Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  Baron, all clear on the sniper call, got wind of officers under fire on the Danziger. He pulled onto the bridge, parking behind a police cruiser under the trusses at the expanse’s halfway point.

  Baron rolled his window down to ask what was happening. Then he heard gunfire and ducked in his seat. Faulcon jumped into his car, sitting up front, holding his shotgun. Gisevius and Hunter jumped in back. Hunter now had his AK-47, and Gisevius held his M4.

  “Let’s get them!” an officer told Baron. He pressed his foot to the pedal, pursuing men running ahead, on high alert, the morning’s tensions all now converging in his mind.

  Racing ahead, he saw a man running parallel to him, wearing a white T-shirt splotched with red blood, holding his right hand under his left arm, almost wobbling as he ran. It was Ronald Madison. By this time, Lance had sped off looking for help.

  “That’s him, right there,” trooper Baron heard one of the officers say.

  To Hunter, it looked as though the man was bleeding from his left arm. He was expecting a gunfight from inside the trooper’s car, but Hunter didn’t see a weapon or sense an immediate threat. In the back, Gisevius told him to hold his fire.

  The man kept running. “I got him,” Faulcon said, eyeing the figure in the T-shirt.

  Baron began to slow the car to a stop. Soon the trooper heard a shotgun blast. He looked up and saw Ronald Madison tumble to the ground and Faulcon standing outside the Impala, his shotgun raised to his shoulder.

  Hunter had been looking at the ground, with his door ajar waiting for the car to come to a complete stop so he could step out, when he heard the same blast. “I looked up, and the guy in white was on the ground.” Faulcon had shot him. Later Faulcon would say he feared being ambushed, with the second figure, Lance Madison, no longer in sight. He contended Ronald spun his head around several times to glance at the car. Faulcon never issued a warning.

  IN MOMENTS SERGEANT BOWEN, by now on the west side of the bridge, stepped out of the Budget truck and walked over to Ronald Madison, as Officer Hunter witnessed the scene unfold. The forty-year-old Madison, hit several times in the back, was wheezing, breathing his last breaths.

  “Is this one of them?” Bowen screamed, his eyes filled with fire, his closely cropped, jet black hair contrasting his pale complexion. Ronald Madison, donned mostly in white, from his T-shirt to his white socks and tennis shoes, lay slumped in the hotel driveway next to an abandoned Chevrolet van. Nearby, discarded cars were submerged in water reaching their floorboards.

  Hunter watched as Bowen, wearing his police issued boots, stomped on Ronald Madison’s back, again and again.

  Officer Hunter was startled. “He was stomping on him with his foot. On his back. It was several times. He was very angry. He had a very malicious look in his eye,” he later testified.

  He yelled at Bowen to stop.

  Ronald was dead, but Lance did not know it. Desperate to find help for his brother and racing for his own life, Lance spotted several feet of water flooding one section of the hotel courtyard. He dove into it, trying to hide. Then he escaped around the back of the hotel.

  Just then Robert Rickman, a maintenance worker, security guard, and all-purpose troubleshooter for the Friendly Inn, happened to be snapping pictures of the hotel’s water damage for insurance purposes. Rickman heard gunfire crackling in the air and looked up to see Lance treading through water with officers in pursuit. Moments later Rickman stepped outside and saw Ronald Madison’s bloodied body on the ground. Rickman had two cameras with him, one in hand and the other in his pants pocket. He began snapping photos, focusing his lens on Ronald’s body and on the mass of law enforcement swarming the bridge.

  An officer rushed to the scene, ordered Rickman to get away from the area, and snatched the camera from him. Then he stomped it to pieces on the ground. The other camera remained in the worker’s pocket.

  Finally, the shooting stopped.

