The fact that the accused and the victims Ronald and JJ were not criminals with lengthy rap sheets and multiple trips in and out of the city’s justice system presented a serious flaw. “You have these—these great charges against this man that’s never been arrested,” said Lehrmann, referring to Lance Madison. “That’s going to present problems.”
Kaufman had a solution.
“Hey, let’s take a ride,” Kaufman told officers around the Crystal Palace one afternoon, planning to make good on his earlier promise to Lohman. So, Kaufman, Lehrmann, Bowen, and Gisevius took a ride to the sergeant’s own house. He parked the car, opened the garage, and rummaged around large Tupperware storage bins. He walked back holding a brown paper bag.
“What’s this?” Lehrmann asked.
“A ham sandwich,” Kaufman replied. The bag passed from hand to hand until it landed in evidence. The Colt Trooper Mark III revolver was now, police said, the firearm Lance Madison used to try to kill police. It was untraceable.
In the police department log, Lance Madison’s weapon was recorded as one blue steel Colt .357 magnum Model Trooper MKIII revolver, five-inch barrel, six shot handgun, serial number 84044J. “The weapon was confiscated by Sergeant Arthur Kaufman on Monday, September 5, 2005 at about 10:00 AM, from the scene on side of the Danziger Bridge. It was subsequently submitted in to Central Evidence and Property,” police reported. “At this time, no purchase information on the weapon or history has been obtained.”
The gun landed in the evidence room six weeks after the shootings, but Kaufman had an explanation. He found the weapon in a search of the bridge a day after the shootings, but left it in the back of his car for six weeks. He simply forgot to put it in evidence right away.
More problems. The supposed officer who first flagged Dupree with the distress call on the I-10 high-rise and who pulled onto the Danziger Bridge riding atop the front of a police car to help identify the suspects, although dressed in full state sheriff’s uniform, was no officer at all. He was Marion David Ryder, a convicted felon who convinced police he was one of them. No matter. In the official fifty-four-page report, David Ryder was listed as a deputy sheriff who swore Lance Madison was the same man who had fired those first shots that morning. Ryder likewise said Ronald Madison was also shooting a gun. Like the seven officers who aimed their weapons, Ryder was listed in the police report as a victim. The phony officer, in fact, was listed as Victim #1.
Detective Lehrmann was there when Kaufman learned Ryder was no sheriff’s deputy. Kaufman was, again, not happy; but he refused to change this story line. “If [Ryder] made those claims and he can’t back them up, then that’s on him,” Kaufman told his colleague.
IN AN ABANDONED, gutted New Orleans police office shortly after the calendar turned to 2006, Kaufman delivered a message to the squad: We’ve got you covered. “Get your stories straight.” This was on January 25, 2006, as the officers on the bridge prepared to give formal audiotaped statements about the shooting to New Orleans officers. First, they huddled together. Kaufman, Lehrmann, and another investigating sergeant, Gerard Dugue, a black officer lately assigned to help with the Danziger inquiry, met with Bowen, Gisevius, and Villavaso. Bowen took the lead in describing the story, and other officers chimed in. Hunter, Hills, and Barrios were there too. Among the seven officers who said they fired their weapons, only Robert Faulcon, who had left New Orleans late in 2005, was not present for the powwow.
“I call it a secret meeting because Dugue told us in the meeting, he said, ‘Look, this never happened. I’ll never admit this meeting occurred,’” Detective Lehrmann would later testify. “And what the meeting was, it was, basically, ‘Okay, this is the story, everybody read the report, everybody know what you’re going to say, so we can put it on tape and take the statements.’”
Once the taping began, the officers did their part to help advance the story. Sergeant Gisevius, who fired his M4 at the Madison and Bartholomew families instead of his police-issued handgun, was asked whether he shot his weapon that day. His answer was artful avoidance. “No,” he replied. “I did not fire my service weapon, no.” He later turned in his police revolver to evidence but not the M4 assault rifle.
