Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  Michael Hunter, a twenty-eight-year-old white officer who had served a six-month stint in the US Marines at age nineteen, jumped in front and drove. Days earlier, Hunter bade farewell to his wife and four young children, who headed to Houston. He had his police-issued Glock .22 caliber handgun as well as his own AK-47, a thirty-inch military assault rifle, which he wedged between the two front seats in the Budget truck each time he headed into the city. As the officers sped to the bridge, Sergeant Bowen, the lean, steel-faced white officer who alerted his comrades to the 108 call, sat beside Hunter. A decade earlier, Bowen served in the Marine Corps Reserve, and mates said he embraced its motto and creed: Semper Fidelis, “always faithful,” to God, corps, and country. Now, at age thirty-one, Bowen looked toward major life changes. His son was due to be born in four months. And, like his father, Kenny Bowen worked as an officer by day and studied law by night. Having graduated from Loyola University College of Law, he was due to secure his Louisiana State Bar license the next month.

  Four years earlier Bowen had survived his own brush with the criminal justice system. Just before midnight on December 13, 2001, Bowen had shot to death a fleeing black man when the suspect turned and pointed a pistol over his shoulder, the officer stated. Bowen fired a single shot from his .40 caliber Glock, sending a bullet through Sylvester Scott’s back shoulder and out his chest. Paramedics found Scott face down in an alley, in handcuffs, with a nine millimeter handgun and packets of pot nearby. The twenty-six-year-old was pronounced dead at Charity Hospital. Police said Bowen shot Scott, an ex-con, as they struggled, after a chase that began when Scott fled a bustling crowd outside a lounge as Bowen and a partner pulled up.

  “NOPD killed my son,” said a placard handed out at a community demonstration a week later. Friends of Scott said he put his hands up in surrender to the pursuing officers. The police “didn’t say, ‘Stop. Freeze. Get down. Nothing,’” one friend said.

  The New Orleans Police Department cleared Bowen, by then a five-year veteran serving the Second District. “Exonerated,” said the NOPD Public Integrity Bureau’s case report. Prosecutors were not convinced, deeply questioning the police account and the finding of a gun near the dead man. They secured an indictment charging Bowen with second degree murder. “There’s nothing on that gun that links Sylvester Scott to it,” a district attorney prosecutor said. Prosecutors suspected police planted it.

  In November 2002, an Orleans Parish Criminal District Court judge ruled that prosecutors failed to present evidence to support their case, putting too much weight on a single witness’s testimony. The judge’s ruling, finding no probable cause to prosecute Bowen, doomed the charges and cleared the officer. The police fraternity cheered the news. To the NOPD, the charges were an insult to those carrying a badge.

  Now, fewer than three years after being cleared in Sylvester Scott’s death, Bowen turned and asked for Hunter’s AK-47. Bowen, once Hunter’s supervisor, had his own police-issued Glock, but wanted the AK-47 instead. Hunter hesitated, but then relented. Robert Gisevius Jr., another white police sergeant in the truck who had been cleared of a string of abuse allegations, brought his own M4 high-powered assault rifle. He too preferred it over his police-issued handgun. Other officers gripped twelve-gauge shotguns, police-issued .40 caliber semiautomatics, and AK-47s.

  They were armed for war.

  TWO FAMILIES ON THE BRIDGE

  With the Sunday weather greeting her like a reprieve, Susan Bartholomew headed out with a brood of six to buy Glucerna, the nutritional drink for diabetics, for her mother, who stayed behind at the Family Inn. She also needed cleaning supplies for the hotel rooms. Susan began walking to the Winn-Dixie, just over the bridge going west, along with her husband, their two oldest children, nephew Jose, and his friend JJ.

  Susan wore a T-shirt, borrowed from JJ, and bright orange sweat pants. Leaving the hotel, she spotted a shopping cart in the road and began pushing it, planning to use it to hold the supplies she’d buy. Her children skipped and hopped in the fresh, freeing air. Jose challenged his buddy to a race. It was no contest. Jose beat him easily to the foot of the Danziger Bridge, with JJ stopping midrace to catch his breath. Cigarettes, Jose thought, they’re slowing that boy down. Now ahead of the group, Jose had time to grab a seat on a rail dividing the bridge from a pedestrian walkway, lean over, and tie his shoes.

