Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  “Daddy, you going to come back?” he asked.

  “Traffic is too heavy,” James Brissette Sr. replied. “We can’t turn around.”

  Hurricane Katrina kept on track toward New Orleans. JJ and Sherrel would make do.

  CHAPTER 3

  ELEVEN PEOPLE, ONE VAN, A SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT

  ONE OF JJ’S FRIENDS was Jose Holmes Jr., a nineteen-year-old who was keen on the piano, deft with a left-handed layup, and at ease hanging with “the nerd.” With Katrina coming, Jose turned out to the second floor apartment of his aunt, Susan Bartholomew, in the Walnut Square apartment complex, just off the I-10 service road near Walmart. Susan, thirty-eight, gathered her immediate family and the larger clan that always seemed to flock to her in stormy weather. Her apartment often served as a harbor against the hurricanes and tropical storms that drenched New Orleans.

  At five feet one, Susan is slight and delicately built like everyone in her family. Her husband—forty-four-year-old Big Leonard III—stands all of five feet four. Little Leonard IV, fourteen, weighed eighty-five pounds at the time and, with his hair braided, was regularly mistaken for a girl. Lesha, the oldest daughter, was seventeen and an inch shorter than her mother, and Brandon, the baby, was eight. Raised in the Ninth Ward, Susan had attended Joseph S. Clark High School and earned money selling Christian products from the family’s residence. Her husband worked for years at the city’s Sewerage and Water Board.

  Katrina threatened to be different, a hurricane that could flood the city and kill the stragglers. Susan knew they should all flee, but the math was against it.

  That August day the group included her mother, Augustine Green, a diabetic, and her nephew Jose, plus Jose’s two sisters and another nephew. The family was close. Augustine had practically raised Jose, and the teen was like a big brother to Little Leonard. The boys were constantly hooked up to the PlayStation or off drawing together.

  Eleven people gathered in the apartment, but the only vehicle was Susan’s van, and everyone wouldn’t fit. If they couldn’t flee together, Susan Bartholomew decided, they would stay together. She prayed her second-floor perch would spare the family from the hardship of a hurricane.

  Her decision made, Susan delivered an edict. The children, including nephews and nieces as well as her own children Lesha, Little Leonard, and Brandon, could not venture off unless Susan or Big Leonard went with them. “None of the group was allowed to go out alone,” Susan said. “No one.”

  The children knew to obey Susan. “She’s the boss,” Jose said.

  CHAPTER 4

  AN OFFICER, A BABY DUE, A CHOICE

  NEW ORLEANS POLICE OFFICER Robert Faulcon Jr. stood aside fiancée Stacey Scineaux, nine months pregnant with their first child, at police headquarters that summer evening in August 2005. The officer and medical assistant planned to marry after the New Year, but with both the hurricane and the baby coming, Stacey was under orders to evacuate. Faulcon kissed Stacey good-bye, then handed her the keys to his car, a roomier, newer car, than hers, and took her keys in return. Stacey and her two children from a previous marriage departed for higher, drier ground upstate in Baton Rouge. Faulcon stayed behind. “I’ll see you after the storm,” he said.

  The officer could have gone to his boss and asked to leave town. After all, his first child was due to arrive within days. But Faulcon felt the call to duty. He hoped the storm would pass quickly enough for him to join Stacey as doctors induced labor. “I assumed that we were just going to have a little flooding, and then I was going to meet her the next day at the hospital so I could be there for the birth of my son,” he later explained.

  One day years later, a lawyer would ask Faulcon about that choice. “Well, why didn’t you go . . . and say, ‘Captain, I’ve got a nine-month pregnant wife. They want to induce labor. They just told her to evacuate. May I be excused to go with my wife, who needs me?’”

  “Well, it was my duty to report,” the officer replied.

