NEW ORLEANS — Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick relented Friday and turned over 37,000 pages of public records to a grieving father in Missouri who wants to know why nobody was charged with killing his son in Metairie seven years ago.
The DA told Bob Arthur the records of its closed investigation into his son Shawn Arthur’s death were ready for him to review in September, but because he lives near Kansas City, he would have to pay $18,500 in fees for paper copies, or $5,550 for scanning and redacting digital copies of the documents.
Arthur sued the DA’s office in January with help from the Tulane Law School First Amendment Clinic, arguing the Louisiana Public Records Act does not permit charging the public for labor.
“People deserve access to government records as a basic mechanism of accountability and transparency,” said Melia Cerrato, Sunshine Fellow with the First Amendment Clinic. “We deserve to know how our government is operating. We pay taxes to support our government, and we have a right to see records without paying exorbitant fees.”
Arthur suddenly received the records for free this week, just days before a hearing in court on the matter that had been set for Monday and is now delayed while Arthur reviews the records.
“It is important to pursue this case to help the general public with getting documents at fair prices,” Arthur said. “Families deserve access to these types of records so that they can learn the truth. Why did it take a year and a costly lawsuit for them to provide these records to me?”
What’s more, a Louisiana Senate committee advanced a bill this week that would allow government agencies to require proof of Louisiana residency before responding to a public records request. Bob Arthur said if that passed, it would have required him to hire an attorney in Louisiana just to request the records related to the investigation of his son’s death.
That’s all the more significant because Arthur was forced to investigate his own son’s death to find out what really happened to him. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office closed its investigation after quickly deciding Shawn’s death was an accident, without following a lead to a prostitute who had visited Shawn’s Metairie apartment the night he died. The investigators in the case said the prostitute, Dominique Berry, did not want to be found and gave up.
Bob had to hire private investigators to track down Berry in a Georgia jail, where she admitted giving drugs and alcohol to dozens of men, including Shawn Arthur, to help her pimp, Randy Schenck, rob them. That led directly to federal prosecutors charging Schenck and Berry with sex trafficking and identity theft, and Schenck was found in federal court to have caused Shawn’s death.
U.S. District Judge Barry Ashe ordered Schenck to pay the Arthurs restitution for causing Shawn’s death. Jefferson Parish Coroner Gerry Cvitanovich testified that outside experts overruled his pathologist’s ruling of an accident, forcing his office to change the cause of death from accidental to undetermined. At one point, Judge Ashe even asked federal prosecutors why Schenck hadn’t been charged with murder. Federal prosecutor Jordan Ginsberg responded that murder is a state crime, not a federal one.
For years, WWL Louisiana followed Arthur’s efforts to get Connick’s office to charge Schenck with the state crime of murder. Under Louisiana criminal law, if someone dies as a result of a robbery or other felony, it’s murder.
But on Feb. 23, 2023, the sixth anniversary of Shawn Arthur’s death, the DA’s office closed the matter without going to a grand jury, saying it “determined that there is insufficient evidence to pursue a homicide prosecution in connection with the death of Shawn Arthur.”
That same day, Bob Arthur filed his public records request.
