Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  “We saw there is clearly a different handwriting,” Shannon Fay said. “That’s when we knew something wasn’t right.” This was not only odd, the lawyers knew, but potentially revealing, perhaps a first sign of a larger cover-up. They retained a handwriting expert to confirm that the Gist Sheet was scrawled in two different hands. In court twenty-four days after the one-page report was written, they found no need to call the expert to the stand. Kaufman confirmed he wrote the second set of notes.

  “And the last three lines, would you read those to me?” Nathan Fisher asked.

  Kaufman looked at the report and read them aloud for the judge to hear. Those lines, for the first time in the report, introduced the idea that Lance Madison was armed.

  Why, Fisher wanted to know, were the report’s first twelve lines written in one hand, by Officer Hills, and the last three in Kaufman’s?

  Sergeant Bowen told him about the gun after Hills first filed the Gist Sheet, Kaufman said. So he added the detail.

  That Wednesday in the bond hearing, defense lawyer Fisher decided to take an unusual step. “Your honor, you know I’ve been practicing for thirty years. And I never thought that I would put on a defendant at a Preliminary Hearing but I’m going to call Lance Madison,” he told Hansen.

  By taking the stand, Lance opened himself up to cross-examination by the state prosecutor, a potential quicksand trap for any defendant facing attempted murder charges. Typically it’s better to keep your mouth shut and force the state to prove its case. Lance Madison, silenced on the bridge, wanted to speak. He raised his right hand to swear to tell the truth.

  Little more than three weeks after the Sunday morning shootings, the events and facts remained a blur in Lance Madison’s mind. At that point, he assumed the teens he saw that morning had fired first. He couldn’t imagine police simply opening fire without cause and aiming at unarmed targets. He also thought he saw something in the teens’ hands.

  “We tried to run for our life,” Madison testified. The men he later learned were police, “they shot the little kids up. And then they saw me and my little brother going up the bridge and one of the officers shot my brother in the shoulder. And I had to pick him up to try to run down the bridge to find some help.

  “And my little brother was shot. And I had to put him down and told him I’d be right back. ‘I’m going to get you some help!’ And that’s when I ran trying to find some help for him through the hotel. And that’s when the police officer came and I don’t know if they shot him again or not.”

  As he ran through the hotel, Madison was chased by bullets. He looked up and saw officers from the state police.

  “I felt comfortable so I was running to them to explain to them that my little brother’s been shot and he needs some medical attention,” Lance testified. “And they threw me on the ground and arrested me.”

  I had no gun, Lance told Judge Hansen. He did own a gun once, but it had been stolen in 1988. He filed a police report then and had not owned a weapon since.

  “Did you, in fact, shoot at some policemen?” Fisher asked.

  “No. I didn’t have a gun at all. My little brother didn’t have a gun. We was running for our life,” he answered.

  In court, Lance said he had no idea where his brother’s body was. He did not know that a day earlier, his siblings Romell and Jacquelyn had gone to a morgue to view Ronald’s body. They were denied that request and told they needed a court order to view the body of their dead brother. Fisher had to file a motion to allow the family to view and identify Ronald Madison.

  On the witness stand, Lance told the judge how he desperately tried to convince police he and his brother were the victims, not the shooters. “I kept telling them—I said that y’all have the wrong person and I’m not that person.”

  The NOPD had no interest in Lance Madison’s plea. “They kept cursing me and told me to shut up. They don’t want to hear nothing from me. They just cursed, kept cursing me.”

  The police didn’t want to hear from Lance Madison, but magistrate judge Gerard Hansen did. He was struck by the story he heard that day. “Listening to your client’s testimony and looking at your client, it’s hard for me to believe that he would be the type of person that would be up shooting at people,” Hansen said.

  Still, based on Kaufman’s statement that Lance threw a gun into the canal, “I’m going to have to find that there was probable cause for his arrest,” the judge said. “But the bond, I think, is excessive under the circumstances. The bond today is $800,000, am I correct?”

