When the Blueprint Is the Crime: Racial Terror, Parental Accountability, and the Architecture of Hate in Zachary, Louisiana

By Andrea Hagan, Criminologist & Founder, Pattern Hunters LLC

Plantation Way.

Say it slowly. Let it marinate. Because before the first fire was allegedly set, before the first tire was allegedly slashed, before a 13-year-old boy allegedly crossed the street in a Ku Klux Klan robe at midnight and spray-painted the word nigger on Caroline Morrison-Howard’s garage door — before any of that, according to a civil lawsuit filed in the 19th Judicial District Court — somebody chose to name a neighborhood Plantation Way. Put it on a wooden sign in Gothic script. Flanked it with brick pillars. Hung an American flag over it and called it home.

That sign is not a backdrop to this story. That sign is the story.

Caroline Morrison-Howard has lived on Littlefield Avenue in Zachary, Louisiana for decades. Same street. Same house. A Black elder rooted in East Baton Rouge Parish long enough to watch the trees in her yard grow tall, long enough to watch an entire neighborhood develop around her, long enough to watch new families move in across the street and believe, as neighbors do, that proximity creates community. She dedicated her professional life to protecting children — to making sure that children, regardless of color, were served, protected, and not harmed. She spent her career in service to the young. And now, in her retirement, she cannot return to her own home.

This is not a story about a bad kid. This is a story about a blueprint. About who draws them, who builds from them, who inherits them, and what Louisiana law does — and refuses to do — when the structure collapses on the people inside.

The Land Itself Has Memory

Before we talk about what happened on Littlefield Avenue, we have to talk about where Littlefield Avenue is. Because geography is never neutral, and in Louisiana, it is rarely innocent.

Zachary, Louisiana, sits in the northern portion of East Baton Rouge Parish, approximately sixteen miles north of Baton Rouge. The city owes its very existence to a Confederate veteran. Darel Zachary, born in 1827, owned a 160-acre plantation on which the city now stands. In the 1880s, he sold that land to the Illinois Central Railroad for one dollar, and a town grew up around the depot (WBRZ, 2026). The town took his name. The city that Black families like Miss Caroline’s eventually called home was built on plantation land, named for a Confederate, and incorporated in 1889 — twenty-four years after emancipation, deep in the violence of Reconstruction’s collapse.

Zachary High School was established in 1912. It was segregated. There was no public high school open to Black students in Zachary until 1954 — the same year as Brown v. Board of Education — and the school itself did not desegregate until the 1970s (Wikipedia, 2025). The East Baton Rouge Parish School System and Zachary’s schools separated in 2002, creating a majority-white school district that many analysts have identified as a mechanism of re-segregation by institutional design.

By 2019, Zachary’s population was nearly evenly split — approximately 49% non-Hispanic white and 47.6% Black (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). Two communities, nearly equal in number, on the same land. But not with the same history on that land, and not with the same relationship to the institutions that govern it.

Into this geography, a developer planted a subdivision and named it Plantation Way. Gothic script. Brick pillars. American flag.

Not a coincidence. A declaration.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) taught us that geography is the materialization of power — that who lives where, under what conditions, with what protections, is never accidental. Katherine McKittrick (2011) extended that analysis to Black geographies specifically, arguing that Black people have always had to claim, contest, and be violently removed from land that others considered theirs by default. Richard Rothstein (2017), in The Color of Law, documented how neighborhood naming, restrictive covenants, and design conventions were used throughout the twentieth century to maintain racial geography in American communities — to signal, legally and extrajudicially, who belonged and who was merely tolerated.

Miss Caroline bought her home and built her life on Littlefield Avenue. She was there before the Popes. She was there before the neighborhood fully formed around her. She extended the kind of neighborliness — the love of neighbor that does not check color at the door — that the entire architecture of American racial geography was designed to deny Black people. She never needed a restrictive covenant. She never wanted one. She welcomed everyone who came.

