No Willie Francis Drive in the works for St. Martinville

The City Council put a stop to any further consideration of renaming a street to honor Willie Francis, a teenager sent to the electric chair in the 1940s not once but twice for the death of a local pharmacist.
With four votes and an abstention, the council denied the request by former Assistant Chief of Police Nary Smith to change Randolph Street to Willie Francis Drive.
Property owner Alexander Pratt, who owns property on that street, made the prevailing argument.
“Can somebody tell me what the up side of this is?” Pratt demanded. “I know what the down side is. It’s going to cost me money.”
Council member Debra Landry, who represents the district, said that when she went door-to-door and explained the inconvenience and costs involved in changing a residential street name – notifying creditors and service providers, including the post office – 18 of the 25 residents signed a petition against the change.
“If you had told them all that at the start, we wouldn’t be talking about this today,” Landry said to Smith in the audience.
“Why dig up the past when everything is going forward,” said Pratt.
Councilman Romanus “Ike” Robertson abstained.
Nary Smith’s name came up earlier in the meeting when city attorney Allan “Sprinky” Durand reported that Smith’s multi-layered discrimination suit against the city had essentially run out of gas.
Smith, who was terminated from the police department upon reaching the age of 65, sued for not only age discrimination but also race and sex bias on the part of the city. His brief noted that a couple of white crossing guards and a female dispatcher had remained with SMPD beyond 65.
A federal judge dismissed the suit, and a state appeals court denied his appeal. Smith has applied for a rehearing, but, according to Durand, he has very little hope of getting it and even less hope of landing before the U.S. Supreme Court if he doesn’t.
Meanwhile, SMPD has abandoned the second-in-command structure of an assistant chief in favor of co-equal deputy chiefs, each supervising a different division.
Calder “Pop” Hebert, the city’s new police chief, said SMPD was ready to take the lead in the investigation of two Sunday night shoot-outs, with the St. Martin Sheriff’s Office and Louisiana State Police swooping in to help contain the crime scenes.
The shooter in the late evening incident leaving six casualties was promptly arrested and a suspect developed in the earlier victimless shooting.
“I didn’t want to test it this soon, but we were able to handle it,” Hebert said.
When one man was shot and killed back in June, just a week into his administration, Hebert didn’t hesitate to turn the investigation over to SMSO.
Hebert continues to praise the sheriff’s office for its cooperation in handling city issues.
A shooting Monday night just outside the city limits falls to SMSO to investigate.