Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  “JJ, stay out of that water,” his mother implored. “I can’t swim, and I’m not going to save you.”

  Not long after that interchange, JJ said good-bye and headed out once more. At dusk, Sherrel awaited his return, eyeing the front door. “I cannot go to sleep. I’m waiting for my son,” Sherrel said. “He could come back at any moment.” Days passed, but no JJ. Armed authorities began directing Sherrel to evacuate, but she resisted, hoping the front door would spring open and her seventeen-year-old son would flash a mischievous smile, just as he had at age three after dousing her kitchen floor with all that Spic and Span.

  Finally Sherrel knew she had to find the safety of higher ground. She departed in the back of a military truck. “When he brings his butt back here, hold him here!” she told authorities, thinking ahead to her reunion with JJ.

  “That’s the last I saw of my child,” she said. “After he left that Tuesday, I never saw him no more.”

  BUNKERED IN SQUALOR

  When the levees broke, the water flooded so high outside Susan Bartholomew’s home it swallowed a fence around the apartment building, reaching higher than Susan’s head. The water swirled higher, snaking its way into their apartment. The second floor no longer offered refuge.

  Nephew Jose punched a hole in the top of the ceiling and climbed to the roof. From there, like the Madison brothers had, he feverishly waved for help. His pleas were not answered.

  Soon, a savior arrived. A boat, navigated by NOPD officers, motored up outside their building and carried the group to drier ground along Chef Menteur Highway. The family had never been so relieved. Two of Jose’s uncles worked for the New Orleans Police Department, and it felt as though family had come to the rescue.

  Now on drier ground, they searched for a roof to shield them. At the first hotel they happened upon, shouting filled the air, leaving Susan uneasy. “You could hear them yelling out really loud,” Susan said later. “There’s no electricity, so the streets are dark, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.” Nephew Jose wasn’t as taken aback. “I stay in the Ninth Ward and you hear a lot of gunshots and violence and stuff like that, so it kind of seemed normal to me,” he said. Fearing the commotion would explode into gunfire, Susan Bartholomew looked for another hotel. The group settled at the Family Inn, just off the Danziger Bridge. It was a Katrina-soaked dump: no power, no water, filthy carpets, and toilets that wouldn’t flush. It did offer a roof and adjoining rooms. They took it.

  By now another person had joined the group, James Brissette Jr. JJ had crossed paths with his close friend Jose after he left his mom that Tuesday. Jose was out that afternoon with Susan and the family, when a voice shot out. “Jose! Jose!”

  From a distance, Jose didn’t initially make out who was calling his name, not recognizing JJ, who had recently gotten a new haircut. But then he knew. When JJ flashed every one of his teeth, Jose could tell how happy his friend was to see him. JJ told his buddy he too had been rescued in a boat, and asked if he could tag along. Inside the Family Inn a little beyond the Danziger Bridge, on the other side of the overpass from where the Madisons were staying, the Bartholomew family made room for one more.

  They needed medicine. Susan’s mother, a diabetic, had been scheduled for a hospital visit before the hurricane, but the procedure had to be cancelled because of Katrina. Inside the grimy hotel room, her feet began to swell, and she began to throw up. We need to get out, Susan said. We need medicine for Mom—Glucerna, a nutritional drink for diabetics—and cleaning supplies for the rooms. The Winn-Dixie, just over the bridge, was said to be open.

  As the family set off for supplies that morning, they were joined by JJ. Thinking of his mom, James Brissette hoped to find the rescue boat and make his way back to check on her. He looked ahead with a teenager’s optimism. “We were in a happy mood, making the best out of things, laughing and joking,” Jose said.

  AN OFFICER DOWN, A “KATRINA BROTHERHOOD”

  On Tuesday, August 30, in the late afternoon a day after Katrina’s flooding plunged New Orleans into historic despair, veteran officer Kevin Thomas and a partner, John Mitchell, saw several women looting a Chevron gas station at General De Gaulle Boulevard. They stopped the looters, took their names, and made them give back the beer.