  As he did, two men walked past him heading in the same direction, over the bridge going west. Lance and Ronald Madison. A full week since the family debate over whether to stay or flee, the brothers, now physically and psychologically exhausted by the storm, had stepped out in a search for escape: from the heat, the water, the hunger.

  On foot earlier that Sunday, they had crossed the Danziger Bridge going east, passing St. Mary’s Academy, a private Catholic school, and reached the subdivision where Ronald and their mother lived.

  They could not get to the house through the still-flooded street. Nearly beaten, they turned around, now heading in the same direction as the Bartholomews. Along the way, Lance picked up a shovel and then saw a flat cart discarded from a Home Depot or Lowe’s store. He put the shovel in the cart and began pushing it. “I brought the shovel to clean the debris that my brother had in his office. And I brought the cart back to help the people that was at the hotel,” he later testified.

  Making their way back over the bridge to return to Romell’s office on the Third District side of the Danziger, the Madisons passed a young man sitting on the railing tying his shoes, and they saw a group of people coming up from behind. “They had kids with them,” Lance said. “I didn’t know if they was a family or not. I just saw it was a group of people.”

  The bridge now connected the families and the police. The Madison brothers and Susan and Leonard Bartholomew and their extended clan tethered by a spare bridge that connects to a commercial strip like an appendage and looks up toward the I-10. Below the Danziger the waters of the Industrial Canal roiled. Three miles away, the police were heading their way, racing to respond to the 108 call.

  The two families—traversing a bridge they had passed all their lives, and a week after Katrina, simply trying to endure—did not know each other or share a single word that morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SHOTS ON THE BRIDGE

  Lives Intersect—Two Dead, Four Maimed, Endless Barrage of Gunfire

  AS SUSAN AND FAMILY joined up with Jose at the foot of the bridge, a large Budget rental truck roared toward them. Behind the wheel, more than a football field away, Officer Hunter glimpsed a group of people ahead on the bridge, walking. Pulling closer, Hunter saw no weapons, sensed no threat. “Where are they?” he asked. Where are the gun-toting thugs police are hunting? Then he heard a call over the radio: “That’s them right there, right there, right there.” The officer had no idea whose voice was on the other end of the radio or where the caller was positioned. Instantly he assumed the people walking on the bridge were the criminals firing weapons earlier that morning. Roaring closer, Hunter leaned out the driver’s window and, without saying a word, fired warning shots from his police handgun to scatter the family in front of him. He steered with his right hand and fired with his left.

  The Bartholomews, stunned by the gunfire, raced for cover behind a three-foot concrete barrier separating pedestrians from the traffic. Hunter then saw Bowen firing his AK-47 from inside the cab of the truck. Big Leonard inched his head up to take in the scene. Just then, Bowen unleashed several rounds.

  Susan’s fourteen-year-old son, Leonard IV, heard a swerving of the truck to his left, barreling toward the family. “And, when it was coming up, I saw a rifle pointed out the window,” the son said later. He crouched behind the barrier, and then dashed down the bridge and tried to scamper back toward the motel, his arms up in the air. The bullets kept coming.

  The truck screeched to a halt so abruptly one officer in back, Robert Barrios, went tumbling to the floor. Then a pack of officers, some black, some white, adorned in blue police-issued uniforms,
jumped out. Without warning, they began unloading their weapons at the black family of six now scampering for cover.

  “Jump over the barrier!” Susan yelled to her children, screaming as they hurdled the barrier separating the bridge from a walkway. Susan vaulted her body over, but before she landed, a bullet struck her arm. Her husband and daughter jumped down beside her. “I could hear them crying out,” she said.

  JJ and Jose hit the ground.

  Robert Faulcon Jr., seated in the back of the truck, stepped out onto the concrete and fired his shotgun. Then he pumped, and fired again. Another pump, another blast. Then a fourth pump and blast. He fired with precision. As James Brissette Jr. lay on the ground, blasts from Faulcon’s shotgun tore into the back of JJ’s head and the bottom of his feet. He blasted a hole in Jose Holmes’s face and lodged pellets into the back of Big Leonard’s head.

  Police officer Anthony Villavaso II, seated in the back along with Faulcon, stepped out, assault rifle at the ready. As his feet hit the pavement, he fired at least nine shots from his AK-47, rapid fire: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Like Faulcon, Villavaso aimed at the people—JJ, Jose, and the Bartholomews—lying unarmed on the pavement. He issued no warnings.

