Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  When the shooting stops, seventeen-year-old James Brissette Jr. is dead, bullets riddling his nearly six-foot, 130-pound body from the heel of his foot to the top of his head. Susan Bartholomew is trying to crawl on the pavement, her right arm dangling by a thread. Her daughter’s stomach is shredded by a bullet. Her husband’s head is pierced by shrapnel. Her nephew Jose is shot in the neck, jaw, stomach, elbow, and hand. A paramedic arriving soon after says not to bother with him; the teen is too far gone. “Don’t give up on me,” Jose Holmes Jr. pleads. Ronald Madison is slumped over the pavement, the back of his white shirt turned red, with seven gunshot wounds in his back. As Madison wheezes his final breaths, federal authorities will later say, Hunter watches former supervisor Bowen storm to Madison, yell, “Is this one of them?” and stomp on his back, leaving a boot print upon the slight figure sprawled in pools of blood.

  Like every one of the victims, he is black, and unarmed.

  In just moments, before police gather a single piece of evidence or question a single potential witness, with blood and bodies splayed around them, the NOPD officers and brass standing atop the Danziger Bridge will decide that the people they just fired upon, two lying dead and four maimed, are criminals. A well-regarded white police lieutenant, his square jaw the visage of a tough cop, arrives at the bridge moments after the gunfire quells and takes in the scene. Lieutenant Michael Lohman sees no guns by the dead teen and wounded family on one side of the bridge. He sees no gun by the forty-year-old slumped over on the other side of the expanse. The cop’s cop makes a choice. “I knew this was a bullshit story, but I went along with it,” he will later admit. So did his colleagues, the men who shot at the people on the bridge and the supervisors who were supposed to ferret out the truth. In the coming days and months, police will plant a phony gun, invent witnesses, craft fictional reports, and launch a public relations campaign portraying the officers as heroes infused with bravery amid the horrors wrought by a hurricane. Behind the scenes, a racial divide is exposed within the ranks. When a group of white sergeants and lieutenant begin putting their tale on paper, they initially report that only the black officers struck the victims with bullets atop the Danziger Bridge, separating the white officers from the bloodshed. Another fiction.

  For a decade the families of the victims will press for truth, pierce the police façade, and uncover the lies buried with their kin. Justice for these families will not come swiftly or kindly after the shots on the bridge.

  PART I

  THE KILLINGS

  CHAPTER 1

  A FAMILY’S BOND, A THREATENING STORM

  WHEN THE BABY BOY entered the world in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the first of March in 1965, his parents, James and Fuki, knew instantly what they would name him. Ronald. He was the second son born to the couple with the given name Ronald Madison.

  Ronald 1, which the earlier child was sometimes remembered as, had died at one month old from sudden infant death syndrome. Two years later, as the Madisons welcomed their next son on the first Monday in March, they honored the infant they had lost by naming the new baby Ronald Curtis Madison.

  Many times over the decades the family would encounter loss, and rebirth, from a union cemented when James Madison, a lean US Army enlistee attired in a crisp military uniform, met the stunning young Fuki Tanaka while on a tour of duty in Japan. The soul mates wed in Nagoya, Japan, in 1952 and had their first child, Romell James Madison, that same year. James was next stationed in Colorado, but he and the family settled in southern Louisiana. Born in St. James Parish, an hour’s drive west from New Orleans, James came home to raise his family in the Crescent City. Ten children were born to the black father and Japanese mother.

  Ronald 1 was not the only child who died too young. Theodore—Teddy, the youngest—died at age seventeen in a car accident. One daughter, Barbara Madison Woodfork, suffered from leukemia and died at twenty-one after falling into a coma while in college; she left behind a police-officer husband. Another daughter, Loretta, died from polio.

  Two other Madison offspring were born with birth defects that left them with the minds of children as they entered adulthood. The second Ronald Madison was one of these children, along with his younger brother, Raymond.