One after the other, the officers shared their stories that Wednesday afternoon, their accounts recorded for posterity.
Starting at 2:45 p.m., Barrios gave his statement to two detectives. Shortly after, Bowen began giving his, answering questions from Dugue and Kaufman. At 2:57, Villavaso gave his statement to two other detectives, who then turned the tape recorder on for Hunter. As Villavaso was sitting down, Officer Hills began fielding questions from Detective Lehrmann. And then, at 3:30, Dugue and Kaufman queried Sergeant Gisevius. The statement lasted fifteen minutes.
Like clockwork the police story came together, neatly tidied up as officers sat down to answer questions from fellow New Orleans Police Department officers.
AS THE POLICE CLIQUE cemented in the months to follow, most of the officers went back to work, and as they did, they were celebrated for protecting the city and doing honor to the force during a time of unprecedented chaos. They were treated “pretty much like heroes,” Hunter admitted. “Nobody thought we did anything wrong. They thought we did our job. You know, we stayed for Katrina.”
Robert Faulcon Jr., whose son was a Katrina baby and who fired the fatal shotgun blast into Ronald Madison’s back, was no longer part of the blue line. Faulcon soon left New Orleans and gave up the badge, moving to Houston, Texas, to be with his bride, young child, and two stepdaughters and doing all he could to put the gunfire and death out of his mind.
“It was a traumatic event. It’s something that you try and get over. It’s something that you don’t want to be reminded of,” he said. Trained in the military and grounded in police work, Faulcon was getting as far away from the life as possible. In Texas Faulcon enrolled in truck driving school, graduating that December. The man wired for police service was giving it up.
CHAPTER 11
SHOCK, FUNERALS, POLICE VISITS—AND A FAMILY’S QUEST FOR ANSWERS
AS POLICE PUT THEIR story into the record, victims planned funerals and grappled with the unknown. Finding the body of their son and brother Ronald took the Madisons more than a month. For more than nine months, Sherrel Johnson did not know where her son JJ was.
When Ronald and Lance stayed behind in the condo, the rest of the Madison family rode out the storm in Lafayette Parish, a 140-mile journey through Bayou low country west of New Orleans. There, sheltered in a hotel in Scott, Louisiana, they heard nothing. The Madisons had always been close with police. At his dental practice aside the bridge, Romell had treated NOPD officers as patients for years. One of the officers on the bridge, Ignatius Hills, had been a patient as a child. A brother-in-law was an officer, and cousins wore the badge. Romell called some of the police he knew and asked them to check on his brothers. A female police representative rang back. Ronald was dead and Lance had been arrested.
Romell knew something had gone wrong. His brothers were no outlaws.
He phoned his sister, Jacquelyn Brown. Inside her hotel room, Jacquelyn dropped the phone upon hearing the news from Romell. Their mother, Fuki, collapsed into the arms of Jacquelyn’s husband. “We cried,” Jacquelyn later said. “You know, we had to give each other encouragement to let us know that, you know, this wasn’t the end for us. That we were still determined to seek justice and we would go to the next step.”
Days before Romell’s phone call, Jacquelyn had told her family of two dreams that stirred her from sleep even before Hurricane Katrina’s arrival, dreams later recounted by her daughter, Brittney Brown:
Dream 1
My mother woke up crying to my father. She told him that in her dream she walked out onto the front porch of a house. The wind was blowing and the sky was getting dark, then it begins to rain. It was like a storm was approaching. As she stood on the porch, a little girl walked up to my mother. She said she could not see the young girl’s face because
it was covered with a veil. The young girl held a flower up to my mother and said, “Everything is gonna be okay,” then all of the petals blew away.
Dream 2
Once again my mother woke up crying to my dad. This time she was at a funeral and all of our relatives were there. My mother walked up to the casket and her brother Ronald was laying there; she had no idea how or why he passed away.
