(Louisiana Illuminator) — Caroline Morrison-Howard has lived on Littlefield Avenue in Central for decades, inside the Plantation Way subdivision.
That neighborhood name choice has taken on new significance.
According to a lawsuit filed June 4 in 19th Judicial District Court, a 13-year-old neighbor began a six-month campaign in December against Morrison-Howard. Court documents detail the escalation: a caregiver’s tire punctured on two occasions, a swastika etched into a vehicle in her driveway, a fire set in the ditch beside the house.
And then the culminating act. Court records describe the child crossing the street at midnight in a KKK robe to spray-paint a racial slur on Morrison-Howard’s garage door and mark her property with “1488”, white supremacist code for neo-Nazi ideology.
The East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office has charged the boy with hate crimes, criminal damage to property and criminal trespass. At a June 8 news conference, Morrison-Howard’s attorney Ryan Thompson called on the district attorney’s office to go further.
“These repeated acts would be considered stalking and terrorism, which are crimes of violence,” Thompson said, pointing to Louisiana’s stalking and terrorism statutes. He cited other state laws he believes apply to Morrison-Howard’s situation as an elder forced from her home. She is currently living with relatives.
East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore had not responded publicly to Thompson’s comments as of Tuesday.
Sociologist Diane Vaughan’s normalization of deviance theory explains the six months of escalating conduct in Plantation Way. Each act was absorbed without structural consequence until the culminating act arrived as inevitability rather than surprise.
At the June 8 news conference, Morrison-Howard’s son, Kwasi Wallace, called on Gov. Jeff Landry to be consistent with his tough talk against crime.
The governor held a news conference after the fatal Mall of Louisiana shooting in April, where expressed frustration with what he called “hug-a-thug” criminal justice policies and judges he feels are too lenient in their punishments.
“You’re not gonna hug a thug, and let’s not kiss a Klansman,” Wallace said outside his mother’s home last week.
The governor has not commented publicly on the incident, which has led Morrison-Howard to relocate to a relative’s home for the time being.
The 13-year-old from Littlefield Avenue does not live alone. A KKK robe does not end up on his body without a household that put it there.
Criminologist Edwin Sutherland established nearly a century ago that criminal behavior is learned. It’s not inherited, not innate, but transmitted in intimate personal groups through modeling, language and daily reinforcement.
The data won’t let Louisiana look away from what this case represents. The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report shows Louisiana officially recorded 71 hate crimes in 2024 — up 37% from 2023 — even as national totals declined. Nationally, anti-Black incidents accounted for the largest single category of race-based hate crimes for the third consecutive year.
And because 81% of reporting agencies either didn’t submit hate crime data to the FBI or reported no incidents, the real numbers are almost certainly higher.
Many eyes will follow what transpires after this unbridled display of hate in Plantation Way. For Louisiana’s sake, it should be meaningful accountability and not dismissive “we’re better than this” lip service.
If allowed to go ignored, it all but ensures the same behavior will be repeated with worsening intensity.
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Andrea Hagan is a criminologist and the founder of Pattern Hunters LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement and accountability.
