Louisiana Voice

Kevin Reeves showed up, but he may as well not have.

To say that Reeves lacked any propensity for candor would be to belabor the obvious.

Reeves, superintendent of State Police during the time that Ronald Greene was beaten, kicked and tased to death by five Louisiana state troopers, appeared voluntarily on Tuesday before the House committee investigating Greene’s 2019 death.

But for any real insight as to what transpired on the early morning hours of May 10, 2019, Reeves may as well have stayed home.

That’s both disappointing and reminiscent of the manner in which his predecessor, Mike Edmonson, managed to avoid responsibility for the infamous San Diego road trip by several of his troopers in an Louisiana State Police (LSP) vehicle.

And for anyone who thinks for a moment that a new day has dawned at LSP under its current leadership, I have some nice bayou frontage property in New Mexico to sell you.

Reeves, accompanied by Baton Rouge high-dollar defense attorney Lewis Unglesby, was sufficiently adept at the bureaucratic two-step so as to avoid answering direct questions that might have shed some light on the tragic events that began in Ouachita Parish and ended in adjacent Union.

There was one observer who was particularly interested in the hearings into how Troop F, headquartered in Monroe, has become something of a rogue outfit. Former prominent New Orleans attorney Ashton O’Dwyer was taken down by members of Troop F in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Ordered to vacate his home (which had escaped wind and flood damage from the cataclysmic storm), he was hauled to Camp Amtrak where he was brutalized by authorities for hours on end.

O’Dwyer said he was appalled at “how easily Reeves lied,” which he said demonstrated the intrinsic arrogance of Reeves in particular and LSP in general. He said Reeves “truly considers himself so much above the law that he believes he can lie with impunity …and that people will believe his lies.”

O’Dwyer, who was fired by his prestigious New Orleans law firm and his law license revoked after he raised so much hell over the manner in which he was treated by authorities (yet another testament to the individual’s right to due process), said he was surprised Reeves testified at all. “I fully expected him to invoke his 5^th Amendment right against self-incrimination.”

O’Dwyer noted with no small amount of irony that the one individual who was indisputably in charge of LSP, along with his entire command staff, “was disengaged” in serious matters such as the death of a motorist while in State Police custody. “The process that Reeves described in such matters allowed the people at the top to simply pass the buck which in the Ronald Greene case, obviously meant absolving themselves of any and all responsibility.”

O’Dwyer said that in a jury trial, be it a criminal case or in a civil litigation, he believes the following testimony by Reeves [would] cause him serious credibility problems:

• The body cam video of Greene’s beating and tasing is “awful but not unlawful” (a statement attributed to Reeves and even defended in Tuesday’s hearing).
• “I don’t believe there was a cover-up by the State Police.”
• “I know of no cover-up in the Ronald Greene matter.”
• “I don’t believe that body cams were turned off with any intent to cover something up.”
• “The only reason that phones were sanitized (erased) was to restore them to factory setting so they could be re-issued to someone else” (which raises the question of why the phones of Lt. Col. Doug Cain and former LSP executive counsel Faye Morrison were likewise sanitized even though the instruments were not re-issued to others).

“Coincidentally, Reeves’s state-issued phone appears to have been sanitized commensurate with [the] filing of the wrongful death civil litigation,” O’Dwyer said.

He said he was surprised to learn that Col. Lamar Davis, the current superintendent of LSP, coincidentally headed up the department’s Technical Section when those phones were sanitized.

“Coincidentally, Reeves’ personal phone, which he routinely used at work and with which he communicated with the governor, was ‘accidentally crushed’ and also unavailable,” the former attorney noted.

That’s a lot of coincidences

O’Dwyer also was skeptical about the initial report that Greene died from injuries suffered in an auto accident. “No accident reconstruction analysis, which is routine in such cases, was ever performed,” he said.

Gov. John Bel Edwards was informed by Reeves some 10 hours after Greene’s death that he had died following a struggle with police. Yet Edwards remained silent on this point when State Police later tried to say Greene died when his vehicle struck a tree.

It’s not the first time that Edwards has appeared to benefit questionable members of law enforcement. Five years ago, he approved the pardon application of former Tensas Parish Sheriff Jeff Britt, who had pleaded guilty in 1999 to felony charges of misspending public funds and mistreating inmates.

Edwards granted the pardon in March 2017 and four months later appointed Britt to the board of the Used Motor Vehicle Commission.

Following his resignation as part of his plea bargain, Britt, along with someone named Ian Williamson of Spanish Fort, Alabama, operated a prison commissary business, providing snacks to sheriffs around north Louisiana for resale to inmates. They also run an outfit called Inmate Financial Services whereby family members of inmates may “conveniently purchase commissary credits for your incarcerated loved ones” so that they may in turn purchase the snacks from their commissary company, Britt’s Distributing, LLC.