Now, drowning in loss, the Madison family was equally racked by uncertainty. One brother was dead, another locked up, and they had no idea why. They didn’t know where Ronald’s body was, and simply learning where Lance was being held would require persistence and contacts. Through a series of phone calls to police, friends, and judges they knew, they got wind that Lance had been transferred upstate in the vicinity of Baton Rouge. They knew little more. Knowing the details they were hearing could not possibly be the full story, they searched for answers.
Their drive was led by Romell, the oldest son, the civic leader. The Monday after the shooting, Romell reached out to Nathan Fisher, a onetime prosecutor and longtime defense attorney with an office in downtown Baton Rouge. The family wanted a lawyer outside New Orleans. “We didn’t know who we could trust,” Jacquelyn said. “So we had wanted to get an attorney that was outside the area.”
Fisher attended Ole Miss when James Meredith became the first black student to attend the university in Oxford, Mississippi, and the young Jewish man witnessed Meredith’s enrollment triggering riots. “It was a hell of an education, watching that,” Fisher said.
Now, the lawyer took the call from Romell Madison, sharing news that one brother had been killed and another locked up. “There’s absolutely no way this happened the way they said it happened,” Romell told Fisher, trying to absorb the little the family knew at that point. The first challenge was to find Lance, and, in the insane days following Katrina, with power still out and communication in the dark ages, it took Fisher and Shannon Fay, a law student working with him, some time to do that. “I don’t believe I’ve ever felt as inept as an attorney as that first day, when I couldn’t find that guy,” Fisher said.
Working his criminal justice sources, Fisher confirmed Lance was being held in the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, about fifteen miles away.
After Lance’s arrest, officers initially held him at the Crystal Palace for more than an hour, keeping him in handcuffs outside the building. Lance spotted a New Orleans police officer he recognized from his football days. He started telling him what happened. “I know this guy,” Lance heard him say. “He wouldn’t do something like that.” The officer went off, Lance assumed, to share his findings. But later, when Lance saw him again, “he said he couldn’t talk to me.”
Next, Lance was taken to “Camp Greyhound,” the temporary jail compound at the Greyhound bus station. He was held in a cage with a portable toilet. German shepherds circled the cage.
Finally he landed at Hunt Correctional Center. There, Lance was being held in a special camp set aside for Hurricane Katrina criminals. At Hunt, Lance Madison stood with his back against the wall, peering out toward anyone coming toward him. He feared someone would try to kill him before he could tell the truth about what happened on the bridge.
It was another day before the lawyers met with Lance. “I didn’t do this,” he told them. “They shot my brother. These people just showed up in a truck and started shooting at us.”
Fisher, Fay, and their defense investigator would look under every rock and follow to the end every thread they could find to test whether the law enforcement version of events was true: that Lance Madison was an attempted murderer. “This family is the salt of the earth. They got hammered,” Fisher told me. “If that had been you and I going across that bridge, that would not have happened.”
By the time he and Fay finished peering under the NOPD’s veneer, Fisher would come to a stark conclusion. This was about the worst abuse of police power that he had ever seen. Fay quickly picked up on clues of a police shoot gone wrong.
Fay is a confident young blonde, a digger who was committed to helping the Madison family uncover the truth. The shootings on the bridge would serve as a real-life case study beyond anything Fay’s professors could dream up in the classroom at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, the same college Lance had graduated from decades earlier. In law school Fay studied contracts, property, criminal, and other legal matters, working for the Nathan S. Fisher Law Firm by day and taking classes at night. The story she was beginning to see unfold—the police fictions, the killings of innocent people, and the cover-up—opened her eyes. “It definitely left a lasting impression,” she said. “This was all we lived and breathed for months.”
First, they represented Lance during a hearing to set his bond while the formal charges against him played out. When Fisher had first gone for the hearing, he bumped into the judge assigned to rule. “I can’t go against the police department,” the judge confided. Fisher stalled, saying he needed more time to prepare. What he really needed was a judge who hadn’t already decided the matter before hearing a shred of evidence.
On Wednesday, September 28, 2005, another judge was assigned the hearing. Fisher didn’t know what to expect.
