In this work, we consider a particular case of hadronic de-excitation via lepton flavor violation (LFV). Namely, ρ′ → ρμe decay, described considering effective dim-5 and dim-7 operators. Using the current bounds for the couplings from direct processes, we exhibit the different features in the dilepton invariant mass distribution and the branching ratios, depending on the effective operator. The results, although heavily suppressed, show that they may be useful to impose constraints on individual contributions and help to disentangle them, when complemented with observables from nuclei. Our particular case can be taken as an initial step to look for other hadronic states, such as in quarkonia, where the de-excitation can have enough energy to search for LFV involving the τ lepton.