  The surviving siblings took special care to watch over Ronald and Raymond, particularly after their father died in 2002 at age seventy-four. Even into adulthood, family members referred to them as “the boys.” Ronald and Raymond lived with Fuki in the same house they grew up in, on Lafon Drive in the solidly working class Academy Park neighborhood of $100,000–$150,000 homes a little more than seven miles from the Superdome downtown.

  With their father’s passing and the other now-grown children raising families of their own, Ronald became man of the house. Raymond grew to tower over him in height and weight, but Ronald still fixed his younger brother’s meals and delivered them to him. Ronald carefully sorted and delivered the household mail, and he paid faithful attention to Bobbi and Sushi, the family dachshunds, treating the dogs as if they were kin. “They slept in the room with him,” said Romell Madison. “He took care of them, fed them, walked them. They were like younger siblings to him.”

  The family home is not far from Interstate 10, but a wide patch of green grass stretches about one-tenth of a mile between the main drive, Chef Menteur Highway, and the neighborhood. The subdivision is lined with one- and two-story homes, many well kept, some boarded up or choked with weeds. On summer days homeowners and workers tend to lawns. A few driveways house a car and a boat, and landscaping trucks occasionally rumble through. Next to the shrubs in front of one house on the Madisons’ street, a placard reads “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Another lawn sign boasts “Academy Park Association presents the Home of the Month.” The Madison home on Lafon Drive stands on a lot of 6,771 square feet, with front steps leading to a stout two-paneled dark wood door that opens into the handsome edifice. Inside these walls, Ronald Madison, an adult with the mental development of a six-year-old, spoke with a child’s enthusiasm. Immersing himself in his circle of family and neighbors, Ronald walked the sidewalks shoeless in shorts, but clean-cut with neatly cropped hair and a gentle manner. When he wasn’t walking his dogs up and down Lafon Drive, his thin figure was sprinting, at full speed, to a neighbor’s house to lend a hand. He met “Officer Friendly” at school, and when a police officer passed by, Ronald sent up a wave and flashed a grin. “We would always tell Ronald and Raymond if they ever needed help, they could always go to a police officer,” said his sister Jacquelyn Madison Brown.

  His siblings never let Ronald go off to the store alone and looked out as their adult brother rode his bicycle around the neighborhood. “Don’t go down too far,” his brothers and sisters would warn. And off Ronald would go, his family looking after him as he pedaled with a free-spiritedness. “He would maybe just ride his bike around the block. But he would always be monitored,” said Jacquelyn. “We were very protective of him.”

  Ronald was not able to fluidly string full sentences together, but he spoke in a way his family always understood. When Fuki served a big family dinner, Ronald would greet his brothers and sisters at the door with a hug and declare, “She cooked gumbo! She cooked gumbo!” Guns, including toy ones, were forbidden inside the Madison home. “My mom would never buy any gun-type toys or any type of weapon toys,” Jacquelyn said. The family knew city police officers through friendship and marriage, but Fuki never let the officers bring their guns into the house.

  Though their father spent twenty-two years in the military, retiring as a Specialist 5, “my mom was the strict one, my mom would hold a grudge on you,” Romell confided. James and Fuki preached to their children the importance of church and the power of education. “They wanted everyone to be something. Everybody wanted to make our parents feel proud,” the oldest son said.

  One daughter, Lorna, studied chemistry and then received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Jacquelyn received a master’s degree in nursing and rose to become
an administrator in the dialysis unit at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. Son Lance Madison received a bachelor’s degree in business and finance from Southern University in Baton Rouge and went on to pursue a career in professional football.

  Romell became a pharmacist and then a dentist, rising into leadership roles in the community. He was active in the New Orleans Dental Association, served on the Louisiana State Board of Dentistry, and, in 2003, was appointed president of the National Dental Association. He opened a dental practice a little more than two miles from the family home, on Chef Menteur Highway at the foot of the Danziger Bridge, the expanse running less than one mile in length and shadowed by the taller I-10.

  Family members would cross the bridge to reach Romell’s New Orleans office, where he treated longtime customers in a brick building with black iron grates over its windows and Democratic political placards on display. Peering down through glasses low on his nose, Dr. Madison practiced in blue dentist’s garb and a mesh medical mask around his neck. His office was airy and well kept, and his roster of patients included New Orleans police officers. The sign out front was adorned with an image of parents holding their hands over the head of a child.

