Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  Bryan was stunned. The report was a public record. It was standard for police to read each other’s reports. “I felt that something was trying to be hidden,” he later testified.

  Instead, the small cadre of shooters and supervisors kept their work a closely held secret. In that first meeting, Lohman asked the officers who did fire to speak up, to recount how many times they shot at people. Hunter spoke first. He had fired multiple rounds, the first flurry of “warning shots” to scatter the family of six at the foot of the bridge, and then more shots toward the two men racing over the expanse.

  “Hold on. Let’s stop for a minute,” Lohman burst in, stunned by what he heard. He pulled Kaufman, Bowen, and Gisevius outside the room.

  To Michael Hunter it was clear why Lohman suddenly halted the group powwow. “We can’t have this looking like a massacre,” he heard the lieutenant say.

  The cover-up took full bloom, and the shooters themselves could see the police narrative unfolding as clearly as the Sunday morning sky. “I mean, it was pretty obvious that they were initiating a cover-up,” Hunter said. “They didn’t separate us and ask us questions individually. Nothing was collected from the scene.”

  Over the coming days, weeks, and months, the NOPD began crafting multiple written versions of what happened atop the bridge. Versions, plural, because the officers and brass had to labor through rewrites and more rewrites to strike up a cover story they believed would hold water.

  The police story that began to emerge in black and white was more like an airbrushed Hollywood screenplay than an official recounting of that devastating morning, filled with jolts of creativity, invented witnesses and evidence, phony names, and fabricated facts. And like a screenplay going up the line in the studio for notes, the police reports went up the line to supervisors, who sent back comments, wrote through confusing passages, and strove to craft a Hollywood ending. At times, like the director and stars hovering over the film editor’s final cut, the whole NOPD crew—from the officers themselves to their supervisors—stood together over a computer terminal, looking to strike just the right key. In their story, the police were unquestioned heroes, standing tall amid nature’s fury to save their city from looters and shooters.

  As supervisors began creating those reports, starting in October 2005, the officers supposedly under review would stand at their side, helping to shape the story. The department had no hunger for an independent review. What it wanted, more than anything, was to keep the massacre out of public view and to cast the officers on the bridge as public servants doing their job during the torturous days after Katrina. It took a fair amount of sweat, and occasional bickering, to strike the right tone.

  That October Kaufman filed a thirty-two-page report for Lohman’s approval. “It was a horrible report,” Lohman saw. “It justified the police shooting, but it was full of holes and inconsistencies, and it—although he cleared the police officers, it really didn’t justify their actions. It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t logical.”

  As he read the report, the lieutenant internally began ticking off the holes he saw filling page after page. “They couldn’t identify who had what weapon or who was actually armed with a weapon. It really didn’t provide any details about anything. Basically, it was a general summary of: The police arrived on the scene—responded to the scene of a 108. Upon arrival, they encountered gunfire and they returned gunfire. That’s basically what it said. It provided no details.”

  For police purposes, the report did contain useful sections, including some tales that would stick for years as police gospel. The report said a gun had been recovered under the bridge, a day later, by Kaufman. That story would stick.

  And, the report included a lengthy recounting of events attributed to Bowen.

  The truck proceeded to the area of the Danziger Bridge at which time the truck stopped and Sergeant Bowen shouted for the subjects to raise their hands in the air. The subjects immediately went for cover while arming themselves and fired upon the officers. The subjects then all jumped behind a cement barrier for cover to ambush the officers exiting the rear of the truck.

  To protect his own life and the lives of other officers exiting the truck, Sergeant Bowen fired several shots into the concrete barrier to deter the subjects from standing and aiming at the officers. Sergeant Bowen began to shout to the subjects to throw their weapons off the side of the bridge.

  Sergeant Bowen observed a young male subject jump from the bridge onto the grassy area several feet below to flee. Sergeant Bowen heard . . . gunfire from the immediate area. Officers Faulcon, Villavaso, and Barrios engaged the armed subject behind the cement barrier and then ceased firing.