  Lance spotted officers he thought were with the National Guard, but they were actually SWAT team members with the state police. He dashed to them, pleading for help. Just then New Orleans police officers raced over. “Arrest him!” they said. “He was shooting at us.” Officers threw him to the ground and handcuffed him. Lance looked up and saw a cluster of officers now circling him. They were NOPD. Bowen, the dark blue sleeves of his uniform rolled up, stood to one side. Hunter, in a lighter blue police shirt and his weapon in his hand, stood to the other side. For a moment Lance Madison closed his eyes, helpless prey engulfed by police.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake,” Lance pleaded, braced on his knees, handcuffed behind his back. “You have the wrong guy.”

  There, in the middle of the street, Lance Madison begged for a lie detector test or gunpowder residue check of his hands. “I’m innocent, I was not shooting,” he pleaded. “My brother’s been shot and he needs some type of medical attention.”

  Officers ignored him. “Shut the fuck up,” one said. Madison peered toward his armed accusers with a face flush with fear, bewilderment, and shock. Later, an irony would haunt him. If he knew it was police spilling from the Budget truck, he never would have run. “I wouldn’t be here today because they would have shot and killed me.”

  Morrell Johnson, a private security officer staying at a nearby hotel, had been returning from the Winn-Dixie that morning when he heard so much gunfire he felt as though he was in a war zone. “Like you was in Vietnam the way it was going on. Nothing but just shooting, just noise,” he said. Johnson is the man Lance saw going the other way up the bridge.

  After police stopped firing their weapons, they threw Johnson to the ground and put cuffs on his wrists so tight they bled. Johnson, black and unarmed, said an officer grazed his forehead with a boot as he lay on the ground. He saw Ronald Madison slumped on the ground.

  Later, Johnson rode in a bus to a police lockup with the young Bartholomew and Lance Madison.

  Lance turned to him.

  “Did you see my brother? A little short guy you saw me on the bridge running with?”

  “That’s your brother?” Morrell Johnson asked.

  “Yes,” Lance said. “He’s handicapped.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Did you see him?” Lance needed to know.

  “Yeah,” Morrell told Lance Madison. “He was lying on the side of the old van over at the motel under cover.”

  “Did he move?”

  “No,” Morrell said. “He never moved.”

  Lance began to sob. Johnson tried to comfort him. Don’t cry, he told the stranger. Don’t cry.

  Lance Madison, readying to face attempted murder charges, told himself: Remember this man’s name, Morrell Johnson, and the boy’s name, Leonard Bartholomew IV. “So I just kept on saying it over and over to myself until—I say I’m going to need these people to be a witness for the crime that was committed against us.”

  Packed inside the police truck, with his hands behind his back, Madison turned to an officer. “Why were you all shooting at us?”

  “I should have shot you,” one of the officers told him, “and I wouldn’t be going through this.” If Lance were dead, he’d have nothing to explain. Lance’s handcuffs were so tight they cut into his wrists. He asked police to loosen the cuffs. They ignored him again.

  At police headquarters, a female officer set Morrell Johnson and the younger Bartholomew free with food and bottled water. She told them to catch a bus out of town. Johnson looked after the Bartholomew son, who he had never met before that day. “We was just walking, walking down Loyola. And I asked him, I asked where he was going, what he was going to do, where he was going. Because he didn’t have nobody, nowhere to go,” Johnson said.

  On the other side of the bridge, paramedics tended to the Bartholomew family. Susan’s arm would have to be amputated. Her daughter and husband were also rushed to the hospital, where their wounds required immediate attention.

  A supervising paramedic took one look at Jose Holmes—shot in
the abdomen, legs, arms, hand, elbow, neck, and stomach—and told his partner to move on to someone else. Jose was too far gone.

  “Don’t give up on me,” Jose whispered.

  Stanton Doyle Arnold, an EMT (emergency medical technician) from upstate Louisiana who volunteered to serve in New Orleans after Katrina, saw all the blood and could not believe the teen was still alive. “He’s been shot so many times,” the paramedic saw. He didn’t expect the patient to make it. Jose continued to breathe.

  Arnold, armed with a .380 Colt himself because of the chaos in the streets, had prayed in the ambulance as it raced to the scene of the shooting. Now he leaned over Jose Holmes, focusing his care on his patient’s upper thoracic cavity, and then helped put him on a stretcher and into the ambulance.