  Hansen cut the bond in half. The family would put up property to meet the bond, freeing Lance as he waited for the case to move through the legal system.

  “Sir, you will be free but I have to take some safeguards and security because of the circumstances,” Hansen said, speaking directly to Madison. “And the charges are serious; they’re extremely serious.”

  “Thank you,” Lance said.

  “If I actually thought you were up there shooting, I would raise the bond to two million dollars, all right. If I actually felt that, I would raise the bond. Okay. I don’t think you’re one of the shooters. I don’t think that, okay.

  “I could be wrong but I’ve been doing this for thirty-two years and I think I have a gut reaction on this.”

  Lance was released on bond the next day, September 29, 2005.

  In all, Lance Madison spent twenty-five days behind bars. “The twenty-five days I spent at Hunt’s prison felt like years. I was sick every day, filled with anxiety. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in prison. I couldn’t breathe, and was certain I’d lose my mind,” he said. “I still feel like I’m in prison . . . still struggling daily to put this nightmare behind me.” He remains haunted that he left his brother’s side. “To my dying day, I will regret that I didn’t stay with Ronald,” he said. “These officers shot Ronald down like an animal, and I had to make the awful decision to leave my injured brother’s side to try to find help.”

  That same day, Romell and attorney Fisher went to the morgue to view Ronald Madison’s body. His body had been moved to another location, they were told. An Orleans Parish coroner would not tell them where. Romell asked to see the autopsy. The coroner said it wasn’t yet typed. Romell asked to see the written notes. The office said no. In two days, the coroner said, he would call Fisher to arrange for the family to view the body.

  It wasn’t until the first week in October that the morgue called to confirm the identity of Ronald’s body. The family had to file a court motion to view the autopsy and see Ronald. When the autopsy was finally released, it said the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office concluded Ronald Madison had seven gunshot wounds in the backside of his body, five in his back and two in his upper arm and shoulder area. Two wounds were penetrating, and five perforating. Attached to the autopsy, a diagram placed the fatal gunshot strikes. Six clustered to the right of his spine, and one to the left. The Madisons arranged for a second autopsy, taking every step to confirm what happened to Ronald. On his Louisiana death certificate, the cause of Ronald Curtis Madison’s death is listed as “Hurricane Katrina related. Multiple gunshot wounds.”

  His funeral cost the Madison family $9,216.50.

  WHEN FAMILY AND FRIENDS gathered for the Mass of Christian Burial on November 2, 2005, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel in New Orleans, they mourned Ronald’s death and celebrated his life inside the city’s oldest church building, whose mortuary chapel had first risen in 1826 to bury victims of yellow fever. “God, in His own way, for His own purpose or reason, and in His own time reached down in our midst early Sunday, September 4, 2005, and called Ronald Curtis Madison home to a sweet and glorious rest,” said the booklet from the morning ceremony.

  “We are, in a small way, comforted in knowing that he joins his family in heaven—his father, James Madison; brothers, Ronald 1 and Theodore Madison; sisters, Loretta Madison and Barbara Madison Woodfork; and nephew Lance Madison.”

  A final inscription reads, “He has
gone to a land that is free from pain and sorrow.” Looking back upon Ronald’s life, mourners took a moment to soak in family pictures on display. In one grade school photograph, Ronald is smiling, with his hands clasped over each other just like any other child would for his school portrait. In a later picture, he is adorned in cap and gown for his graduation. In others, he is surrounded by his family, his protectors.

  At the service, brother Lance was among Ronald’s pallbearers.

  Lance’s release from the Hunt facility motivated the family to push even harder to unmask the truth they knew was hidden that morning on the bridge, even as police were telling the public they had ample cause to fire at the citizens.

  In the coming days, an investigator for Nathan Fisher traveled from his Baton Rouge office to New Orleans with Shannon Fay to visit the crime scene. Questions, not answers, were all around. “We took pictures. Bullet casings were still on the ground,” Fay said. “Clearly there had been no crime scene worked up.”