  As his partner checked inside, Thomas, a black officer wearing an NOPD baseball cap and police badge, stood outside. Just then, four men approached. Thomas stopped them and started a pat-down search. One man screamed obscenities, then pulled a .45 caliber pistol from his pocket and fired a bullet into Thomas’s skull, sending the officer tumbling to the pavement in a pool of blood. Hearing the fire, Officer Mitchell managed to strike one of the fleeing men in his left shoulder and radioed for help as the criminals sprinted off.

  Rushed to West Jefferson Medical Center in critical condition, Thomas survived, and a massive police search hunted down the culprits. The shooting, occurring in a city flooded with water and buried in lawlessness, put police on a red-alert edge. “We were scared,” one NOPD sergeant later confided.

  Some officers began sleeping with their side arms. The chain of command that ruled their lives had vanished. The police communication system collapsed with the storm, leaving officers to connect through handheld radios. “It was chaotic, overcrowded. People are talking on top of each other,” a police lieutenant explained. “It was hard to get in and speak with the dispatcher because there was so much communication going on.” When three officers became trapped in floodwaters, their radio batteries died, killing their connection with colleagues. “It was totally out of control for people used to being in control,” said one lieutenant.

  The chaos bonded the Katrina police corps in palpable ways. NOPD officers ventured out each day with two core missions: to save the stranded from the floodwaters, and to shut down the scofflaws ransacking the city.

  Robert Faulcon Jr., now part of this core, knew Kevin Thomas as a friend and viewed the post-Katrina days as his brothers did. It was us against them. It was war.

  Heeding a call to find higher ground, Faulcon spent his first days after Katrina at the Comfort Suites with his partner. The hotel charged them for the lodging, but the accommodations were bleakly spare. Faulcon arrived to a room without power and suffocatingly hot. The windows did not open, so Faulcon and his partner jimmied the air conditioning unit out of the wall to allow a whiff of air to circulate. He slept in the same police uniform he was wearing when he had kissed his fiancée good-bye.

  After the levees broke, Faulcon peered from his third-floor hotel window and saw his police car submerged in water. His police service revolver, dunked in the water by accident, wouldn’t fire. He was now, it seemed, a hostage to Katrina: no power, no food, little air, and no way to communicate as the sun set to stifling, eerie black nights.

  “I saw the water get up to the—halfway up the wheel of the car, our police car, and then after I saw the police car being submerged in water, at that point, I knew we were in trouble. . . . The water continued to rise until it got to the roof of the houses,” Faulcon explained later. “We didn’t have any ventilation. We didn’t have any food. We didn’t have any plumbing. And basically at nighttime it was just hot, stifling, and just dark, black, pitch-black dark.”

  He didn’t know it, but his son, Rashad, was born the day after Hurricane Katrina’s arrival. With power dead, the officer had no way to connect with his family. Instead, thinking of his pregnant fiancée and absorbing his bludgeoned surroundings, he awaited his mission and sought his own survival.

  Two days in, a police boat appeared outside his hotel. Faulcon and his partner, Paxton, waded into the water and climbed inside. “Somehow,” Faulcon thought, “they found us.”

  The boat transported them to the Crystal Palace reception hall, at the intersection of Chef Menteur Highway and Read Boulevard. Faulcon’s possessions comprised the clothes on his back: stinking, wet, and dirty. It would be days before a trip to Walmart brought fresh underwear and T-shirts. Some patrolmen late
r moved to a retirement home, evacuated after Katrina, where they slept at night and returned to the Crystal Palace in the morning. This banquet hall was now the police department’s anchor in this corner of east New Orleans.

  The Crystal Palace reception center stands back off Chef Menteur Highway, US 90, surrounded by palm trees and an expansive parking lot, with a soft peach exterior. Not far away: used auto-parts stores, a collision body shop, Popeye’s and Church’s Chicken, and Chef Cash Advance. Some homes rise in the vicinity, but the section is mostly industry. On one side of the road on a typical summer day without hurricanes, men sell whole watermelons from the back of a truck, a hand-lettered sign listing the price at six dollars. Across the street, a laborer grabs a respite under the shade of a tree. A few people walk here and there, but this is lower Louisiana, not New York City or Washington, DC, and, in normal times, it moves at its own pace. Louisianans will get there, but on their own terms. Right across from the Crystal Palace stands Capt. Sal’s Seafood & Chicken, featuring po’boys and daiquiris. Lucky’s Lounge is a mile and a half up the road.