  The Madison family looked after Ronald and, likewise, encouraged him to excel in his schooling and enjoy his life. “After my dad passed we knew he was going to be our responsibility,” said Romell. Ronald attended school for children with special needs, studying until the age of twenty-four, and graduating from Danneel Pre-Vocational School in New Orleans. He never married and rarely left the family cocoon. “He was just a soft-hearted young kid,” his oldest brother said. “Always wanting to help people.”

  By 2005, at the age of forty, Ronald loved tuning into The Little Rascals, The Cosby Show, and Diff’rent Strokes on TV. He connected with music and movies. On birthdays his siblings bought him his favorite DVDs, which Ronald neatly stacked in his room; his brothers and sisters knew better than to disrupt his bedroom, Ronald’s personal domain. Comedies and cartoons put Ronald Madison at ease. “He didn’t like scary movies,” Romell said. “He would be too scared to confront anybody. He’d run away from any trouble that came about.”

  THAT SUMMER OF 2005 trouble loomed for southern Louisiana and hundreds of thousands of homesteaders like the Madisons. Hurricane Katrina churned toward New Orleans, and residents listened as the mayor, the governor, and the president implored everyone to flee the city before Katrina arrived Monday morning, August 29. “We are facing the storm most of us have long feared,” New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, his face somber, said in ordering an evacuation of his city of nearly half a million residents. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.” The Madisons were convinced. Convincing Ronald was another matter. He would not leave without Bobbi and Sushi. The family initially planned to leave the dogs behind at Lance’s two-story New Orleans condo, providing them with plenty of food and water and hoping the storm would quickly pass. The family’s planned destination in upstate Louisiana couldn’t take the pets.

  The siblings pressed. Ronald stood firm. He would not leave Bobbi and Sushi to fend for themselves. No, he told his mother, brothers, and sisters. He would not go. Romell found him crying about leaving the dogs alone.

  The family relented to his wishes. Ronald would stay with Bobbi and Sushi in New Orleans. Lance had planned to caravan out with the family, but he would stay back with Ronald. “I was hoping they would be okay,” Romell said. “I was a little upset they didn’t leave.”

  Lance, who would turn forty-nine days after Katrina’s expected arrival, was a onetime star wide receiver. He broke his leg in college but recovered well enough to land two professional free-agent contracts, with the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs. The 1981 Chiefs roster listed wide receiver Lance Madison among the players, but on the injured reserve list. Injuries dogged his NFL hopes—Lance played with screws in his ankle—and he was released by both teams. Out of the game, he drove commercial trucks for FedEx from the New Orleans airport, a job he held for twenty-five years. Now, he would stay with his brother and the dachshunds. Compact, still nearly in football shape more than two decades after catching his last pass for Southern University, Lance Madison exuded a serious, waste-no-time attitude. He always treated Ronald more as a son than a sibling and still called him “my little brother.”

  As the rest of the family, including mother Fuki and brother Raymond, escaped their hometown city near the Gulf Coast, Ronald and Lance waited inside big brother’s two-story wood and brick condo. Hurricane Katrina was coming.

  CHAPTER 2

  A MOTHER’S LAST CHANCE

  IN LATE AUGUST 2005, with Hurricane Katrina propelling toward southern Louisiana, Sherrel Johnson checked in on her son, seventeen-year-old James Brissette Jr. Her thoughts reached back to when JJ resided in her belly. “I talked to him before he was even born,” she said years later. “I told him how much I loved him and, ‘Oh, I can’t wait for you to be born!’”