  Faulcon was seemingly wired for service. Born in Brooklyn, New York, and attending high school in North Carolina, he never stirred enough trouble for his minister father to be called to the principal’s office, despite the challenges facing an African American child growing up in the South. His mother was a schoolteacher and bank teller, and his brother would, like his father, become a Baptist minister. After high school, Robert Faulcon enlisted in the US Army for four years, jumping out of airplanes for the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. After a brief stint working in a family business in Detroit, he enlisted in the US Navy. He studied to become a legalman—akin to a military paralegal—and graduated from legalman school in Newport, Rhode Island. He spent four years in this wing of the military, just as he had in the army. The service fit his profile: serious, religious, with the discipline and taut physique of a military man.

  Out of the service, Faulcon turned to a career in corrections and police work, working through a series of jobs before landing as an officer with the New Orleans Police Department. He joined the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office as a correctional officer and, later, a bailiff. Next, he signed up with the NOPD, graduating from the academy in 2001 and taking SWAT training. Faulcon was trained in firing twelve-gauge pump-action shotguns and firearms.

  As a trainee, he took part in paint-ball exercises, where officers are set in simulated life-threatening situations and can shoot to “kill”—using paint, not bullets. In his first few years on the force, Faulcon attended funerals of three comrades who had taken part in the paint-ball training with him.

  “With the scenarios that we went through in the academy using paint ball guns, even if you get shot, if you make a mistake, you get—you know, you’re still in a safe environment,” he would one day testify. “Everything is going to be all right, you’re going to go home at the end of the day. But a paint ball scenario in the academy does not compare to a real-life situation where at that fraction of a second you have to decide whether you’re going to live or die. I mean, the fear that you have in that split second, there’s just no words to describe it.”

  As a patrolman, he was subject of unauthorized force complaints in 2002, 2003, and 2005, the last coming a little more than six months before the hurricane’s march toward New Orleans. “Complainant claims officer struck him,” NOPD files say. Another case that February alleged he verbally threatened a citizen. Each time, the department ruled these allegations were without merit, police files show. The department did suspend Faulcon for three days in 2003 for lack of truthfulness.

  But he also drew praise for diligence and calm. After a suspect taunted a mail carrier at gunpoint in June 2003, twice pulling the trigger but not firing the gun, Faulcon and a sergeant tracked the criminal to his house that evening and cornered him in a bedroom. The gunman pulled out his weapon and aimed it at the officers. Faulcon and the sergeant talked him down, and the man dropped his firearm. As he was escorted outside, the gunman became violent. Faulcon helped subdue him, made the arrest, and earned a commendation. He never fired his weapon that day, or at any other time on the force. Five months earlier, supervisors had nominated Faulcon as Officer of the Month, citing his flurry of police activity and calling him “a terrific addition to this platoon, always willing to accept any assignments required of him.”

  Now, two years later, with the hurricane charting a path toward New Orleans and his pregnant fiancée sent out of harm’s way upstate, Faulcon, age forty-one, was ready to patrol. A National Weather Service bulletin predicted devastating damage, prompting police bosses to tell the troops to seek higher ground that Sunday evening, August 28, and leading authorities to open the Louisiana Superdome as a refuge of last resort.

  Faulcon and a partner, Marchant Paxton, pulled into the Comfort Suites hotel off the I-10 service road. They got the last room available.

  CHAPTER 5

  A CITY UNDER WATER

  Survivors Cling to Life, Police Lose Their Grip

  AT TEN MINUTES AFTER five on Monday morning, August 2
9, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made its second landfall in southern Louisiana, its winds tearing off chunks of buildings downtown, ripping open roofs atop homes fanning out of the city, and shattering any sense of calm the storm skeptics had held onto. Its winds and rains ruptured New Orleans with the force of a tornado strike, sending slabs of aluminum and shrapnel hurtling through the air as residents cowered inside their homes.

  By midmorning, hundreds of thousands of southern Louisianans were trapped inside four walls with no way out, the power dead, the waters rising in a city standing some ten feet below sea level in some sections and protected by aged, fragile levees.

  Then the levees broke.