  It is a straight 3.3 mile drive, like a beeline, to the Danziger Bridge.

  From this nerve center, with the hurricane forcefully reconfiguring the landscape, Faulcon joined other officers. “We immediately went into rescue mode.”

  Sometimes they traveled in boats, their weapons at their side, looking to rescue survivors or arrest looters. Other times they traveled passable streets in vast Budget rental trucks commandeered from a hardware store near the Winn-Dixie. Police sometimes stopped cars and trucks traveling through New Orleans. If the driver could not prove the car was his, officers assumed it was hot. They took the keys. “If we found a vehicle that we could get started, we pretty much used it,” Officer Michael Hunter explained. Navigating a city ravaged by winds and water, Faulcon was stunned by what he saw. New Orleans was unlike anything he had witnessed in the US military.

  Women, children, and the elderly were living on the I-10 service road. “They were just there. They had nowhere to go,” he said. Faulcon and his colleagues pulled them in and took them to shelter, most often to the Superdome downtown. “We did that around the clock.”

  In his rescue missions, Faulcon and his partners sometimes passed dead bodies.

  “It was pretty much like nothing existed. There was no life, I mean just—it was just nothing. It was just devastation,” he said. New Orleans turned pitch dark at night, powerless and foreboding. As Faulcon retired to the Crystal Palace after another long day of rescue, he heard gunfire crackle the air and glimpsed signs of looting around him.

  At the Palace, Faulcon was surrounded by his brethren, but the federal government was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t notice any state officials, either. It was just the men and women of NOPD, trapped by the storm. He felt abandoned, betrayed. His partners were now his brothers, and the only ones he had. They sat around the Palace at night, sharing a meal of Vienna sausages and breathing heavily after another day.

  The word spread that looters were shooting at Black Hawk rescue helicopters. Then the officers heard that a well-known colleague had taken his own life after the hurricane. With even the police communication system operating on life support, it was nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction. But as they set out into flooded streets and a powerless city, the officers expected the worst.

  As he tried to find sleep, Faulcon’s head spun.

  “We just went through a major storm. I had nothing but the clothes on my back. I didn’t know where my family was. My wife was nine months pregnant. My friend, Officer Thomas, was shot in the head across the river by looters,” he said. “I was just trying to keep myself together mentally.”

  Days after the hurricane, Faulcon was able to connect with his parents by phone. I feel homeless, he told his father. “Leave the area,” Robert Faulcon Sr. implored. Faulcon said many co-workers had already fled. He had taken an oath.

  The officer awaited whatever the next day would bring.

  CHAPTER 6

  108

  Officer in Distress, a Race to the Bridge

  BEFORE HURRICANE KATRINA, Detective Jennifer Dupree’s job was investigating crimes against people, including shootings, robberies, and assaults, in Police District Three, an area covering the communities of Lakeview, Gentilly, and Westend and encompassing a cluster of colleges, including Dillard University and Southern University of New Orleans.

  After Katrina, her job was rescuing people.

  Early Sunday, September 4, she hopped in the back of a truck and headed toward District Seven, abutting the Third District and covering a wide swath of east New Orleans, on a rescue mission checking on family members of police staffers. The Danziger Bridge connects the two police districts; the west side of the bridge is part of District Three, and the east side marks the beginning of District Seven. Two trucks, driven by civilian volunteers, towed airboats that Dupree, other officers, a supervising lieutenant, and the volunteers would use that day to pluck survivors from their upper story windows and roofs.

  Interstate 10 runs parallel to the Danziger Bridge, and this morning, the police and civilians took the I-10 to head into District Seven, the smaller expanse clearly visible off to their left as they drove east. As the truck rolled down the high-rise, Dupree spotted a pack of cars stopped at the foot of the I-10.

