Hardin at first didn’t recognize the shrouded corpse as her son when she was allowed to see him later a funeral home. “It didn’t look like what they said,” Wade said. Loved ones arriving at the hospital in West Monroe became suspicious after seeing the deep bruises on Greene’s face and cuts on his head. Those fears were confirmed when her daughter called her early that morning in a panic, saying Greene had been in a crash and “didn’t make it.” Alana Wilson said a state trooper told her by telephone that her brother “was in a car accident, hit a tree, went through the windshield and died on impact.” Hundreds of miles away, in central Florida, Hardin said she “felt in my soul something was wrong with Ronnie.” Another, Chris Hollingsworth, struck Greene in the head several times with a flashlight, and was later captured on his squad car video boasting he “beat the ever-living f- out of him.” One trooper, Kory York, could be seen on body-camera video briefly dragging him facedown by his ankle shackles. It ended with troopers converging on Greene’s SUV, beating him, jolting him with stun guns and leaving him handcuffed and prone for several minutes as he pleaded for mercy and wailed:“I’m your brother! I’m scared!” Greene, who an autopsy would show had cocaine in his system, sped away, leading troopers on a chase that topped speeds of 115 mph. Not long before midnight on May 10, 2019, the 49-year-old Greene was driving near the University of Louisiana at Monroe when a trooper attempted to pull him over for a traffic violation. “In the end, you just end up being part of a big nightmare,” Hardin said. Hardin saw her son’s assailants stay on the job, unpunished for months, the then-head of the state police defending Greene’s deadly arrest as “awful but lawful” before abruptly retiring, and the body camera video remaining a secret from the public for more than two years before the AP obtained and published it this spring.Īll of it has deepened her family’s pain, she said, while making a mockery of the criminal justice system. After a federal probe that’s dragged on more than two years, still none of the officers involved in Greene’s arrest has been criminally charged.Īlong the way, the 70-year-old Hardin says her repeated trips to Washington, D.C., and Baton Rouge have been met with empty promises from officials, institutional wagon-circling and indifference. And by the state police’s own count, 67% of troopers’ uses of forcein recent years targeted Black people.īut it’s been a frustrating crusade. An Associated Press investigation identified at least a dozen cases over the past decade in which troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Indeed, Greene is not the only Black motorist abused in recent years by Louisiana’s premier law enforcement agency.
Hardin recoils at the pattern of police misconduct that’s emerged since her quest began. “We have to relive this constantly,” Hardin told The Associated Press in an interview near her Orlando-area home. She holds tightly to her son’s cremated remains and says she won’t be able to put him to rest until she gets justice. She’s haunted by the body-camera images of her son Ronald Greene being punched, stunned and dragged by Louisiana State Police, and she’s enraged that troopers initially tried to explain away the Black man’s 2019 death as the result of a car crash. (AP) - Mona Hardin calls it her walking nightmare.