  Sergeant Bowen also observed two males running west over the bridge while gunshots could be heard coming from those two subjects. Sergeant Bowen exited the truck and cautiously peeked over the cement barrier. He observed two dark colored handguns lying on the cement next to the stationary subjects. Sergeant Bowen jumped over the cement barrier and kicked the weapons over the side of the bridge.

  Sergeant Bowen ran down the bridge and into the tall grassy area on the side of the bridge to look for the young male subject. While walking through the grassy area next to the bridge, Sergeant Bowen observed several handguns lying in the grass near the bridge.

  Sergeant Bowen could see that the officers were still chasing the other two male subjects on foot over the bridge, when he observed one of the subjects being chased, later identified as Lance Madison, discard his weapon over the bridge into the Industrial Canal.

  Once in front, Sergeant Bowen observed that one of the two subjects who had fled over the bridge was stationary just inside of the apartment complex. The officers lost sight of the second subject who had run north in the floodwaters. Shortly thereafter, Louisiana State Police SWAT team located the second subject attempting to escape outside the west side of the police perimeter. This subject was arrested by state police without incident.

  That second subject, of course, was Lance Madison, whose brother lay dying as Lance pleaded for help.

  As police constructed their story, they occasionally shifted the narrative’s setting and scenery, moving from the Danziger Bridge to hospital bed interviews with the Bartholomew family. These east New Orleans residents, clinging to life on an eighth floor hospital ward, pointed the finger at nephew Jose Holmes as unleashing the gunfire, the police reported. Kaufman and the detective assigned to work with him, Jeffrey Lehrmann, had visited the Bartholomews as they recovered from surgery days after the shootings.

  Lehrmann, raised in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, had joined the New Orleans Police Department in March 2005, fewer than six months before Katrina, and Kaufman was his link to the force. The two had bumped into each other performing off-duty work at a Marriott Hotel when Lehrmann worked for a neighboring sheriff’s office. Early in 2005 Lehrmann told Kaufman he was thinking of transferring to the department. “Well, if you don’t have anywhere to go or you don’t really know anybody, you can come out here and work with me,” Kaufman told him. “Okay. That sounds good to me,” he replied. So, Lehrmann, a white, thirtyish officer with a puff of light brown hair, went to work in the Seventh District.

  When Kaufman left Susan Bartholomew’s hospital room after one visit, he made an announcement, in a booming voice loud enough for nurses and fellow investigator Lehrmann to hear. “She just said Jose shot at the police.”

  So now, in the hospital charged with bringing the Bartholomews and Jose Holmes back to life, the word was out: Jose had shot at police first. Soon a veteran nurse scolded the teenager for shooting at police.

  “Mrs. Bartholomew stated that she recalls her nephew was shooting at the police officers as they approached on the Danziger Bridge,” an NOPD report said. “Mrs. Bartholomew stated she doesn’t remember what happened after that and later woke up in the hospital.”

  The police reports included more embellishments from other members of the Bartholomew family. The father said that, as the
family began walking to the Winn-Dixie, nephew Jose “started shooting at military vehicles that pulled up behind them. He stated he did not remember anything after that,” police reported. “Mr. Leonard Bartholomew Sr. mentioned he was unsure why his nephew was shooting at the military.”

  When Kaufman and Lehrmann entered the room for one visit, they found the parents and their daughter, Lesha, sitting together. Lehrmann felt a chill coming from the teenager, who didn’t say a word. “She was still, basically, afraid of me,” the detective saw. “Because we shot them—they shot them.”

  Detective Lehrmann knew the truth. The Bartholomews had never said Jose was shooting. He had no weapon and fired at no one. Kaufman was inventing testimony and taking a starring role in spreading the tales, at times with dramatic flourish.

  The NOPD’s storyline ensnared Ronald Madison as well. In one police account, Susan Bartholomew told police that Ronald and Lance Madison were friends of Jose Holmes and were with the family on the east side of the bridge when the shooting began. In truth, the Madisons, who did not know Jose, were heading toward the other side of the bridge.

