Craig Robert Thompson, the lead surgeon, had been living in the hospital since Katrina destroyed his home. Responding to the call, he quickly scanned the four surviving gunshot victims. Performing emergency triage, he decided three—Jose, Lesha, and Susan—faced life-threatening injuries. Leonard, grazed in the scalp and legs, was in the most stable condition. Dr. Thompson arranged for his care and focused on the other three victims.
Susan Bartholomew, even in her dire condition, fading in and out of consciousness and her right arm severed and hanging, was more stable than her daughter or nephew. The doctor arranged for a plastic surgeon to amputate her arm, while other doctors treated her remaining gunshot wounds.
Lesha was alert, but the doctor saw that bullets had penetrated her abdomen, legs, and bottom. The gunshot to her abdomen was the most worrisome, since the bullet had settled near major organs. Dr. Thompson feared she was bleeding to death within her abdominal cavity. Opening her up, he discovered a bullet that pierced her liver and blood in her abdomen. Like her mother, Lesha would need surgery.
Jose Holmes’s injuries were the most severe. “He was no longer responsive. He had very low blood pressure,” the doctor said. “He had multiple gunshot wounds. In the order of triage, he was clearly the most in danger at that time.” Jose was in shock, and Dr. Thompson could barely detect a pulse. Medical staff inserted a tube into his trachea to help him breathe. The teenager suffered a gunshot wound to his jaw, just above his neck, and multiple gunshot wounds to his abdomen. His liver was hemorrhaging, and his colon had been perforated as well.
“I thought we could save him,” the doctor believed. “But I also knew that Lesha was also seriously injured, and I knew we could save her. So my instructions at that time were that I was going to take Jose up to the operating room. And then in about fifteen minutes, I asked them to bring Lesha up and take her and put her to sleep in another operating room, believing at that point that I was either going to have enough time to stabilize Jose and then step out of that operating room and go over to Lesha’s operating room, or at that point Jose may have expired and Lesha would be ready to go.”
Dr. Thompson performed surgery on one part of Jose’s body after the next, back-to-back-to-back procedures to close his gaping holes and settle his traumatic injuries. When the physician was nearly done, he checked one last part of Jose’s body, his right elbow. He found a bullet there too.
CHAPTER 9
NOPD TRIAGE
The After Action Reports
THE EMERGENCY ROOM DOCTORS at West Jefferson were not the only ones performing triage after Hurricane Katrina.
Six weeks after the deadly storm, in October 2005, the New Orleans Police Department examined how well prepared it had been for Katrina. The answer was obvious. If a blueprint for failure for hurricane preparation existed, it was spelled out in the After Action Reports filed by NOPD supervisors who had, in some instances in the immediate wake of the storm, issued pleas for help in all capital letters.
“There did not appear to be a preplan for this event,” Captain Jeffrey J. Winn, a commander in a tactical unit, wrote in his “Hurricane Katrina After Action Report.” “Communications failed at the most critical time. Back up systems did not work at all.”
The radio system crashed. With no central communications system working, officers had to keep contact through handheld police radios, as Dupree did when she “kicked in” her assistance call.
“This was critical to the operation and seriously hampered rescue operations,” Winn explained. “Lack of communication placed officers in extreme danger without an avenue for assistance.”
Logistics and support were nonexistent. There had been no preplanning for food, water, weapons, and medical care. No central distribution point was set up to move supplies to the field, and no one thought ahead to such basics as the officers’ needs for personal hygiene and restrooms.
These officers saw firsthand how those failings put lives in danger. The first night after the storm, the department lost contact with three officers trapped in rising waters. Their radio batteries had died, and colleagues spent a fruitless night searching for them. After wading through five miles of water that sometimes reached their chests, the officers found their way back by morning.
The force had no aerial views to tell the officers where the waters rose highest, leaving them to guess where they were most needed.
“The New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness failed,” said Captain Timothy P. Bayard, commander of the Vice Crimes–Narcotics Section. “We were not prepared logistically. Most importantly, we relocated evacuees to two locations where there was no food, water or portable restrooms. We did not utilize buses that would have allowed us to transport mass quantities of evacuees expeditiously. We did not have food, water or fuel for the emergency workers. We did not have a back-up communication system.”
“We drove trucks, piloted boats and walked past bodies in the first fourteen days of the storm,” Captain Bayard wrote in his After Action Report. “We did not have the proper clothing, equipment or training to attempt body recovery. We notified the communications section where human remains were and secured the bodies to unmovable objects. No one knows when these bodies were recovered or if they were even in the location initially reported.”
The lack of planning left officers in the lurch, bereft of fresh clothing and hustling for food, just like the residents held captive by Katrina. A Third District commander, Captain Donald J. Paisant, said the officers were forced to fend for themselves. “The only food and water we had were the ones the individual officers provided,” Paisant wrote.
“Many of our officers lost their families, their property, and basically everything they had to their name,” reported Sergeant John F. Deshotel. “But they had to put on their game faces and handle the mission despite their own growing grief. There was absolutely no counseling or compassion being offered by the supervisors to the victimized officers.”
