Last week’s Youngsville City Council meeting was unexpectedly short but predictably nasty, as Police Chief Rickey Boudreaux sought to defend the indefensible — his inappropriate and unprofessional performance last fall at a traffic wreck involving another public official.
Council member Kayla Menard Reaux, who caused that costly wreck, had the good sense to resign her seat Thursday, four days after the events of Nov. 12 were revealed in an Advocate news story. But Boudreaux doubled down on what police camera footage from that night suggests was an unseemly effort to extract Reaux from potentially weightier penalties for her part in the one-vehicle wreck.
Here are the facts, as best as can be discerned: Reaux, who on Nov. 12 said she had driven her son to a college visit in Alabama, returned to Youngsville late that night and drove to Boudreaux’s house, where she said she picked up some items from Boudreaux’s girlfriend. She stayed 10 or 15 minutes, the chief said, left and — while later driving through a 15 mph zone — crashed her vehicle so hard into a parked SUV on Palfrey Parkway that it caused $25,000 in damages.
When the SUV owner tried to talk with her, Reaux wouldn’t respond. When two polite, professional officers arrived at the scene, she refused to cooperate with them, too. After all, she’d already called her friend, the chief, who hustled over.
One officer asked if she had been drinking. Her response: “No. Yes. Possibly.” Asked by an officer, filling out a traffic wreck form, for her telephone number, she responded “867-5309,” from the title to an early 1980s pop song. Boudreaux, ever an entertainer, offered a few bars from the song himself at the scene. Some fun, traffic wrecks.
Later, Reaux cursed and insulted one officer, who seemed by body camera evidence to get little vigorous support from his chief, who was too busy serving the council member’s immediate needs to defend his officers. Among Boudreaux’s many civic sins that night, that may have been the worst.
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