  As the Madisons pushed for answers, some NOPD brass became fearful of what could come. Lorna Humphrey, one of the Madison sisters, was just then going through a divorce with a New Orleans officer; her husband was once a partner with the then NOPD superintendent Edwin Compass. Romell and Compass had been fraternity brothers years earlier, and Compass, a former football player himself, worked out at the same gym as Lance Madison. He had attended the funeral of their father, James Madison. “We’re sorry,” Compass told Lorna in a phone call, the family said. “We hope you don’t sue us.”

  Said Shannon Fay, “You knew something wasn’t right when the police chief called up and said, I hope you’re not going to sue us.”

  The Madison family was determined to get a full accounting of what happened on the bridge. With Ronald’s passing, five of the ten children born to James and Fuki had died. Jacquelyn’s daughter Brittney cited a piece of scripture that was driving them. “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:2, King James version, italics added).

  AS ROMELL MADISON AND his family pressed for answers, Susan Bartholomew, her daughter, and Jose Holmes Jr. were hospitalized for months recovering from their injuries and the surgeries they had to undergo.

  When Susan was first whisked into the hospital room, a nurse walked in and Bartholomew clung to her fiercely. “She just seemed like an angel, a godsend. I asked her and begged her to just to not leave me, and she said that she wouldn’t,” Susan said later. Then she lost consciousness.

  In the days after the shooting, Officers Kaufman and Lehrmann twice entered Susan Bartholomew’s room. Leaning over her bed, they asked, “Who did this?”

  She looked up and saw it was NOPD.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think it was the National Guard.”

  Bartholomew knew the shooters were New Orleans Police, not the Guard. She was scared, and their direct questions chilled her. These are the same people who shot off my arm, fired at my husband’s head, and tried to kill my two children. I’m going to trust them? “I felt threatened,” she said. “I felt intimidated, just the way they . . . their approach.”

  After the first two visits, she asked a nurse to stop the officers from coming back. The nurse promised to help.

  A few days later, the police returned. The nurse turned her back and walked away. The officers closed the door and stood over Bartholomew. “Who did this?”

  “The National Guard,” Bartholomew said. They asked her husband the same question. “The National Guard,” Leonard III said.

  For nearly two weeks, Susan had no idea where her son, Little Leonard, was, and she woke up each morning jolted by worry. After Morrell Johnson looked out for the boy that Sunday morning, Little Leonard met a woman who was driving people out of New Orleans in buses. The woman, Carla, heard his story and took him into her home in Baton Rouge for a week and a half. She and her boyfriend cared for him and put a notice on the Internet about a missing child. In Texas, his uncle Jerome saw the notice and came to get him. Jerome drove Leonard Bartholomew IV directly to the hospital.

  His mom was in a wheelchair, her right arm gone. His sister Lesha was in a hospital bed, unable to walk. Cousin Jose, his close pal, lay in his own hospital bed, unable to talk, with a metal plate in his jaw. Surrounded by loss, the teenager was suddenly engulfed by guilt. Why wasn’t he shot too?

  Looking toward his cousin Jose, he started crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Leonard told him. “I should have been shot, too. It isn’t right that I got off like that but everybody else has to go through all of this pain. And I’m just walking around, I’m fine. I don’t have to worry about injuries. It just isn’t right.”

  Jose looked at his cousin, lifted an arm, and gave a thumbs-up. You didn’t do anything wrong, he was saying. None of us deserved this.

  When Jose had first been rushed to West Jefferson, a gush of wind snapped him to as the hospital doors whisked open, and he looked up to glimpse lights and doctors encircling him. Then the images faded, and doctors scurried to save his life in surgery. Now Jose lay in his hospital bed with a metal rod in his left arm, a jaw fixator to hold his face in place, deep scars across his stomach, a tube to help him breathe, and a colostomy bag. “A poop sack,” he called it. Nurses ordered Jose to move even when he didn’t want to, to begin the painful process of rebuilding his muscles. One nurse refused to let Jose be lazy, and he was thankful she pushed him. Yet the same nurse chastised him for firing at helicopters, repeating the line Sergeant Kaufman so loudly uttered after one visit to Susan’s hospital room.