  Sherrel’s first two children encountered hardships that would test her strength and faith. Her firstborn, Robert, known to everyone as Yogi, had toppled down the stairs at age two and suffered permanent brain damage. As he grew older, his mind grew younger. Yogi used fewer and smaller words as he developed—“mom, baby, eat”—and he lost any sense of danger. When he was ten, Sherrel placed him in a home for developmentally disabled children. Home on weekends, Yogi savored Popeye’s chicken, spins on his three-wheel bike, and watching football. He was an athlete himself, competing in the Special Olympics and once winning the fifty-yard dash. At twenty-one, Yogi graduated from special schooling, and his mother can still picture him donning his cap and gown. Yet his disability followed him through his life. “I had a thirty-five-year-old who was a two-year-old,” Sherrel said. “He did not know danger. He was a baby.” Then in November 2004 a brain aneurysm burst, shutting down his body and leaving him in a coma. “Tubes were running all in and out of my child,” his mother lamented. He died after nine days.

  Sherrel’s daughter, Andrea, born after Robert, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and underwent several rounds of surgery as a child. She walked with a walker and a limp, but was determined to surmount obstacles and developed a focused intensity. As a child, Andrea didn’t play with dolls and refused to be defined by the disability. A grade school teacher once suggested she enroll in a class for children with special needs. “I don’t belong in here,” Andrea announced. “My legs may not work, but there’s nothing wrong with my mind.”

  James “JJ” Brissette Jr., having a different father than his siblings, arrived more than a decade after Yogi and Andrea in November 1987, and Sherrel knew he would be her last child. At thirty-seven years old, her son was delivered by C-section. “I couldn’t wait for him to get here. I had the stroller, the walker, and the high chair,” she said. “I did everything I could to protect my unborn child.”

  With James “I prayed a little extra,” she said. “This was my last chance, my very last chance to do this.”

  Andrea was fifteen years old when JJ was born, and she pampered the new child in the house. “He was my baby,” Andrea said. “I helped my mom take care of him.” It was as if JJ had two moms, and both spoiled him. When he opened his first e-mail account years later, he used the name “spoiledrotten.” Sherrel raised him in her home in the Eighth Ward of New Orleans, that narrow stretch of the city bordered by the Mississippi River to the south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, and the Ninth Ward to the east.

  The child could charm. Seeing his mother mopping one day, three-year-old JJ pulled out a box of Spic and Span and dumped the entire contents on the floor. “I’m here to help!” he said. Catching his mother’s stern gaze, JJ retreated to his bedroom and returned with all his toys gathered in his arms. “I need to be punished,” he said, handing the toys over. Sherrel and Andrea, who would later earn a master’s degree in organizational management, marry a city of New Orleans police officer, and raise her own family, busted out in laughter.

  Now
, fourteen years later, JJ had grown almost six feet tall and stick thin, no more than 130 pounds, and wearing glasses that were goggle thick. He loved to sleep, sometimes with his glasses still on his face, and was glued to books and the Discovery Channel, though he also loved The Simpsons. He attended a Gospel Baptist church with his sister and mom, who worked at a nursing home. He never played with guns—his mother forbade even toy guns in the house, just as the Madison family had—and wasn’t much for sports. JJ’s friends called him a nerd. Still, this nerd pictured himself being delivered in a limo to his prom the next year. “He said, ‘I’m going to wear one of those white coats and tall hats,’” Sherrel said. “He wanted to drive in a stretch limousine.”

  JJ had just started calling girls on the phone and going on dates to the movies. He told his mom he hungered for the day he would flash his first car keys, dreamed of attending culinary school, and planned to become a chef.

  This day Sherrel put those glimpses to the future aside and checked again the weather report. The warnings about Katrina had become dire, with the entire city ordered to evacuate. Sherrel had heard the warnings before and knew hurricanes didn’t always arrive as promised. She thought of her job at the nursing home and began packing up the house. She’d stay back, keep working, and sleep over at a family friend’s house on higher ground, on Burgundy Street in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward.

  Daughter Andrea Celestine and her two children had already fled upstate to Baton Rouge, as her police-officer husband, Lawrence Celestine, stayed behind to report for duty. Thousands of cars choked the highways out of New Orleans. With the evacuation deadline hovering, Sherrel told JJ he should leave with his daddy. JJ rang his father and learned that his dad was already on his way out of the city.