  “As they walked on the bridge, her nephew, Holmes, and his two friends began shooting at police officers. She said she was then shot from what she thought was a military helicopter. She indicated she remembered nothing beyond that.”

  The officers employed their most vivid creative writing to place Ronald Madison on that side of the bridge with the Bartholomews, saying he and some of the family members headed out together to loot a store for food. The idea was to place the two families together and pretend that the shooting all began on one side of the bridge. That story was easier to believe than having two dead victims on opposite sides of the bridge, two separate crime scenes in which no guns were found near either James Brissette Jr. or Ronald Madison. “The reason he was chased to the west side of the bridge in the first place is because he was part of the initial group that were shooting at police officers,” Lohman explained. “I think it would have been unbelievable—more unbelievable to think that there were two separate groups on either side of the bridge.”

  Other invented scenes filled the accounts.

  “Two of the subjects, one later identified as Jose Holmes and the other who remains unidentified, continued to fire in the direction of the officers from behind the barrier, while the two remaining subjects continued to run towards the top of the bridge also firing at the officers.

  “At this time, Officers Faulcon, Barrios, Hills, and Villavaso tactically moved to the concrete barrier, as Sergeant Bowen laid down suppression fire, and engaged Holmes and an unidentified black male who also brandished a handgun. The officers fired several rounds as the two perpetrators returned fire, striking all five subjects.”

  The larger story was taking shape. Still, the initial thirty-two page draft needed tweaking, required an editor’s eye. Lohman scrawled notes on the report and handed it back to Kaufman for reworking. “Clarifying things, adding details,” he said. “Making it more believable.”

  Soon after, Kaufman handed him a forty-six-page report. It was, again, “horrible,” the lieutenant saw. “It didn’t provide any details or justify any of the officers’ actions. Although it cleared them of the shooting—in the shooting, it didn’t justify their actions or what they did.”

  A racial divide became clear in the forty-six-page report. Only the black police officers, Faulcon, Barrios, Hills, and Villavaso, were said to have struck the civilians with gunfire, while a white officer, Bowen, laid down suppression fire.

  The white officers huddled together and created the report—led by investigators Kaufman and Lohman, with input from shooters Bowen and Gisevius. All worked in District Seven.

  “As of this writing, it appears that officers Faulcon, Villavaso, and Barrios are more than likely the officers whose rounds struck the perpetrators,” the report said. It made note that Anthony Villavaso was armed with an AK-47, but neglected to say that white officers were too.

  Lohman didn’t like the newest version either. He took matters into his own hands, that November crafting his own seventeen-page police report. He typed over what was already there on the computer document, adding or subtracting information after conferring, once more, with trusted aides Bowen, Gisevius, and Kaufman. As he rewrote the reports, the officers under his command sat with him, the group bouncing ideas off one another. They made sure to talk out of earshot of officers they feared would not go along. Within the NOPD, naysayers likely to question the unfolding Danziger Bridge narrative were cut out.

  The seventeen-page report now nearly finished, Lohman told Kaufman to meet with each officer named in the report, to make sure they were good with how their actions were portrayed. Kaufman reported back, “They were all okay with what their role was in the report.” Lohman signed this report and handed it to Kaufman to submit up the line.

  Without telling anyone, Lohman had made copies of each report that took shape, from the thirty-two- to forty-six- to seventeen-page version he assumed would be the final initial report. Even as he stood by the blue line of police brotherhood, something nagged at him, so much so that he stored copies of the reports without telling anyone. “I had concerns about this case all along and about what had taken place,” he said, explaining why he kept copies.

  Unbeknownst to Lohman, Kaufman took out his own editing pen and filed a slimmed-down seven-page report, replacing the seventeen-page version, to further tighten the police script while keeping the core story intact. Lohman never signed that report. Later, he learned that his signature was there, nonetheless—thanks, he said, to sleight of hand. The face sheet from the seventeen-page report was removed, and then placed as the cover sheet on the seven-page report.