  A two-hundred-yard breach from the Industrial Canal gushed oceans into the Lower Ninth Ward, the water pouring from a canal that connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, and separates New Orleans East from the rest of the city. “It went from nothing to as high as fourteen feet within twenty-three minutes,” the deputy police superintendent reported; the force and rescue workers were trapped by winds ripping at one hundred miles per hour. By eight that morning, water was rising on both sides of the Industrial Canal. Fourteen minutes later, the National Weather Service issued a flash-flood warning, predicting up to eight feet of water. “Move to higher ground immediately,” the experts urged. More levees broke, imperiling those who were forced to bet against nature.

  By nine, the Lower Ninth Ward was engulfed in eight feet of murky, swirling water, and in some areas the waters rose higher. From the sky over New Orleans and surrounding parishes, some rooftops could not be seen at all. They had vanished, swallowed by the floodwaters.

  That afternoon, as the depth of disaster was beginning to take shape for the world outside New Orleans, the city’s Homeland Security director told reporters that untold numbers were dead in those waters or inside homes turned death caves. “Everybody who had a way or wanted to get out of the way of this storm was able to,” the director said. “For some that didn’t, it was their last night on this earth.”

  Nearly one hundred thousand city residents could not or would not flee New Orleans. For many, escaping to a hotel was financially out of reach, a sudden one-thousand-dollar expense to evacuate, lodge, and feed a family for days. “For the poor of neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city’s lowest-lying areas, this was an impossible sum, though they had an alternative in the Superdome, the city’s ‘refuge of last resort,’” a federal report noted. Yet the city had no plan to evacuate the stragglers, and by the time of Katrina’s landfall, the Louisiana Transportation Department had taken no concrete action. Federal officials had no plan in place.

  “FEMA was unprepared for a catastrophic event of the scale of Katrina,” the federal report Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared would conclude. “Preparations that were adequate in the past and that might have been sufficient had Katrina been a ‘typical’ hurricane proved to be grievously inadequate.”

  The report, issued by the US Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, cited “a failure to heed the warnings of a looming catastrophe during the weekend preceding the storm, and a failure on the day of landfall to recognize that the worst predictions had come true.”

  The parish director of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness was among those trapped and powerless, operating from a makeshift response center with the aid of his wife and secretary. “I am in the attic, I have my child with me in my attic, I need somebody to come get me out,” a typical caller pleaded. “And they are crying. Let me tell you, it got to the point where my secretary and wife couldn’t answer the phones anymore,” he said. “We knew that the majority of these people we are talking to now were going to die and we were the last people they were talking to. There was nothing we could do. Nothing physically possible for us to do.”

  Katrina obliterated three hundred thousand homes, ten times the number lost in Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the last most catastrophic storm to strike the United States.

  “It was the most destructive natural disaster in American history, laying waste to 90,000 square miles of land, an area the size of the United Kingdom. In Mississippi, the storm surge obliterated coastal communities and left thousands destitute. New Orleans was overwhelmed by flooding. All told, more than 1,500 people died. Along the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands suffered without basic essentials for almost a week,” said the Katrina Senate report.

  The Madison brothers, the Bartholomew family, JJ Brissette, and his mother, Sherrel Johnson, and officer Robert Faulcon Jr. all now faced the daunting task of finding their way out.

  THE MADISON BROTHERS: A SWIM TO SURVIVAL

  Before he fell asleep on the eve of Katrina, Lance Madison parked his van under the carport behind his condo in case he, Ronald, and the dogs needed to make a hasty escape. When Ronald shook him from sleep several hours later—yelling, “Water’s in the house!”—the van was submerged. Lance stepped from his second floor bedroom to encounter six to eight feet of water filling the ground floor. Water was chasing them.

  Back on the second floor, Lance punched through a ventilator, climbed into the attic and, with his brother and their dogs, ascended to the rooftop. Overlooking a city buried by water, they waved toward the sky, desperate for a helicopter to swoop down and lift them to safety. None came.

  Without power or phones, the brothers lost contact with the outside world. With a clear view of the devastation below, they didn’t need anyone to tell them how dire conditions had become.