  “Get down. They’re shooting at us!” a man yelled as Dupree’s truck pulled up, flagging them down from the roadway. “They’re trying to take our boats!” Dressed in full police uniform, the man said he was from a sheriff’s office upstate.

  Dupree heard the popping of gunfire, jumped out of the back of the truck, and ran to the side of the I-10 facing away from the Danziger Bridge.

  She looked down and saw four black males on the ground below the bridge. When someone yelled “Police!” two of the men looked up. One wore a red shirt, and the other had on a black shirt and carried a backpack. Both were armed. Dupree heard more gunfire and ducked for cover.

  “Kick it in!” her supervisor ordered, and Dupree, a six-year NOPD veteran, did just that.

  “One-o-eight!” she called into the police radio, kicking in the call for help. “Officer needs assistance. Officer’s life in danger!”

  The two men sprinted under the I-10, and Dupree lost sight of them. She repositioned herself on the other side of the I-10, now facing the Danziger, but still couldn’t see them. As fellow officers scanned below, a man with a video camera, who happened to be atop the I-10 at that moment, turned to Dupree. “There they are,” he said. Dupree looked down and re-spotted the men, a red shirt and a black shirt. They were running toward the Danziger Bridge. In between the two expanses, the men sprinted over ground covered with storm debris and cluttered with trailers and cars. Dupree followed them with her eyes, calling in updates over her handheld radio, as other officers took off in pursuit. “It became kind of chaotic at that point,” she said.

  Armed with a Glock .40 caliber pistol and her police-issued shotgun, Dupree strained to follow their path as the men ran past a pack of dogs, calling in more updates as fellow officers shared what they saw. “The guys with the red shirt and the black shirt, I specifically kept my eyes on them,” she said. “I lose sight of them because they’re running in between the trailers. So you would catch a glimpse of them, lose sight. I tried to give the locations where they were.” She relayed that officers were running down toward the suspects, and kept repeating her description of the two men—one wearing a red T-shirt, the other a black shirt with a black book bag. Years later in court, Dupree reported that she never said the words “Officer down.” Despite the gunfire, no officers had been struck.

  Dupree—sturdily built, focused on her targets—held her shotgun at the ready, but did not fire. From day one in the academy, the rules were clear: fire with deadly force only when you face it yourself. With their backs to her, fading off into the distance, the gunmen were not a direct threat. “I was too far away,” she said. Then she lost sight of
them entirely.

  At the Crystal Palace, the officers, gearing up for another day of duty, heard the call: 108. A comrade under fire. Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, among the first to hear the bulletin, rushed inside the Palace. “One-o-eight! Chef and Downman!” he screeched. Officers began sprinting toward a Budget truck parked outside.

  “It’s a call that you never want to hear,” said Officer Faulcon. Though Dupree said she never broadcast that a colleague was down, officers racing to the scene assumed the worst, and feared what awaited them. Some believed a comrade, indeed, was down. Faulcon, for one, interpreted the dispatch as “an officer down, shots fired, 108, officer needs assistance, multiple armed subjects.”

  Faulcon hopped in the back of the boxy Budget truck, a white behemoth with dashes of color around its logo. Two officers drove up front, and nine crowded in the cargo area in back. With the truck’s back doors ajar, the officers in back could see buildings getting smaller behind them. Faulcon was sandwiched between both veteran police sergeants and patrolmen relatively new to the force.

  The officers barely spoke, the truck’s gears grinding over pavement as it sped the three miles separating the Crystal Palace from the bridge. Faulcon gripped a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. In the days after Katrina, NOPD officers had been fired at, some hit, and Faulcon braced for a battle.

  “I knew we were going into a bad situation because of the fact that it was a 108. And once we arrived, I just expected to be shot at because of the fact that the description that the officer gave when she said multiple armed subjects.”

  The shotgun wasn’t his but borrowed from another black officer, Anthony Villavaso II, after his own weapon had been dunked in water. “Vil,” as his partners called him, crouched near Faulcon with an AK-47. Vil’s partner, a young black officer named Robert Barrios, toting a Remington shotgun and wearing a Philadelphia Eagles cap backward, sat in the back alongside other armed officers.