And what allegedly moved in across the street — according to the civil petition and press conference testimony — brought a Nazi flag, a Klan robe, a can of spray paint, and a father who, according to Attorney Ryan Thompson, posted to social media: you got to teach him young (Thompson, press conference, June 8, 2026).

The history of racial terror in the American South is inseparable from the history of fire (Rothstein, 2017). Night riders. Burning crosses. Torched homes. These were not random acts of individual hatred. They were instruments of a spatial system — designed to communicate, enforce, and preserve the racial geography of who belonged where. When a ditch adjacent to an elderly Black woman’s home is allegedly set ablaze in December 2025 in a subdivision called Plantation Way, in a city built on a Confederate veteran’s plantation land, the history does not need to be explained. It needs only to be recognized.

Same script, different cast.

The Architecture of a Six-Month Campaign

In December 2025, Miss Caroline received word that a fire had allegedly been set in the ditch adjacent to her property. Attorney Ryan K. Thompson, who filed the civil lawsuit on behalf of the Morrison-Howard family in the 19th Judicial District Court, argued at a June 8, 2026, press conference that this constitutes aggravated arson whereby human life could be placed in danger (Thompson, press conference, June 8, 2026). Miss Caroline is an elder. She would have been sleeping.

The fire was not the beginning of a story that escalated. The fire was the beginning of a pattern — and the Louisiana Revised Statutes recognize the difference.

Weeks after the fire, tires on a vehicle at Miss Caroline’s address were allegedly punctured. Several weeks after that, the tires were allegedly punctured again — and this time, a swastika was allegedly etched into the car of the woman serving as Miss Caroline’s daycare keeper. The campaign was methodical. Each act distinct enough to be dismissed individually. Together they constitute what Thompson and co-counsel Attorney Jessica Hawkins identified on the record as stalking under Louisiana law — a crime of violence — and terrorism, also a crime of violence (Thompson, press conference, June 8, 2026).

The culminating event arrived when Shooter Pope — the 13-year-old son of Ryan Pope and Jamie Pope, who lived directly across the street — allegedly crossed Littlefield Avenue at midnight. He was allegedly wearing a KKK robe. He allegedly spray-painted the word nigger on Miss Caroline’s garage. He allegedly referenced 1488 — white supremacist code for the fourteen words of neo-Nazi ideology and Heil Hitler. He allegedly spray-painted names on the property. He came, based on witness accounts, with what appeared to be a firearm, and social media posts found by investigators showed Shooter with what appeared to be a rifle, accompanied by a statement from someone believed to be his father: you got to teach him young (Thompson, press conference, June 8, 2026).

According to statements made by Attorney Thompson at the June 8 press conference, when officers arrived at the Pope residence, they found a Nazi flag hanging on Shooter’s bedroom wall.

Not hidden. Hanging.

Eugene Collins of the Baton Rouge NAACP named it without hesitation at the press conference: domestic terrorism. “Nothing short” (Collins, press conference, June 8, 2026). He noted that Shooter Pope smirked at the Morrison-Howard family in court. He noted that the day the vandalism occurred, Shooter and his mother stood in the driveway and waved at the family.

Miss Caroline has not been able to return to her home.

Theory: The Blueprint Requires a Draftsman

Shooter Pope did not come out of his mother’s womb in a Klan robe. He did not come out knowing what 1488 means. He did not come out calling Black people niggers. He did not arrive in this world ready to cross the street at midnight, set fire to a ditch, slash tires, etch swastikas, and terrorize an elderly Black woman who had done nothing to him, who did not even know him. None of that is born. All of it is made.

Albert Bandura’s (1999) theory of moral disengagement identifies the psychological mechanisms through which ordinary people come to commit acts of harm without experiencing moral conflict: dehumanization of the target, moral justification of the act, displacement of responsibility onto authority or ideology. These mechanisms are not innate. They are transmitted through language, through example, through the symbols that hang on bedroom walls, the words that run at the dinner table, and the social media posts a father publishes for the world to see.

Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory locates the family as the child’s primary microsystem — the environment closest to the child, most formative, most persistent. What lives in that house lives in that child. For thirteen years, Shooter Pope allegedly lived in a house where a Nazi flag hung on his bedroom wall — according to press conference testimony. For thirteen years, he allegedly heard language and witnessed behavior that told him what Black people were and what he was permitted to do about it. He is thirteen. That means for thirteen years — his entire conscious life — this was his education.

Louisiana’s one-drop rule once determined a child’s entire life status — enslaved or free, property or person — based on what lived in the blood of the parent (Domínguez, 1986). One drop of African ancestry and your fate was sealed. What the parent carried, the child inherited. Status transferred. Condition passed down.

Turn that logic over. Apply it to ideology instead of ancestry. If a child spends thirteen years in a household where the N-word is allegedly spoken freely, where a Klan robe is allegedly stored, where a Nazi flag allegedly hangs on the wall, where the father allegedly posts you got to teach him young — what drops into that child? What accumulates, year by year, in the formative environment of a boy who has known nothing else?

We are not excusing Shooter Pope. We are prosecuting the architecture that produced him. And we are demanding that the law reach the architects.

Charles Mills (1997) called it the epistemology of ignorance — the arrangement of society’s knowledge systems so that it cannot see, and therefore cannot name, what it has built racially. The epistemology of ignorance does not require active deception. It requires only the quiet maintenance of conditions that make certain patterns convenient to dismiss as isolated incidents. A December fire. A slashed tire. A swastika on a car. Each processed alone. Never summed. Never named.

Thompson named it. The totality of circumstances. Six months. One campaign. One family. One target.

Intersectionality: The Specific Vulnerability of Miss Caroline

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality framework demands that we account for the layered nature of vulnerability — that race, gender, age, and class do not operate independently but compound one another in specific contexts of harm.

Miss Caroline is a Black elder woman who dedicated her professional life to the protection and service of children. She spent her career making sure that children — regardless of color — were not abused, not neglected, not left without care. She is the kind of person this state should surround with protection in her retirement. Instead, she cannot return to her own home.

The child, her neighbor raised, allegedly terrorized her for six months, according to the civil petition filed in the 19th Judicial District Court. That child does not know her. His parents likely do not know her. The hatred that allegedly crossed the street at midnight had nothing to do with who Miss Caroline is and everything to do with what she represents to a household that, according to the civil petition and press conference testimony, allegedly spent thirteen years teaching a boy that Black people are targets.

She has a daycare keeper, which tells us something about her physical circumstances and the care she requires. The fire was set at night. The culminating incident occurred at midnight. Her home is adjacent to the woods. She is an elder living in a neighborhood called Plantation Way, on land once part of a Confederate veteran’s plantation, in a city that did not desegregate its schools until the 1970s.

None of that is incidental. All of it is geography. All of it is history. All of it compounds.

Louisiana law recognizes this layered vulnerability. R.S. 14:93.3 — cruelty to persons with infirmities — defines elderly as any individual sixty years of age or older and provides for up to ten years imprisonment with hard labor when the act of cruelty is intentional and malicious, with at least one year served without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence (La. R.S. 14:93.3, 2025). The psychological suffering inflicted on Miss Caroline — who cannot return to her own home out of fear of retaliation — is precisely the unjustifiable suffering the statute was designed to address.

This statute has not been publicly invoked in connection with the Shooter Pope case. That is a gap. And gaps in the application of law to protect Black elders from racial terror are not administrative oversights. They are choices.

The Covenant Inverted

Rothstein (2017) documented how restrictive covenants — private agreements backed by state power, enforced by courts until Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 — were used throughout America to prevent Black families from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. The covenant was the instrument of spatial terror made legal. It said, in writing: this ground is not for you.

Miss Caroline never needed a restrictive covenant. She never wanted to restrict anyone. She bought her home and extended the love and decency that the covenant system was designed to deny to people who looked like her. She welcomed everyone. She loved her neighbors. She treated people the way she was taught to treat them — the way her mother taught her, the way the scripture she lives by demands.

