evidence and testimony related to the military’s use of force over the past month and decided to leave the handcuffed Greene prone for several minutes before rendering aid. And for the first time in the case, a medical examiner ruled Greene’s death a homicide.
The federal grand jury investigation, which was expanded last year to examine whether state police brass obstructed justice to protect the trooper, remains open, and prosecutors have been tight-lipped about when the panel might rule on charges.
Greene’s May 10, 2019, death was kept secret from the start, when authorities told grieving relatives that the 49-year-old died in a car crash at the end of a high-speed chase near Monroe — an account questioned by both his families. And even an emergency room doctor who noted Greene’s battered body. Still, a coroner’s report listed Greene’s cause of death as a motor vehicle accident, a state police accident report removed any mention of troopers using force, and 462 days would pass before the state police began an internal investigation.
All the while, the body-camera video remained so secret that it was withheld from Greene’s initial autopsy and Edwards officials refused repeated requests to release it, citing the ongoing investigation.
But last year, the AP obtained and published the footage, which shows what actually happened: Soldiers huddled in Greene’s car, repeatedly shocking him, punching him in the head, dragging him by the bones and leaving him on the ground for more than nine minutes. minute. At times, Greene can be heard pleading for mercy and wailing: “I’m your brother! I’m scared! I’m scared!”
The results led to a federal investigation into whether not only the soldiers but top officials obstructed justice to protect them.
Investigators have focused on a meeting in which detectives say state police commanders pressured them to stop the arrest of a trooper seen on body-camera video hitting Greene in the head and later boasting: “I beat the living crap out of him.” That trooper, Chris Hollingsworth, widely seen as the most culpable of the half-dozen officers involved, died in a high-speed, single-vehicle crash in 2020. Greene’s arrest.
The AP later found that Greene’s arrest was among at least a dozen cases over the past decade in which state police troopers or their bosses often ignored or covered up evidence of beatings of black men, deflecting blame and hampering efforts to root out the abuse. Dozens of current and former soldiers said the beatings were viewed by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, racism.
Such reports were cited by the DoJ this year to launch a sweeping civil rights investigation into the Louisiana State Police, the first “pattern or practice” investigation of a statewide law enforcement agency in more than two decades.