  Soon the NOPD would have some business with the teenager. Jose Holmes, clinging to life with a stomach wound that would require surgery, was poised to face charges of attempted murder. The officers who fired on him would claim Jose, like Lance Madison, was a criminal.

  Officer Kevin Bryan made his way back up the bridge and saw a man on the ground, covered in blood. EMTs pressed one side of the victim’s chest. Blood squirted out the other side. Bryan, on the force for two years, felt nauseated. He never fired his gun, nor did at least three other officers in the truck.

  Officer Dupree raced to the scene.

  “I was the one that kicked it in,” she said. “Do you all need anything?”

  “No,” she was told. “Keep going.”

  The police brass assigned to investigate the shooting—which left two dead and four gravely wounded—decided it was unnecessary to question the officer whose call set the events in motion that morning. Just as it failed to question state trooper Baron or other officers, like Bryan, who did not fire their weapons. “If you didn’t shoot,” an NOPD sergeant told the trooper, “I don’t need you.”

  A police log would later catalogue the bloodshed.

  • Susan Bartholomew, black female, date of birth 3/5/67, three gunshot wounds to the left leg, one gunshot wound to the right arm, fractured left femur, amputated right arm.

  • Lesha Bartholomew, black female, date of birth 6/25/88, one gunshot wound to the middle of stomach, one gunshot wound to the left lower buttocks, one gunshot wound to the middle of the buttocks, one gunshot wound to the left middle back.

  • Leonard Bartholomew Sr., black male, date of birth 12/22/60, one gunshot wound to the left heel, one gunshot wound to the upper back, one gunshot wound to the head, exiting above the right ear.

  • Jose Holmes, black male, date of birth 6/13/86, gunshot wounds to his left hand and elbow, right elbow, neck area, and stomach.

  • JJ Brissette, black male, deceased, gunshot wounds to the right elbow, right flank, and back of the neck.

  • Ronald Madison, black male, deceased, multiple gunshot wounds to the back “consistent with a shotgun blast.”

  “On the scene, the bodies of the two deceased perpetrators remained with no Coroner’s Office support available to retrieve them,” police reported. Officers from the Seventh District briefly watched over the bodies until a lieutenant later took them to the coroner’s office in Jefferson Parish. From there, JJ Brissette and Ronald Madison were moved to Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, where they lay in a temporary morgue for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

  For some time police were not clear about the names or ages of the two men they had just killed. Initial reports listed JJ as “Name Unknown, black male, approximately 20 years of age,” and Ronald Madison as “Name Unknown, black male, approximately 25 to 30 years of age,” underestimating his age by a full decade. Police would identify Ronald Madison through dental records within days, but months later, the department could report only modest progress in learning the identity of the teenager who had died of his gunshot wounds.

  “Let it be known, during this investigation, the names of James Barsett, James Barest, James Bartert, and James Bastert have been mentioned as a possible name of the unknown black male who was fatally wounded on the Danziger Bridge. Attempts to identify this individual have been met with negative results,” said a report filed months later. “This inquiry is ongoing.”

  AS AMBULANCES SPED TO the hospital, filled with the still-breathing victims bloodied from the gunfire, Sergeant Bowen walked over to Hunter. “I’m sorry. I was out of line,” Bowen said. “We’re not animals like them,” Hunter shot back. “We’re better than that.”

  Do we have a problem? Bowen asked. No, Hunter said. No problem at all. It is what it is, he thought. He didn’t say another word.

  Later, Bowen would deny stomping on Ronald Madison, would deny leaning over the railing and spraying gunfire at innocents. Those images, he said, took place solely in Hunter’s mind.

  Racing to the bridge after the 108 call, Hunter had felt his insides fill with fury, stunned that, once more, police appeared under attack. That mix of fear and rage engulfed the Budget truck, coursing through officers black (Faulcon, Villavaso, Barrios, and Hills) and white (Hunter, Bowen, and Gisevius). In the months to follow, the focus would be on these seven, not the four other officers who didn’t fire.