What allegedly moved in across the street — according to the civil petition — introduced the element the covenant was supposedly designed to keep out. Not the Black elder. Not the woman who spent her career protecting children. The household with the alleged Nazi flag. The family whose son allegedly crossed the street in Klan garb. The parents who have denied everything and crossed the street for nothing except to stand in the driveway and wave.

The covenant logic, turned over, indicts its own architects. In 2026, in a subdivision called Plantation Way, on land built from a Confederate veteran’s plantation, an elderly Black woman who never restricted anyone finds herself unable to return to her own home because of the element her neighbor allegedly raised and allegedly released into the street.

The irony is not rhetorical. It is structural. It is the whole point.

Law: What Is Charged, What Is Owed, and What the Gap Reveals

Shooter Pope was charged with criminal damage to property, criminal trespass, and hate crimes. He was adjudicated. He was released on bond without an ankle monitor and without a mental health evaluation.

He smirked in court.

Miss Caroline’s son, Kwasi Wallace, was present at the proceedings. He told the press conference audience that if he and his sister had not been there, the charges would have been dropped that morning and Shooter Pope would have been back across the street (Wallace, press conference, June 8, 2026). The family was not notified in advance. They showed up because they knew they had to.

Thompson raised the comparison that no one in authority has been willing to make publicly: if this pattern of conduct — arson, property destruction, intimidation, escalating hate symbols, a midnight confrontation with an apparent weapon — had occurred in a domestic violence context, no Louisiana jurisdiction would release that individual without an ankle monitor and a mandatory mental health evaluation (Thompson, press conference, June 8, 2026). The standard for protective intervention exists. The mechanism exists. The variable is whether the law recognizes what the civil petition describes as a white supremacist minor’s alleged six-month terror campaign against a Black elder neighbor as equivalent in danger to intimate partner violence.

It should. It does not. That is the gap.

Louisiana statutes that deserve full prosecutorial deployment in this case:

Stalking (La. R.S. 14:40.2): Repeated acts constituting a pattern of conduct that causes a person reasonable fear of bodily injury or death. Six months of alleged arson, alleged property destruction, alleged swastikas, and an alleged midnight confrontation with a weapon meets this threshold on its face.

Terrorism (La. R.S. 14:128.1): Intentional commission of a criminal act to intimidate or coerce a civilian population. The alleged 1488 reference — white supremacist ideology deployed as a message — argues intent to terrorize beyond one household.

Elder cruelty (La. R.S. 14:93.3): Intentional infliction of unjustifiable suffering on a person sixty years of age or older. Miss Caroline cannot return to her home. That is the suffering. That is the statute.

Parental liability (La. Civil Code Art. 2318): Parents are responsible for damage caused by their minor child who resides with them. According to Kwasi Wallace’s testimony at the June 8 press conference, the Pope family has denied their son’s involvement, crossed no streets, made no calls, and done nothing to repair the harm done to Miss Caroline.

The EBRSO has reportedly indicated it will not bring criminal charges against the parents at this time. That decision is not neutral. It is a posture. And it sits alongside the fact that Jamie Pope — Shooter’s mother — ran for Louisiana House of Representatives District 65 in 2023 as a Republican, presenting herself as a private investigator with the skills to be a “vigilant watchdog over local and state politics” and an advocate for transparency in government (Pope for Louisiana, 2023). She lost that primary to Lauren Ventrella — the same State Representative who showed up at Miss Caroline’s press conference and pledged to make calls on the family’s behalf.

The person who wanted to represent this community in the Louisiana legislature allegedly raised a child with a Nazi flag on his bedroom wall, according to press conference testimony. The person who won that seat stood in Miss Caroline’s driveway. The contrast is not lost on Pattern Hunters, and it should not be lost on Louisiana.