  The brothers kept waving when, finally, Ronald began sobbing. Lance stepped toward him. “He was very frightened, scared. I tried to calm him down,” Lance said later. “We prayed. And I just tried to talk to him and keep him comforted.”

  A day later, Tuesday, August 30, they fled the rooftop. With little food and water, the brothers agreed to make their way from Lance’s wood and brick condo on Chimney Wood Lane to the dental office of their brother Romell at 4819 Chef Menteur Highway.

  It took nearly five hours to traverse two miles, with Ronald and Lance wading and sometimes swimming through five feet of cloudy water and carcasses of dead animals. They journeyed through muck and a hardscrabble industrial area, passing a pizza takeout joint, a local po’boys haunt, auto shop, fire station, and strip club. Off to the right, the blue and yellow Bunny Bread sign greeted them like a cruel joke, the smiling bunny out of place. They reached their brother’s dental office around noon. A big hole had been punched into the roof, the floors were covered with debris, and the office looked as if it had been broken into. But it was, relatively speaking, dry and secure. The brothers tidied it up. It was their temporary home, standing at the foot of the Danziger Bridge, and two miles from the family home on Lafon Drive.

  Romell’s office features an airy foyer and small patient rooms in back, offering ample space for Lance and Ronald to catch their breath and plot their next move. Vitally, it had a half-dozen five-gallon tanks of water. The brothers used the water to drink and bathe. They met other survivors at the Friendly Inn Motel just next door, and one family shared a meal with them. Like others now trapped by Katrina, they were desperate for food. The Winn-Dixie stood across the street from the dental office, and survivors were already depleting its supplies. One day Lance grabbed an armful of food from its shelves, making a note to remember how much he took (about fifty dollars’ worth).

  After spending two nights at the dental office, Lance prepared to return to the condo alone to rescue Bobbi and Sushi that Thursday, September 1, his forty-ninth birthday. “The water was still high, and Ronald was frightened,” Lance later said. He locked the door behind him, telling his brother, “I’ll be back with the dogs.”

  Lance made it back to his condo, swimming and wading once more. Bracing for a grueling return trip to the dental office, he found relief. An out-of-town sheriff’s crew from Jefferson Parish downstate happened by in two boats and ferried him and the dogs close to the office. Lance thanked the officers and, with the dogs, mad
e it back to Ronald. Little brother was overjoyed to reunite with Bobbi and Sushi, a momentary salve amid Katrina’s torment.

  In the days after the storm, residents reported hearing gunshots at night. All around the Madison brothers, homes and offices had been ransacked and stores had been looted. The air, it seemed, was filled with menace. Some survivors seized US Post Office trucks. Romell’s office was dry, but, with electricity out, the air choked on itself. In the post-hurricane tropics, the brothers’ refuge became oppressive. They were cut off from family. The phone lines were down. As their food and water supply dwindled over three more nights, Lance and Ronald Madison charted their next move.

  On the morning of Sunday, September 4, 2005, the sun gleamed upon New Orleans. The brothers saw it as a sign. They ventured out once more, leaving the dachshunds with food and water. They would make their way to their mother Fuki’s home, hop on bikes, and pedal as far as possible from the misery.

  To reach 4833 Lafon Drive, they would first cross the Danziger Bridge, the seven-lane lift bridge a stone’s throw away. Nearly three-quarters of a mile long, the Danziger Bridge connects with Chef Menteur Highway and runs east to west over the Industrial Canal. Danziger runs parallel to another well-traversed New Orleans bridge, the I-10 high rise, which spans nearly one mile.

  In post-Katrina New Orleans, two miles seemed like two hundred.

  SHERREL AND JJ: TOGETHER, THEN SEPARATED

  With no ride out, JJ Brissette had stayed through the storm with his mom at the home of a schoolmate on Burgundy Street in the Ninth Ward. Filled with a teenager’s curiosity, he ventured out from the house, each time a little farther, to take in the flooding with his own eyes. “Mama, you should see that water!” he reported after one trip into the city. “It’s up to here on me,” JJ said, pointing high on his wiry frame.