  What enraged Hunter most was that the call came in the aftermath of Katrina, as police scrambled to keep peace amid the flooding and chaos. “I wanted to send them a message,” he would later testify. “Don’t mess with us.” Officer Ignatius Hills, who aimed his service weapon at a five-foot, eighty-five-pound fleeing teenage boy, said he fired out of fear.

  “It was an intense situation,” Hills said about those moments.

  “You intended to kill him?” he was asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You wanted him dead?”

  “Killing him is not—wasn’t my intention. I didn’t want to kill him.”

  “You wanted to shoot him in the back?”

  “Yes,” Hills admitted.

  Soon after, a veteran white NOPD supervisor ordered a criminal records check on some of the citizens on the bridge that morning. The sergeant assumed the run would produce criminal rap sheets. It came back clean.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE GUNFIRE STOPPED, another caravan of officers arrived at the Danziger Bridge. The group had been headed to the Crystal Palace to report for duty, steering a commercial shuttle bus commandeered from a limousine service, when they passed the Budget truck speeding by in the other direction. Officer Taj Magee, a lifelong city resident driving the bus, told his partners to turn on the police radio. Gunfire and shouting filled the air. Magee turned around and headed, cautiously, to Danziger.

  Magee stepped from the bus and witnessed the remnants of a massacre.

  He saw Holmes, blood pouring from his mouth, trying to breathe. He saw JJ, motionless, blood-soaked. “He had several gunshot wounds to the torso and one that was—that I remember vividly was the fact that his elbow had been blown out where it was exposed, where you noticed in the joint, you could see the bone and you could see the flesh. And that kind of stood out to me.”

  Nearby, he spotted a woman on the ground. “She was attempting to crawl, I would think, and she was riddled with bullets.”

  On the other end of the bridge, he made his way near Ronald Madison, slumped over, the back of his white shirt turned dark red. “He was pretty much on his butt leaning forward, slumped over.” Madison was dead.

  Instantly, the images the officer took in didn’t add up. When he stepped into the street, Magee was careful to check for bullet holes in the truck, but found none. Walking atop the bridge, he saw dozens of shell casings, but recognized all as coming from police weapons. He saw no guns near Holmes, none near JJ, none near the Bartholomews, and none near Ronald Madison. It didn’t make sense. He began scouring every inch of the bridge, desperate to find evidence that the victims had fired first or had carried weapons themselves. He couldn’t fathom the other possibility racing through his mind.

  “I didn’t understand why they were shot, you know, and I didn’t understand what was going on, what happened in the
incident altogether,” he said. “I was hoping I would find a weapon or something of that nature, or a second area where there were casings so that it would make sense to me why there was a shooting. . . . Hoping to find bullet casings, a weapon, anything that would, you know, explain and justify the incident that occurred.”

  He kept scouring the bridge, from one end to the other, and then began walking down the grassy area under the Danziger. Nothing. He passed by another officer and shared his findings. “Good thing you’re not working for a lawyer,” the cop told him.

  Magee got back into the bus and drove away from the Danziger Bridge, trying to put the puzzle out of his mind. It wasn’t his investigation. It wasn’t his role to question the shooters. He returned to other duties. “I didn’t ask anybody anything,” he said. “I didn’t want to know.”

  An old adage entered his mind: “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  TWO TO THREE HOURS after the gunfire had quelled, Friendly Inn troubleshooter Robert Rickman walked back outside. Ronald Madison’s body remained on the pavement. No officers were around, the lifeless figure left unguarded. Rickman pulled camera two from his pocket and began taking pictures. He snapped photos of the forty-year-old man lying before him and of shell casings around the body. No one from NOPD asked him a question about that morning, but Rickman kept the photographs. They might be important one day, he thought.

  CHAPTER 8

  TRIAGE

  AT WEST JEFFERSON MEDICAL CENTER, the alert blared over a loud speaker. “Dr. Thompson, come to the emergency room stat.” The victims of the police gunfire were being rushed to the hospital for emergency care.