Mona Hardin has been waiting five long years for any resolution to the federal investigation into her son’s deadly arrest by Louisiana State Police troopers, an anguish only compounded by the fact that nearly every other major civil rights case during that time has passed her by.

It took just months for Tyre Nichols ’ beating death last year to result in federal charges against five Memphis police officers. A half-dozen white lawmen in Mississippi have been federally sentenced in last year’s torture of two Black suspects. And federal prosecutors long ago brought swift charges in the slayings of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky.

Every one of those cases happened months or years after the death of Ronald Greene in northern Louisiana on May 10, 2019, which sparked national outrage after The Associated Press published long-suppressed body-camera video showing white troopers converging on the Black motorist before stunning, beating and dragging him as he wailed, “I’m scared!”

Yet half a decade after Greene’s violent death, the federal investigation remains open and unresolved with no end in sight. And Hardin says she feels ghosted and forgotten by a Justice Department that no longer even returns her calls.