At one point, Deshotel had three people pass out at his ankles from heat exhaustion while waiting for buses to evacuate them. “That incident was truly overwhelming for me, considering I had absolutely no medical resources available to me.”
More than anything, he said, the chaos, the exhaustion, and the stress pointed up the need for counseling. Without it, police officers are torches poised to ignite.
“Some officers who should have been decommissioned and sent for counseling were given rifles instead and allowed to continue working while choosing their own assignments.”
PART II
MAKING IT ALL GO AWAY
CHAPTER 10
THE COVER-UP
WHEN THE 108 CALL screeched over the radio that first Sunday after Katrina, sending an urgent alarm about officers under fire, Lieutenant Michael Lohman stood outside the Crystal Palace handing out assignments for officers to venture out on boats to rescue survivors. The grandson of a police officer, Lohman was raised on the West Bank in Jefferson Parish in the suburbs of New Orleans. He joined the NOPD in 1988, at age twenty, after logging several semesters at the University of New Orleans and then Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Lohman exudes the look of a man raised in a law and order family: sturdily built, with dark eyebrows and close-cropped gray-black hair framing his white skin and accentuating his masculine jaw. A cop’s cop with a commanding presence. With Hurricane Katrina looming, Lohman had sent his wife and five- and eight-year-old daughters to stay with family in Prairieville, Louisiana, an hour northwest of New Orleans. “I had to work,” he said.
That morning Lohman saw the pack of officers race off to the Danziger Bridge, and he felt the force was plentiful enough to handle the call. He finished handing out the last of the rescue missions. Then he headed for the Danziger Bridge himself.
As the ranking officer on duty, Lohman would supervise any internal inquiry likely to surface should officers, indeed, engage in a gun battle likely to come with the 108 distress call. By the time Lohman arrived, the gunfire had qui
eted, and blood and bodies covered the overpass.
When he pulled up to east side of the Danziger Bridge, Lohman glimpsed five people on the ground, paramedics working on the bodies. Police hovered around the area. Lohman instantly began looking for guns, just as officer Taj Magee had. The difference was that Lohman was now officially lead supervisor in charge of reporting what had just happened.
He didn’t see any. “I was concerned,” the lieutenant said later. “If these were the perpetrators, where were the guns? How come we weren’t locating any guns?”
By this time another white supervisor, Sergeant Arthur “Archie” Kaufman, who worked under Lohman’s direction in the department’s Seventh District leading the homicide section, arrived on site. After twenty-seven years as a police officer, Kaufman was no longer the fit army enlistee he had once been, but retained a head of thick, wavy hair. That morning Lohman assigned Kaufman to lead the review into the shootings on the bridge.
Atop the bridge, Lohman huddled with Kaufman and Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, who was also under his supervision in the Seventh. Both told him the same story, Bowen from a first-person perspective and Kaufman telling what he learned shortly after arriving. “When they arrived on the scene of the bridge, they saw a group of pedestrians on the bridge who were armed with weapons. The pedestrians fired at them and they returned fire, and as a result, the individuals who were lying in the pedestrian walkway were struck with their gunfire,” Lohman later recounted, encapsulating the police line that quickly took shape that morning.
What about the guns? Lohman asked. We’re still looking for them, came the reply. The lieutenant scanned the area. He didn’t see police officers searching for guns, or, for that matter, any evidence to back up their account.
Lohman walked across the bridge and down to the expanse’s west side. There, he saw Ronald Madison sprawled on the pavement between two vehicles near the Friendly Inn. Bowen filled him in here too. The dead man had been part of the pack of people shooting at police on the other side of the Danziger, Bowen said, and then tried to flee pursuing officers over the expanse of the bridge.
“As he ran across the bridge, Officer Faulcon, along with other officers, pursued him over the bridge,” said Lohman, repeating Bowen’s account. “And as he turned into the driveway of the motel, he reached into his waistband. Officer Faulcon thought he was going for a weapon and fired one shot, striking him.”
That morning Faulcon shared the same account with Lohman. “When the guy turned into the entrance of the hotel, he reached into his waistband,” Lohman recounted. Faulcon said he believed he was going for a gun, and fired.
Once more, Lohman searched for a gun near the victim. Once more, he came up empty-handed. His concern, sparked on the other side of the bridge, was now fully stoked. Lohman spent two hours that morning on the bridge, and as the minutes passed, his gut told him he had stepped into a police shoot gone horribly wrong. In his mind, he began tallying all the missing pieces of the police story’s puzzle.
“The fact that they responded to a scene and it was alleged that these people were the perpetrators who had fired at them, yet there were no weapons located by the perpetrators or on the perpetrators,” he said. “No one could tell me which one of the perpetrators was actually armed with the weapon, whether it was all of them, one or two of them, or just one of them.”
Lohman and Bowen now huddled on the west side of the bridge near the motel and Ronald Madison’s limp body. Suddenly Bowen came up with a story to explain the missing guns. “Well, what about this, what about if I kicked the guns over the side of the bridge?” Bowen offered, Lohman would later testify under oath.
Why, Lohman pressed, would you kick the guns over the side of the bridge?