The Double Standard Has a Name — and a Face

Governor Jeff Landry built his political identity on being tough on crime. On April 24, 2026 — six weeks before Shooter Pope allegedly crossed Littlefield Avenue in Klan garb — Landry held a press conference following the Mall of Louisiana shooting and denounced what he called “hug a thug” policies that he claimed allowed criminals to return to the streets (NOLA.com, 2026). He called for accountability. He called for consequences. He called for the full weight of the law.

His office has been silent on Shooter Pope.

Put two cases side by side and let Louisiana explain the difference.

Markel Lee is a Black teenager from zip code 70802 in Baton Rouge. In 2024, he was filmed for the Baton Rouge Community Street Team — a violence-prevention program serving young people in the neighborhoods where prevention has to fight harder than the violence to keep its footing. On camera, at sixteen, he told a journalist that music became his therapy after his mother was shot, his aunt was incarcerated, and too many people in his world had died. He was enrolled. He was engaged. He was holding on (Hagan, 2026).

Then, Louisiana defunded the program. Sateria Tate Alexander, Program Director of the Baton Rouge Community Street Team, has continued working to track and interrupt violence in those zip codes using color-coded mapping of murders, shootings, and robberies going back to 2021 (WAFB, 2025). But the budget zeroed out the jobs, housing assistance, counseling, and conflict mediation that held young people like Markel Lee in the program’s orbit (Hagan, 2026). The architecture built to hold him was dismantled. He was returned to the street.

In April 2026, he was charged with the murder of seventeen-year-old Martha Odom at the Mall of Louisiana food court. He is being prosecuted as an adult under Senate Bill 3 — signed by Governor Landry and effective April 19, 2024 — which made Louisiana the only state in the country to pass Raise the Age legislation and then fully reverse it, funneling all seventeen-year-olds into adult court from arrest to sentencing (Hagan, 2026). Angola is on the table.

Now look at Shooter Pope.

Shooter Pope is a white thirteen-year-old from Plantation Way in Zachary. According to the civil petition filed in the 19th Judicial District Court and press conference testimony, over six months he allegedly set a fire adjacent to an elderly Black woman’s home, allegedly slashed tires twice, allegedly etched a swastika into a car, allegedly crossed the street at midnight in a Klan robe with what appeared to be a firearm, allegedly spray-painted the word nigger on a garage door, and allegedly referenced 1488 — white supremacist code for neo-Nazi ideology — on the property of Caroline Morrison-Howard, a Black elder who dedicated her career to protecting children.

He was adjudicated in juvenile court. Released on bond. No ankle monitor. No mental health evaluation. He smirked at the family in court. His parents waved from the driveway the day it happened.

Landry’s “hug a thug” language was deployed against a Black teenager in a mall within six weeks of this press conference. He has said nothing about the white teenager on Littlefield Avenue who allegedly conducted six months of racial terror against a Black elder and walked out of court smirking.

This silence has a pattern that predates the governorship. During his campaign, Landry’s videos called out the District Attorneys of Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans parishes for crime rates in their jurisdictions — highlighting images of the two Black prosecutors while omitting any footage of East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore, who is white (Bolts, 2023). The selectivity of Landry’s tough-on-crime posture is documented in his own campaign materials.

East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore has built his career on juvenile accountability, stating publicly that a juvenile who commits murder being released at age 21 is “just not acceptable to victims” and calling for a full overhaul of the state’s juvenile justice system (KPLC, 2022). He has advocated loudly, repeatedly, for holding young offenders accountable.

The Morrison-Howard family reached out to his office. A detective promised to call back. A week passed. No call. No meeting. Nothing (Wallace, press conference, June 8, 2026).

The boy in the prevention video and the girl in the food court were, as this publication has already documented, not two separate stories — they are the same budget line read from two ends (Hagan, 2026). Apply that same logic here: Markel Lee and Shooter Pope are not two separate stories either. They are the same double standard read from two ends. One child the state abandoned and then prosecuted as an adult for the consequences of that abandonment. One child who, based on the public record, appears to be receiving considerations the first child never received.

