This Bayou town elected its first female police chief. Then, police say, she was sabotaged.

GOLDEN MEADOW — On Michelle Lafont’s first day as the newly elected police chief of this tiny speed-trap town and shrimping community on the way to Port Fourchon, the door of her Town Hall office wouldn’t budge.

You’ve got to be kidding me, she thought.

Her predecessor, former Golden Meadow Police Chief Troy Dufrene, had locked the keys inside the office after losing the November 2024 election by an excruciating nine votes, she said.

That wasn’t all.

The day after Dufrene lost, state criminal investigators say he began deleting computer records pertaining to the police department’s citations, calls for service, theft complaints and warrants. He also deleted administrative records like payroll sheets and fuel reimbursement reports, investigators said.

Dufrene continued doing so throughout his remaining 55 days in office — jeopardizing some 12 years’ worth of records, according to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office.

Dufrene later apologized for his actions, explaining that he “felt the data belonged to him,” an investigator wrote. He was arrested Aug. 6 on charges of computer tampering, injuring public records and malfeasance — all felonies.

Lafont believes Dufrene had personal motivations, pointing to a confrontation at a community event shortly after Lafont launched her campaign last year. Dufrene raised his voice and demanded to know if she was running against him, Lafont said.

“You can’t do my job,” Dufrene said, according to Lafont. “You can’t do a better job than me. You have no experience.”

“I can,” Lafont replied.

At his Golden Meadow home, Dufrene referred a reporter to his lawyer, New Orleans-based attorney Brian Capitelli, who said Dufrene has “voluntarily cooperated with the Attorney General’s investigation.”

“Former Chief Dufrene created a few custom programs for use by the Golden Meadow Police Department under his term,” Capitelli said. “Prior to vacating the office, he did not delete underlying data from the Golden Meadow Police Department, and he looks forward to continuing to cooperate with this investigation and defend his actions, as necessary.”

Dufrene has not yet entered a plea in the case.

His arrest capped an unusually contentious era atop the five-person police department, whose notoriety has typically been limited to its officers’ aggressive enforcement of speed limits along Golden Meadow’s state highway.

Dufrene, 55, also a former member of the Lafourche Parish School Board, was appointed by the town council in 2021 to replace a former chief who resigned after the town settled a federal lawsuit that accused the previous chief of excessive force.

Violent crime is virtually nonexistent in Golden Meadow, which has a population of around 1,600, according to crime data reported to the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement. The police department — which responds mostly to complaints of vandalism and other misdemeanors — averaged 15 arrests a year from 2022 to 2024, the data shows.

But Dufrene faced occasional complaints about his work ethic and sparred with Golden Meadow’s powerful Mayor Joey Bouziga, who has held that office for 26 years.

In replacing Dufrene, Golden Meadow voters selected Lafont, a 53-year-old middle school teacher who had no recent experience in law enforcement: She spent two years as a Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s deputy in the mid-'90s. Her husband is a veteran officer with the local harbor police.

Lafont is Golden Meadow’s first female police chief in the department’s 75-year history, and one of just a few female chiefs in Louisiana.

Lafont declined to discuss details of Dufrene’s actions, pending his criminal case.

Blank screen, reports deleted

But she said she discovered something was wrong on her first day in January, when she tried to open a computer program to enter payroll information. The screen was blank.

She contacted the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office, which oversees a report management program that the sheriff shares with Golden Meadow police.

The system contains “modules,” pertaining to incident reports, traffic citations, arrests, misdemeanor summons, payroll, fuel reimbursements and other data, according to state investigators.

When the Louisiana Bureau of Investigation took over the case, investigators identified “over 30 reports/modules” belonging to Golden Meadow police or LPSO that had been “deleted/deactivated” by Dufrene.

Dufrene told an officer who worked under him that the department would have to “memorize anything they needed” after he was gone, an investigator wrote.

Eventually, IT workers for the program’s software company were able to recover some of the records, though no one involved has been willing to say how many, or share more details of what was inside them. The company billed LPSO $4,680 for its work, according to the investigation.

It’s unclear what effect, if any, Dufrene’s actions have had so far or will have in the future on any pending criminal cases in Golden Meadow. The Lafourche Parish District Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

Though Dufrene is facing three felony charges, they’re nonviolent offenses and he does not appear to have any criminal history. It’s unlikely that the charges would result in prison time if he were convicted, said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission.

“Nonviolent first offenders, for felonies, do not get sent to the penitentiary,” Goyeneche said. “If he is convicted of any of those, or all of those felonies, it’s probably a 99.99% chance that he will get (probation).”

'Not protected'

To Daniel Lorraine, who has represented Golden Meadow on the Lafourche Parish Council for more than 40 years, Dufrene seemed to have done a fair job as chief by the end of his first term in 2024.

“He was just a normal guy,” Lorraine said. “But things do happen.”

Things came to a head in a January 2024 town council meeting when — after Dufrene complained about the cost of installing a door at town hall — Mayor Bouziga interjected.

In an exchange uploaded to YouTube, Bouziga accused Dufrene of overseeing a “toxic environment” in the workplace, without going into details.

“This town is not protected under your leadership in the police department,” Bouziga said, slamming his fist on the table.

“It’s not protected,” Bouziga repeated, as the back-and-forth continued, with Bouziga and another council member accusing Dufrene of neglecting to do any patrols himself.

Lafont decided to run after watching the video. She was tired of the political infighting and promised to be a more visible chief who personally handled patrols.

“This cannot keep happening,” she thought as she watched it. “This is not the town I was raised in.”

“This is Golden Meadow,” she said in an interview. “We’re a tight, close-knit community. We work together.”

Lafont had the support of Bouziga and Tom Pitre III, a well-known local businessman who knocked on doors with Lafont. Lafont’s husband fashioned wooden frames for her campaign signs in their garage.

The night of the election, Lafont expected to win, she said. She didn’t expect it to be so close. After 789 votes were cast, Dufrene received 390. Lafont received 399.

Hands-on chief

On a recent afternoon, the wall of Lafont’s office was bare but for the four hooks that Dufrene left nailed into the drywall. One framed photo, a gift from Lafont’s 19-year-old daughter, is hanging.

It shows Lafont, a daughter of a Lafourche Parish crab fisherman, being sworn in at Lafourche Landing, a restaurant across the street that serves soft-shell shrimp trawled by local anglers.

The ceremony was overseen by Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice John Weimer, a friend of Lafont’s from Thibodaux.

On her desk is a stack of her department’s citations and an award from the Lafourche Parish School District for “Middle School Teacher of the Year” for the 2024 to 2025 school year. A live police radio sits silent.

“Most of the time, it’s pretty quiet,” Lafont said. “Some days we go without handling a single complaint,” Lafont said.

Still, Lafont said she’s taken a hands-on approach to the job. She spent a week doing ride-alongs with her officers, beginning at 12:15 a.m. on Jan. 1, the morning she took the job.

She completed six days of Police Academy training in April, a refresher course from when she received certification as a sheriff’s deputy in 1994.

She said she’s continued to handle in-person patrols since. And at the start of the school year earlier this month, she added a new duty — crossing guard, at the school where she used to teach.