  Another hospital staffer told Jose he needed to get healthy because, once he was released, he would be arrested on attempted murder charges.

  In the weeks after the shooting, Jose was barely able to speak. Other than a BB gun at age fourteen, he had never owned a gun. In the hospital bed he tried to muster strength to tell the nurse what the police were saying about him was not true. “And I just kept shaking my head because I couldn’t talk to her,” Jose said, “but she kept insinuating I was shooting the helicopters.” More than anything, he didn’t want the people working to bring him back to life believing he was a killer.

  AS 2005 SPUN INTO 2006, Sherrel Johnson heard nothing from JJ. He had vanished, and the family feared the seventeen-year-old had been buried by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters. She had no inkling he had been gunned down on the bridge.

  James Brissette Jr. was not the only family member killed during the hurricane and its aftermath. His brother-in-law, Lawrence Celestine, who was married to JJ’s sister Andrea Celestine, was a well-respected, eight-year NOPD veteran who had died in the first days after Katrina. Initially police ruled his death a suicide, an event that captured the attention of the New York Times and was cast as a symbol of the city’s painful, depressing spiral. A forensic expert, conducting a psychiatric forensic autopsy, concluded that “Officer Celestine’s death by suicide was the result of an ‘Acute Stress Disorder,’ brought on by the extreme catastrophic circumstances of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the duties he had to perform in the course and scope of his employment as a NOPD officer,” a Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling noted five years later.

  Some other experts did not share this assessment, finding no sign that Celestine suffered from mental illness and seeing no evidence to support the diagnosis.

  The circumstances of Celestine’s death are filled with coincidences. The seven-page NOPD report on his death was written by the same Sergeant Kaufman helping lead the department’s probe of the shootings on the bridge. Officer Celestine was related by marriage to Henry Glover, a New Orleans resident shot by police and later set on fire in the days after Katrina. The accused shooter served in the same police district, the Seventh, as Celestine. Glover and Celestine died the same day.

  Citing these and other unusual circumstances, Celestine’s widow pressed the city to investigate her husband’s death as a murder, not a suicide. A decade later, th
e case remains unresolved.

  MONTHS AFTER THE SHOOTINGS on the Danziger Bridge, Sherrel Johnson knew only that her nerdy, book-loving teenager was no longer around.

  By Mother’s Day weekend 2006, Sherrel submitted her DNA sample to a network formed by the Louisiana Department of Public Health following Katrina to connect families with missing loved ones. The state set up the Find Family National Call Center in a one-time sporting goods store in Baton Rouge and, every time the center linked a family member with a missing loved one, a worker would ring a bell. Sometimes the family member rang it, the clang a visceral confirmation of one more family tie knotted.

  Using dental records, fingerprints, medical records, and other resources, the state’s Victim Identification Center also worked to positively identify the remains of unclaimed Hurricane Katrina victims. By December 30, four months after Katrina, forensic experts at the center had positively identified 735 remains.

  “When all other means have been exhausted, a technique called kinship DNA analysis will be used to assist in the identification of victims. This process involves analyzing DNA from family members and then comparing these samples to DNA taken from the unidentified deceased,” said the Louisiana Department of Public Health, which took mouth swabs to collect the DNA.

  Sherrel had resisted going to the center, fearing the worst but still holding out a mother’s hope. Displaced to Tennessee for weeks after Hurricane Katrina, she took the time to fill out paperwork enrolling JJ in public school there, saving a place for him when her boy came home.

  When Sherrel finally did submit her DNA sample, she did so with her mother at her side, a cushion of familial strength. A match came back. On June 6, 2006, Sherrel was told JJ had died. She initially assumed her son had drowned. She didn’t know police had killed him, a fact she would learn only later.