  Villavaso’s partner, Robert Barrios, was poised to join the fire but froze as a bullet whizzed past his ear. A black officer sitting near him, Ignatius Hills, had leaned out the truck to take aim as Little Leonard raced down the embankment. Hills targeted the boy’s back. He missed. Another officer in the truck, a white patrolman named Kevin Bryan, turned to Hills. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded. “What the fuck are you shooting at?”

  “I tried to pop that little N——,” Bryan would testify Hills replied.

  Screams mixed with gunfire. The mother, father, and daughter, Lesha, cried out, bloodied and in pain. A bullet grazed Big Leonard Bartholomew’s head. Another tore into Lesha’s stomach.

  More gunfire ripped into Susan Bartholomew’s right arm, nearly severing it from her shoulder, her limb held together by skin. Lesha, at seventeen years old, one inch shorter than Susan, lay atop her mother, trying to shield her as bullets tore through the concrete barrier.

  “I got closer,” Lesha said, “so she wouldn’t get shot again.” The bullets kept coming. “Lord, help us,” her mother whispered.

  Why is this happening? Lesha couldn’t fathom the answer. Then a bullet ripped into her buttocks.

  Sergeant Robert Gisevius, seeing two men sprinting up the bridge, fired his M4 at the backs of Lance and Ronald Madison. Hunter fired toward the Madison brothers, as well. Then Gisevius turned and aimed closer, firing a bullet into Susan Bartholomew’s leg, and another into James Brissette Jr.’s leg as the teenager lay on the pavement, defenseless, authorities said.

  Bullet after bullet shredded JJ’s body from the heel of his foot to the top of his head; the teen now lay dead on the pavement. Seven gunshot wounds and even more pellet wounds, fired from multiple weapons, tore into JJ’s right leg, right buttock, and right elbow; pierced his left arm and shredded his neck; and lodged in his brain. His wiry body was left unrecognizable. Faulcon fired some of the shots. Bowen fired another, from the borrowed AK-47.

  Jose Holmes, shot in the jaw, arm, and elbow and down near JJ, felt the most severe pain of his life. He lay still, praying the gunfire would stop. “I heard my auntie and my cousin Lesha, I heard them screaming. I heard my Uncle Leonard, he was screaming too.”

  Suddenly Officer Hunter shouted, “Cease fire!” Using a motion he learned during his short stint in the US Marine Corps, Hunter, with a mop of brown hair over his head, moved his arms up and down to signal the command. The gunfire was so raucous Hunter thought his fellow officers couldn’t hear his command, so he flapped his arms to be sure they did.

  The shooting stopped. For five seconds.

  Sergeant Bowen, the dark-haired, pale-skinned officer who had been so tense in the truck, kept pursuing. Holding the AK-47, he leaned over the concrete railing and began “firing indiscriminately” at the residents cowering on the sidewalk, Hunter said.

  Jose Holmes looked up and saw a man lean over the railing, his finger on the trigger. Holmes clenched his stomach, told himself to breathe, and braced for the fire.

  “I saw like a shadow, a person run over, and I looked up and I saw a barrel of a gun. And so I looked away and they shot me twice in the stomach,” Holmes said later. His thought: “Man, they really want me dead. I paced my breathing because I knew—I thought if I panicked really bad that I would die. So I had enough mind to pace my breathing.”

  Blood gushing over his body, he lay on the ground, “wondering if I would survive. You know, praying to God that he would get me through this.”

  Bowen’s AK-47, borrowed from Hunter in the truck with a full magazine of thirty bullets, was now empty. When Hunter went to retrieve it, the assault rifle was hot to the touch.

  Officers raced to their victims, and standing over them, ordered them to shut up, not to look up, and to raise their hands in the air.

  Susan Bartholomew thought it a death sentence.

  “They were telling us to hold our hands up, raise both our hands up, and, of course, I couldn’t because my arm was shot off, and I just thought they were gonna—gonna kill me, and they said that they would kill us,” she said later. “We weren’t allowed to look to see who they were, turn our heads the other way.”

  “I raised the only hand I had.”

  In the madness, Bartholomew glimpsed the garb of one officer. It was NOPD.

  Lesha lay still. One officer barked that if she moved “he was going to blow my head off,” Lesha said.

