"No Sir, She Didn't Make It"
Allison Rice, a stopped train, and the questions Baton Rouge Police left unanswered
A freight train sits stalled on the crossing at the 1500 block. The street is dark and still. A silver SUV rolls westbound and stops at the tracks. Perhaps the radio is still on. Perhaps not.
Government Street, Baton Rouge.
It is 2:19 in the morning, September 16, 2022.
Behind the wheel sits Allison Rice. She is 21 years old, sharp-featured and quick to laugh, the kind of young woman her coworkers at The Shed BBQ say lit up a room. She has worked a late shift. She is driving home.
Two men step out from between the stopped train cars.
What they want, in the next ten minutes, will be disputed for years.
Before I tell you what happened next, I want to tell you about Angela Engler.
A decade ago, I hired Angela as a quality assurance engineer at a Baton Rouge technology company. She was intelligent, warm, and quick to laugh.
Her last name was Rice then.
Her daughter, Allison, took after her.
Someone shot Allison at a train crossing on Government Street. Five months later, police still had no leads and no suspects.
An eastbound driver had stopped across the tracks that morning. He later described the scene to journalist Kiran Chawla.
“I was bringing a friend home. When we got to the tracks on Government, the train was at a complete stop. Then two guys walked past my car. One was wearing dark clothes with long sleeves. The other wore a red hoodie pulled over his head. They were both Black males, maybe mid-20s, and both around 5’10 or 5’11.”
“At this time, her vehicle pulled up. I was going East on Government. She was coming West toward downtown. The train was still at a complete stop. They were walking through the train’s cars to get across the tracks.”
“Not ten minutes later, I heard the gunshots. At least five to six. After that, I could still see her car parked. As soon as the shots started, she tried to turn around but stopped. I began backing out to leave.”
“The next morning, I saw on the news that someone had been found dead by the tracks. That’s when I recognized her car as the one I saw.”
Later, police found Allie and her SUV riddled with bullets. Her attackers had fired at least a dozen times. The coroner found bullets in her chest and defensive wounds on her arms.
Witnesses reported the driver’s side window and front windshield blown out. Both doors had bullet holes.
Allie’s attackers had no interest in her car.
Baton Rouge Police ruled the attack a random, failed carjacking.
Lt. Kevin Heinz, commander of BRPD’s violent crime unit, spoke one week after the murder. The department, he said, had zero indication of gang involvement.
“There’s a lot of things we’re looking at that I’m not going to go over right now,” he said.
Evidence collected at the scene included ballistics and nearby surveillance footage. Neither produced a definitive breakthrough.
A carjacker who fires a dozen rounds into both sides of a car seems poorly motivated.
Highwaymen rarely shoot drivers in the chest. They do not shatter every window in a vehicle they plan to steal.
Years later, both investigators and Paul Rice have continued to work from a different premise. Allie, they believe, was the victim of a random, isolated act of violence.
The bullet patterns do not change. What motivated the men who fired them remains, officially, unknown.
After my first newspaper column on this case, a retired Baton Rouge officer contacted me. He was unhurried and precise, the manner of a man accustomed to being disbelieved.
The men, he said, did not want the car. They wanted Allie.
He believed the attackers planned an abduction. They killed her when she refused and tried to escape.
He described what he called guerilla pimps, gang-affiliated privateers who kidnap women for sale to criminal networks abroad. He said officials had suppressed the problem for years to avoid public alarm and protect downtown commerce.
I am a reporter of forty years. My first instinct was skepticism. Then I checked his facts.
The United Nations International Labor Organization designates sex trafficking as the world’s second-largest criminal enterprise.
The Department of Justice National Gang Center names street gangs as North America’s primary engine of human trafficking. In 2022 alone, according to DOJ data, American street gangs earned more than $150 billion trafficking human beings.
Covenant Rescue, an international nonprofit tracking trafficking activity, places Baton Rouge among the ten worst American cities for sex trafficking.
A 2021 Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services report counted 759 trafficking victims in the state in a single year. Of those, 530 were children.
In September 2022, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome addressed reporters following Allie’s murder.
“We cannot turn a blind eye to continuous offenses by the same groups of individuals,” she said.
Chief Murphy Paul told the same gathering that identified gangs in the city were looming. He estimated the active total had exceeded eight.
BRPD maintained the attack on Allie Rice was a random carjacking. No gangs were involved.
In 2013, the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination project counted thirty street gangs in the city, with 500 members. LSU criminologist Ed Shihadeh placed the number higher, at more than 42.
18th Judicial District Attorney Tony Clayton addressed the Baton Rouge Rotary Club on the subject last year. He called street gangs the single largest catalyst for crime across four parishes.
“We have kids on the street who are 12, 15, 16 years old, and they have more guns than our cops,” Clayton said.
Allie Rice’s murder was the 74th in East Baton Rouge Parish in 2022. It followed an August 19 robbery-shooting of another LSU student. Police had also investigated two separate campus kidnapping cases in the days surrounding her death.
Baton Rouge’s streets were not simply dangerous that fall.
They were predatory.
SIDEBAR
Three months later, 19-year-old Madison Brooks was raped by four men and abandoned on a Baton Rouge highway. An oncoming car struck and killed her. She was also an LSU student.
The legal proceedings involving the four suspects arrested in connection with Madison’s January 2023 sexual assault continue today. Because the suspects are being tried separately, their cases are moving through the court system at different paces, marked by significant delays and complex legal maneuvering.
In addition to the criminal cases, Casen Carver and Everett Lee filed a federal defamation lawsuit against television host Nancy Grace and Madison Brooks’ mother, Ashley Baustert.
The lawsuit alleges that public broadcasts unfairly branded Carver and Lee as “rapists and murderers,” despite police and arrest records indicating that neither Carver nor Lee had physical sexual contact with Brooks during the incident.
The federal court rejected early attempts to quickly dismiss the action, and the civil dispute has been playing out alongside the criminal track.
On January 17, 2023, the Krewe of Spanish Town announced a tribute to Allie. Its Mardi Gras parade, one of Baton Rouge’s largest, would carry her photograph on the floats. The goal was to call witnesses forward.
Allie’s father, Paul Rice, spoke to WBRZ that afternoon.
“We are hoping that the continued exposure of Allie’s photo and the $55,000 reward serves as a reminder of how important it is that we as a community speak up and not protect those out there doing harm.”
The horror had begun for Paul at 4:45 that same September morning. Uniformed officers had knocked on his door.
“They kept mentioning Allie’s name,” he told People magazine. “Finally, I asked, ‘Well, is Allie okay?’ And that’s when the policeman said, ‘No sir, she’s with the coroner right now. She didn’t make it.’”
LSU awarded Allie her degree posthumously.
Paul Rice and BRPD investigators have both publicly acknowledged a difficult possibility. The perpetrator may already be dead, killed in subsequent street violence. Police have been unable to connect any deceased individual to the crime scene.
Allie’s family has not waited for answers.
They established the Live Like Allie Foundation to fund scholarships for local students. A room at Baton Rouge’s newly renovated Howell Park facility is being dedicated to her story, tied to youth mentorship and violence prevention.
What I cannot tell you is what those men wanted from Allie Rice. Paul Rice, after years of living with that question, believes it was random. The physical evidence does not contradict him. It does not confirm him either.
What I can say is this. A dozen bullets entered both sides of a car. A young woman was shot in the chest and arms as she tried to escape. Two men disappeared back through a stopped train into the dark.
This does not describe a carjacking.
It describes something that wanted her.
The $55,000 reward has stood for nearly three years. It has not been claimed.