Kwasi Wallace put it plainly: if a person of his color had done what Shooter Pope did, they would have been put under the jail (Wallace, press conference, June 8, 2026). He is not making a rhetorical point. He is making an empirical one, grounded in decades of documented racial disparity in juvenile adjudication, charging decisions, and prosecutorial discretion in East Baton Rouge Parish and across Louisiana (Rovner, 2023; The Sentencing Project, 2021).

If the “hug a thug” framework applies, it applies here. If parental accountability is a Louisiana value, it applies here. If the full weight of the law means anything, it means here. And if it does not apply here — if Shooter Pope receives a different standard than the Black children of North Baton Rouge, than Markel Lee, than every young person the state has processed through its adult courts under SB3 — then Louisiana has confirmed, in the case of a woman who dedicated her life to children and cannot return to her own home, exactly what its tough-on-crime posture was always actually about.

The Theological Contradiction

The Ku Klux Klan has always wrapped its ideology in Christian language. Purity. God’s order. The natural hierarchy of races as divine design. The robe. The cross. The invocation of a God whose scripture they have read selectively enough to miss 1 John 4:20: If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar.

There is no theological tradition that authorizes what was allegedly done to Miss Caroline. There is no reading of scripture — not in the tradition of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not in any honest engagement with the text — that produces what the civil petition and press conference testimony describe: an alleged Klan robe, an alleged Nazi flag, a can of spray paint, and an alleged midnight walk across a street to terrorize an elderly woman who spent her life protecting children. What the ideology calls purity is not found in any legitimate reading of the faith it claims. The robe was never holy, and if it was, they desecrated it by their unholy actions.

Miss Caroline’s son knows the difference. Her community knows the difference. The scripture itself makes the difference plain.

Conclusion: Why We Cannot Get Over It

People ask Black people in America why they cannot get over it. Why they keep bringing up race. Why they keep fighting for protections that others claim are no longer necessary. Why, in a so-called post-racial society, they insist on remembering.

This is why.

A woman who gave her career to protecting children — who loved her neighbors without restriction, who watched a neighborhood build around her, and welcomed everyone who came — cannot return to her own home in her retirement because, according to the civil petition and press conference testimony, someone allegedly taught a child to hate her before he ever knew her. She is not a symbol. She is a person. And she is not safe in her own house.

The reason Black people cannot get over it is not because they are fixated on the past. It is because the past allegedly keeps showing up at midnight in a Klan robe and spray-painting the evidence on the garage door — or at least that is what the civil petition filed in the 19th Judicial District Court says happened on Littlefield Avenue.

The reason we keep fighting for civil rights protections — for the Voting Rights Act, for the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act still waiting for a Senate floor vote, for the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act that exists because a Black man was dragged to death by white supremacists in Texas and a young man was beaten to death in Wyoming, for hate crime statutes, for the Elder Justice Act, for elder protection laws, for oversight of the offices that are supposed to watch the watchmen — is because the moment we stop, this is what the ground looks like. Plantation Way. An alleged Nazi flag on a bedroom wall. A smirk in court. A DA who never called back.

Somebody has to be a watcher over the watchers. Somebody has to correct the ones that are supposed to be correctors. Pattern Hunters is here for exactly that.

The blueprint for what allegedly happened to Miss Caroline — according to a civil petition, a juvenile arrest, and testimony delivered on the record by named parties — was not drawn by a 13-year-old. It was drawn by adults. Allegedly maintained by adults. Allegedly hung on a wall by adults. Passed down with the instruction — posted publicly, in writing, for investigators to find — you got to teach him young.

Louisiana has the law. It has the statutes. It has the framework. What the Morrison-Howard case reveals is the distance between what the law provides on paper and what the state extends in practice to a Black elder woman on Littlefield Avenue when the person who allegedly terrorized her — according to the civil petition filed in the 19th Judicial District Court — is the son of a family whose members have been publicly photographed with elected officials, in a subdivision called Plantation Way, in a city named for a Confederate veteran’s plantation.

That distance is structural. That distance is the pattern.