“Well, it was a hot scene,” Bowen proffered. “It was still hostile and chaotic. There were people running around. I didn’t know to what degree the pedestrians were injured. They could possibly re-arm themselves with the guns or someone else on the scene could pick up a gun and arm themselves and start shooting at us. So to secure the weapons . . . I pushed them over the side of the bridge with the intention of going down there and getting them once the scene is under control.”
So why, then, couldn’t police find the weapons he kicked? Bowen had an answer for that too. “Someone apparently came by and picked up the guns and left with them,” said the officer, a month away from earning his Louisiana State Bar license.
Bowen simply didn’t have any place on his body to place the hot guns, he told the supervisor. Lohman looked over his colleague, and saw that Bowen was attired in his NOPD uniform—with six pockets in the cargo pants, plenty of room to store any found guns. It was another fiction in plain sight.
That morning the police supervisor, a college-educated lieutenant who had advanced through the ranks, made a decision.
“I knew this was a bullshit story, but I went along with it,” Lohman said. The blue line of the police brotherhood was stronger than any remorse he might later feel for lying, or any guilt he might have about the victims. “The guys who were involved in this were co-workers, and some of them were friends of mine,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble; I didn’t want anyone to have to have any problems, including them and myself, and that’s why I participated and went along with the cover-up.”
That morning on the bridge, Lohman went back to confer with Bowen and Sergeant Robert Gisevius Jr., another white officer under his command, who had just sprayed gunfire at the unarmed victims. Bowen and Gisevius directed patrols in high crime hot spots for the Seventh District’s task force. Unlike Sergeant Kaufman, who worked attired in jacket and tie, they turned out for duty in the full “BDU style”—battle-dress uniforms, with blue pants, cargo pockets on the side, and police patches on both sleeves of a blue shirt.
“You two guys need to get together and decide what happened,” Lohman told them. “You need to calm down, collect your thoughts and decide what happened, and come back and let me know what happened.”
The veteran lieutenant already knew how the story would play out. He didn’t expect the truth.
Lohman was careful not to tell his underlings precisely what to say, but, instead, to give them room to find a believable account. “Had they came back and said, ‘Look, we made a mistake, we screwed up and we shot the wrong people,’ that’s the way the story would have went,” he explained. “In my heart or in my gut, I knew that wasn’t what they were going to come back and tell me, though. I knew they were going to come back with a story explaining their actions.”
Archie Kaufman, just assigned to investigate the shootings, was reaching quick conclusions about how the case would come down.
“Twenty-one NAT, babe,” Kaufman told Lohman, using police lingo that, translated, means the case will be closed. NAT: necessary action taken. Twenty-one: miscellaneous complaint. In Kaufman’s mind, and in the police narrative rapidly taking shape that morning, what just happened atop the Danziger Bridge was nothing more than twenty-one NAT, babe.
The two supervisors mulled over the idea of gathering evidence. Kaufman had a thought. “Look,” he said. “We’re just not going to collect anything because we’ll write it off on Katrina since the crime lab wasn’t available.” Again, Lohman went along.
Blaming Katrina became shorthand, allowing the NOPD to explain away the lack of investigation of a fusillade of fire that morning, which left two residents dead and four wounded. Standing atop the bridge, Kaufman figured at least some of the residents handcuffed or sprawled out before him would have police records, and that would make it easy to cast them as criminals, not victims.
Typically, when police engage in gunfire and victims are left bloodied on the pavement, a small army of supervisors, experts, and technicians instantly scour the crime scene, snapping photographs, collecting and tagging shells and firearms, interviewing witnesses, brushing for fingerprints, and taking note of every minute detail. But this was no normal shooting, and it was no normal time.
&
nbsp; A detective assigned to work with Kaufman, his friend Jeffrey Lehrmann, said Kaufman made a conscious decision not to worry about collecting evidence just yet.
“Because of the hurricane and the lack of resources of the police department, he wasn’t worried about collecting shell casings, or photos, or anything,” Lehrmann said. “And even at that time, he didn’t even intend on putting anything on paper.”
Kaufman pulled Lohman aside once more. He had an idea about how to deal with the lack of weapons found on the victims. I have a gun, Kaufman confided. I can put it on the scene.
“Is it clean?” Lohman asked him.
Yes, Kaufman assured his lieutenant, the gun he had in mind was clean, untraceable.
“If you’re going to do it, do it,” Lohman whispered. “You don’t need to talk about it with anyone else or involve anyone else in it.” Lohman knew what would come next. “He was going to plant a gun on the scene to make it look as though the people that had been shot were armed.”
THAT SUNDAY MORNING, the police officers returned to the Crystal Palace. There, all the officers who fired weapons on the bridge gathered around a table, brought together by Kaufman. Lohman told the crew Kaufman was going to be handling the investigation. “Homicide isn’t coming out,” Lohman said. “It’s going to be handled internally. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Officers who had not fired their weapons were barred from the session. One of them was Kevin Bryan, who had become nauseated witnessing the blood gushing out from victims. Not long after the meeting, Bryan saw all the officers huddled around Bowen, clutching reports in their hands. When Officer Ignatius Hills passed him, Bryan asked for a copy. The two had graduated from the academy together. Hills refused to share any report.
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