Five Louisiana law enforcement officers were charged with state crimes ranging from negligent homicide to malfeasance Thursday in the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene. They are the first charges to emerge from a death authorities initially blamed on a car crash before long suppressed body-camera video showed white officers beating, stunning and dragging the Black motorist as he wailed, “I’m scared!”
Five Louisiana law enforcement officers were charged with state crimes ranging from negligent homicide to malfeasance Thursday in the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene. They are the first charges to emerge from a death authorities initially blamed on a car crash before long suppressed body-camera video showed white officers beating, stunning and dragging the Black motorist as he wailed, “I’m scared!”
Greene’s bloody death on a roadside in rural northeast Louisiana got little attention until an Associated Press investigation exposed a cover-up and prompted scrutiny of top Louisiana State Police brass, a sweeping U.S. Justice Department review of the agency and a legislative inquiry now looking at what Gov. John Bel Edwards knew and when he knew it.
Facing the most serious charges from a state grand jury was Master Trooper Kory York, who was seen on the body-camera footage dragging Greene by his ankle shackles and leaving the heavyset man face down in the dirt for more than nine minutes. York was charged with negligent homicide and 10 counts of malfeasance in office.
Others, including a Union Parish sheriff’s deputy and three other troopers, were charged with malfeasance and obstruction of justice.
“We’re all excited for the indictments, but are they actually going to pay for it?” said Greene’s mother, Mona Hardin, who for more than three years has kept the pressure on state and federal investigators and vowed not to bury the cremated remains of her “Ronnie” until she gets justice. “As happy as we are, we want something to stick.”
Union Parish District Attorney John Belton submitted arrest warrants for all five of the indicted officers.
Belton had long held off on pursuing state charges at the request of the U.S. Justice Department, which is conducting a separate criminal investigation. But as years passed and federal prosecutors grew increasingly skeptical they could prove the officers acted “willfully” — a key component of the civil rights charges they’ve been considering — they gave Belton the go-ahead this spring to convene a state grand jury.