  It took the investigators four tries to get the initial report right. And that was not even the final word. That initial report was a precursor to a larger, fifty-four page supplemental report that would be filed in May 2006 and become the final document.

  Publicly, the department’s Public Affairs Division issued a two-page press release on October 4, 2005, one month after the shootings, under the letterhead of Superintendent Edwin P. Compass III. The press release would later disappear from police archives. But, for now, it was the official police version, prepared for public release. That statement, updating information on the “attempted murder” of eight officers, said the police were met with gunfire from “at least four suspects at the base of the bridge. The officers positioned themselves and began an exchange of gunfire.”

  An unidentified gunman sustained a gunshot wound and died on the scene, the press release said. That was JJ Brissette; the press release implied he’d been shot only once.

  The other unidentified gunman was Ronald Madison. “The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him.” Ronald Madison had seven gunshot wounds. Lance Madison “was seen discarding his handgun into the Industrial Canal,” the release said, and was apprehended.

  “When Jose Holmes is released from the hospital, he will be arrested on eight counts of Attempted Murder of Police Officers, along with Lance Madison,” it said. The others on the bridge that morning were not charged. “However, the District Attorney is being consulted.”

  “Investigators are still [in] the process of establishing an exact motive for the incident,” the release concluded.

  “GIVE ME A NAME!” Kaufman hollered out one day, seeking to create a star witness as he worked to hone the final report about the shootings on the bridge. Lehrmann, Kaufman’s underling, heard his colleague’s question. Lehrmann had arrived on the bridge after the shooting began and then, once it stopped, started to put handcuffs on Ronald Madison. Suddenly realizing the slight figure was dead, he took the cuffs off. The episode embarrassed Lehrmann. Kaufman told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t mention it in his report. Now Lehrmann was part of the crew assigned to investigate the shootings.

  “Lakeisha,” Lehrmann blurted out.

 
; So there it was. “Lakeisha Smith” was promptly listed as a witness to the shootings on the bridge. In Kaufman’s narrative, she saw Ronald Madison reach into his waistband and turn toward police before they fired. For good measure, Lakeisha Smith reported Lance and Ronald Madison had been looting and terrorizing people since the storm.

  “Mrs. Smith advised Sergeant Kaufman that she was in the process of relocating to Dallas, Texas, to live with her sister at an unknown address,” Kaufman reported. “Sergeant Kaufman mentioned Mrs. Smith could add nothing further.”

  Lakeisha Smith was a fiction, like much of the official fifty-four-page report Kaufman and other supervisors ultimately created to explain away the events of that Sunday morning. The second eyewitness police cited was “James Youngman.” Kaufman and crew gave Youngman a local address, at a Michoud apartment complex, but transposed the apartment number so the given address was unreachable. “Just part of the fun,” Lehrmann later said in court. In the report, Youngman said he “observed several black males shooting at police officers near Downman Road and then fleeing over the bridge. Youngman advised that he also observed the police officers return fire and chase the males over the Danziger Bridge.”

  Police listed no phone or Social Security numbers for their two star witnesses. If anyone ever tried to track down James Youngman or Lakeisha Smith, well, good luck. They were ghosts. “Sergeant Kaufman related this was a brief verbal statement, as Officers were unable to obtain any audio or video taped statements due to post storm conditions,” the report explained.

  The official police version said Lance Madison and Jose Holmes fired first that day, and that officers were fully justified in responding. Around the Crystal Palace, that story stuck. Already, fellow officers were patting Bowen, Hunter, Hills, and the other gunmen on the back, thanking them for protecting their hurricane-ravaged city from looting gunmen.

  Lance Madison was accused of trying to kill seven New Orleans Police Department officers who pursued the two families, along with the man dressed in police garb, who initially flagged officer Dupree for help from the I-10. He was charged with eight counts of attempted murder of the same mob of NOPD officers who shot Ronald in the back, James Brissette Jr. from heel to head, and four others from the Bartholomew family. Jose Holmes was still in the hospital recovering from surgery. Once he was released, the department planned to charge him with attempted murder too.