The former police chief of the small Lafourche Parish community of Golden Meadow is arrested for allegedly deleting a dozen years worth of files on his way out the door. Tony Dufrene is charged with injuring public records, computer tampering and malfeasance in office. Attorney General Liz Murrill says that data includes traffic citations and fuel expenditures.
“I’m not sure whether that data was also stored somewhere else, whether you might be able to recover it all,” Murrill said.
Murrill says this all happened after Dufrene lost his bid for re-election.
“There’s always security protocols that you need to have in place when you have employees who are exiting under any circumstances,” Murrill noted.
Murrill says after Dufrene lost his re-election bid, protocols should have been in place to prevent him from doing what he allegedly did.
“I certainly would expect someone like that to have been removed from the system so they didn’t have access to the system, and would not actually be able to get into the system to be able to do something like that,” Murrill said.
Dufrene’s bond was set at $15,000.