Pattern Hunters is watching. And we are not going anywhere.

Andrea Hagan is a criminologist, public intellectual, and the founder of Pattern Hunters LLC — a public scholarship and investigative journalism platform that sits at the intersection of community, academy, and institutional accountability, and refuses to let any of them off the hook. Her work has appeared in the Louisiana Illuminator, The Lens, The Conversation, The Times-Picayune, and The Baton Rouge Advocate, among other publications. She can be reached at andrea@patternhunters.com.

References

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

Bolts Magazine. (2023, October 16). Jeff Landry’s bid for Louisiana governor has been a crusade against its cities. https://boltsmag.org/jeff-landry-governor-race-new-orleans-policing/

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.

Collins, E. (2026, June 8). Statement at Morrison-Howard press conference [Press conference remarks]. Zachary, Louisiana.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

Domínguez, V. R. (1986). White by definition: Social classification in Creole Louisiana. Rutgers University Press.

Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press.

Hagan, A. (2026, May 7). The boy in the video, the boy in the mugshot: Louisiana met Markel Lee twice. The Lens. https://thelensnola.org/2026/05/07/louisiana-violence-prevention-markel-lee-martha-odom/

John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2025, H.R. 14, 119th Cong. (2025). https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/14

Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, 18 U.S.C. § 249 (2009).

KPLC TV. (2022, December 1). EBR District Attorney urging leaders to overhaul state’s juvenile justice system. https://www.kplctv.com/2022/12/01/ebr-district-attorney-urging-leaders-overhaul-states-juvenile-justice-system/

Louisiana Civil Code Article 2318 (2025). Liability for acts of minor child. Louisiana State Legislature.

Louisiana Revised Statute § 14:40.2 (2025). Stalking. Louisiana State Legislature.

Louisiana Revised Statute § 14:93.3 (2025). Cruelty to persons with infirmities. Louisiana State Legislature.

Louisiana Revised Statute § 14:128.1 (2025). Terrorism. Louisiana State Legislature.

McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a Black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(8), 947–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.624280

Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press.

Morrison-Howard civil petition, 19th Judicial District Court, East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana (2026).

NOLA.com. (2026, April 30). Gov. Jeff Landry speaks out on ‘hug a thug’ comments after Mall of Louisiana mass shooting. https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/jeff-landry-mall-of-louisiana-shooting/

Pope for Louisiana. (2023). About Jamie. https://www.popeforla.com/about/

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing.

Rovner, J. (2023). Black disparities in youth incarceration. The Sentencing Project.

The Sentencing Project. (2021). Race and justice: Too little progress. https://www.sentencingproject.org

Thompson, R. K. (2026, June 8). Press conference remarks on behalf of the Morrison-Howard family [Press conference]. Zachary, Louisiana.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2019). American Community Survey: Zachary city, Louisiana. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/zacharycitylouisiana

Vaughan, D. (1997). The Challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. University of Chicago Press.

Ventrella, L. (2026, June 8). Statement at Morrison-Howard press conference [Press conference remarks]. Zachary, Louisiana.

Wallace, K. (2026, June 8). Statement at Morrison-Howard press conference [Press conference remarks]. Zachary, Louisiana.

WAFB. (2025, October 2). Street team works to reduce Baton Rouge crime as National Guard is requested. https://www.wafb.com/2025/10/02/street-team-works-reduce-baton-rouge-crime-national-guard-is-requested/

To contact the Baton Rouge Community Street Team directly or to support their work in zip codes 70802 and 70805, visit https://www.brcst.org

WBRZ. (2026, May 6). WBRZ flashback: Zachary is born. https://www.wbrz.com/news/wbrz-flashback-zachary-is-born

Wikipedia. (2025). Zachary High School. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_High_School

Windisch, S., Simi, P., Ligon, G. S., & McNeel, H. (2022). Disengagement from ideologically-based and violent organizations: A systematic review of the literature. Journal of Groups in Conflict and Resolution, 2(1), 1–28.