Magistrate judge Gerard J. Hansen presided over the hearing that would set the bond and determine whether Lance had any chance to be released in a legal system buried in Hurricane Katrina backlogs. Hansen, with soft tufts of white hair and a soothing Cajun cadence, grew up working in the family’s Sno-Bliz counter on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans, shaving ice from the oldest sno-ball stand in the United States. As a judge, Gerard Hansen went on to earn the distinction of setting the most bonds of any jurist in Louisiana history.
In the hearing this day, twenty-four days after the shootings on the bridge, Sergeant Kaufman testified first, called to the stand to outline the gravity of the charges against Lance Madison and to help the district attorney seek a steep bond for his release. From the witness stand, Kaufman recounted the 108 call. The Budget truck headed out first, racing to the bridge. Kaufman jumped into a police car and called for an ambulance to follow him, arriving after the shootout.
“A gunfight ensued,” Kaufman told the judge. “The officers identified themselves; they were fired upon by four of the seven subjects. Handguns were used by the subjects.”
There were eight residents, not seven. Kaufman left the Bartholomew son out of the narrative, the teen who escaped down an embankment and avoided bullets whizzing by his back.
“Five people were shot at the foot of the Danziger Bridge, four critically wounded, one killed,” the sergeant continued, first describing what happened to the Bartholomew group.
Then he recounted the Madison brothers’ path up and over the bridge. “Two of the perpetrators continued up the bridge firing at the officers. They were chased into the Friendly Inn, which is on the Third District side of the Danziger Bridge. It’s right at the foot of the bridge. One subject turned, reached in his waistband, turned on the officers—returned—actually fired; killed him on the spot in the driveway.”
Kaufman described how Lance Madison continued through the driveway, wading through water and toward the back of the hotel. Kaufman said he pulled onto the scene in time to see Ronald Madison shot and killed in the driveway.
“At that point, of course, chaos ruled,” he said. “And we were making sure that no officers were shot.”
State police stormed the bridge in an armored vehicle, and some fifteen Louisiana State Police troopers spilled out, donned in SWAT-team regalia. They had been in the area earlier responding to the unconfirmed sniper call and, once they heard of the fracas from the 108 call, went to the bridge. In the bond hearing, Kaufman connected the sniper fire to the shooting on the bridge, another web to tangle the victims into the police account. “Once we got everything under control, we realized that the gunfire coming from the hotel and the incident that we encountered were one and the same. That was the same group of people,” Kaufman told Hansen.
Officers swarmed the area and apprehended Lance Madison behind a business. By this time, one hundred officers were on scene, Kaufman said, answering questions from assistant district attorney Donna Andrieu. He said that David Ryder, the man who flagged down officer Jennifer Dupree, setting the initial call in motion, was brought to where officers surrounded Lance Madison. Ryder identified Lance Madison as among the people shooting at him that morning, Kaufman testified.
Did police find a gun on Lance Madison, the family’s attorney, Nathan Fisher, asked. “Not with him, no, sir,” Kaufman replied. But they did find one later, he said.
“We have one,” Kaufman said, figuratively putting a weapon in Lance Madison’s hand. “It’s a revolver,” he continued. “It was retrieved by one of the other officers that was involved in the incident.”
Fisher asked about the polygraph Lance Madison had begged for that morning. “There’s a possibility he may have asked,” Kaufman answered, dismissing the question’s significance. “It was irrelevant at that point.”
Then Fisher asked Kaufman about a curious one-page report, a brief police summary of events known as a Gist Sheet filed that first day to support the attempted murder charges against Lance Madison. Scanning the sheet days before the hearing, the family lawyers noticed two sets of handwriting on the single page. The newer handwriting filled the bottom three lines. “The perpetrator fled and threw his handgun into the Industrial Canal and was apprehended a short time later,” it said. The report was authored by Ignatius Hills, one of the officers on the bridge that morning, and approved by Sergeant Kaufman.
Shots on the Bridge Page 9