  Officer Hunter stood beside Susan and Lesha Bartholomew as they lay on the bridge, clutching each other and wailing in pain. Lesha suffered a gunshot wound in her leg so wide “I could stick my fingers in it,” Hunter would later testify. The officer said nothing to the women. He didn’t call for help. He was taken aback by what he saw. “I thought it was kind of messed up, that the females got shot,” he said. “It was just the first reaction I had. I’m not used to dealing with seeing females with gunshot wounds.”

  Kevin Bryan, son of a deceased NOPD officer, later caught up with the younger Bartholomew. He pointed his gun at Little Leonard, ordered him to freeze, and get on his knees. Then the officer slapped the black youth with an open hand and put the fourteen-year-old in handcuffs. Little Leonard hadn’t threatened Bryan or any officer. He was scared. Why did Bryan hit him? “The heat of the moment, adrenaline pumping,” said Bryan. When the moment passed, he felt horrible for slapping the teenager. Bryan moved Little Leonard, still cuffed, behind a car wash, to shield him from any more fire that may come. “They had all kinds of gunfire going on, and I didn’t know which direction they were coming from,” the officer said.

  The Madison brothers had been halfway across the bridge when the gunfire unleashed. Stunned, Lance Madison had spun around to see heavily armed men pile out of the truck and prey upon the group he and his brother had passed moments earlier. In the frenzy, Lance initially assumed the younger people he saw moments earlier had fired first, and he thought he saw an object in one of their hands. Why else would these men be hunting us like animals? He didn’t have time to stop and think.

  Lance and Ronald sprinted to escape the bridge. Lance Madison ran faster than he had in his football days, believing a pack of criminals had stormed the bridge to shoot unarmed residents and steal their possessions. “Run, Ronald!” Lance yelled to his little brother. “They’re shooting at us.”

  As the Madisons made their way down the other end of Danziger, Officer Dupree, who kicked in the initial 108 call, spotted them. Lance, wearing black spandex shorts and a black short sleeved shirt, and Ronald, in jeans shorts and a white shirt, did not match the description of the gunmen Dupree saw earlier. One of those men wore a red shirt, and the other had a black book bag on his back. But, believing they might be linked to the earlier turmoil, she called in an update: subjects fleeing the bridge
. Faulcon heard the call and believed these were the same men whose earlier gunfire prompted the initial 108 call. The radio transmission became more urgent. “That’s them,” Faulcon heard an officer say. “They’re getting away, they’re getting away. Hurry, hurry!” Dupree kept calling in updates but, by now, officers had their targets in their sights. One officer radioed back to Dupree. “Shut up!” he screamed. “We got them.”

  Lance glanced over and saw that Ronald was already pierced by gunfire and bleeding through his white shirt, struck by fire from the men who spilled from the truck. Ronald wailed in pain. Lance raced over, lifted him under the shoulders, and tried to rush him to cover. Ronald, breathless, stopped him. “Tell Mom I love her,” he said. He shook big brother’s hand, and said to tell their brothers and sisters he loved them.

  “We got to go!” Lance shouted. “These guys are coming after us.” He and Ronald began descending the bridge, crossing paths with a man pushing a cart in the opposite direction. Lance yelled to turn around, people were firing at them. “We just kept running.” He glimpsed a car coming behind but didn’t look at it closely. “I was trying to run, get out of the way from being shot,” he said.

  As he descended the bridge, Lance led his brother toward the Friendly Inn, at 4861 Chef Menteur Highway, just off the foot of the bridge’s west end and right next to their brother’s dental office. “I’m going to get help!” Lance told Ronald, trying to calm him. “Just be quiet. You’re hurt real bad.” Lanced turned a corner toward a hotel courtyard, with Ronald staying behind. Separating from his brother would haunt Lance Madison as the most wrenching choice of his life. He ducked through the hotel lobby and searched for someone, anyone, who could help. Behind him, the gunfire continued.

  Faulcon and other officers, finished with the Bartholomew family, now pursued the Madison brothers. As officers headed up the bridge, they spotted a Louisiana state trooper, Sergeant Michael Christopher Baron, behind the wheel of a black Chevy Impala. State police had been in the area earlier that morning for another reason, responding to unconfirmed calls of sniper fire on a Coast Guard helicopter at a Holiday Inn at Chef Menteur Highway and the I-10. Strikingly, the two dramas played out in the same pocket of New Orleans that Sunday morning, reports of snipers aiming at a helicopter and then, afterward, the 108 call.