Newhouse News Service reported on September 26, 2005, that a doctor with FEMA—the organization that couldn’t initially get relief into the city and kept a lot of supplies and rescuers out—had sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process the bodies. They quoted the doctor saying, “I’ve got a report of two hundred bodies in the Dome.” The actual body count was six, including four natural deaths and a suicide. The September 26, 2005, Newhouse story went on to conclude, “The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees—mass murders, rapes, and beatings—have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical, and civilian officials in positions to know.”
Locked and Loaded
There were many ways in which the war in Iraq spilled over into Hurricane Katrina. Governor Blanco’s troops fresh from the battlefields of Iraq, M16s locked and loaded, implied that New Orleans too was a war zone and that the job of the National Guard was to retake the city. The Army Times took this literally in a September 2 news article headlined, “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans” that began, “Combat operations are under way to take this city back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” In other words, the stranded citizens were the enemy and the city was to be taken from them. New Orleans was not to be rescued, but conquered. Blackwater security forces, whose casual massacres in Iraq became notorious, were sent in. Jeremy Scahill reported for The Nation magazine that the four Blackwater commandos he talked to “characterized their work in New Orleans as ‘securing neighborhoods’ and ‘con fronting criminals.’ ” He reported further that “they all carried automatic assault weapons and had guns strapped to their legs. Their flak jackets were covered with pouches for extra ammunition. When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary. ’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.” Eventually the U.S. Army arrived. National Guard units in fatigues and armored personnel carriers were still patrolling the city in 2007, per Nagin’s request, since crime was high, and the police department continued to be in disarray. The belief that poor black people were going to attack, or were attacking, or had descended into some sort of maelstrom of animality, shaped the governmental responses and the media coverage. And it turned citizens into vigilantes. The real violence of Katrina deserves its own chapter, however.
For many of the tens of thousands stranded there for the better part of the week, the trauma was not merely the terrible storm and the flooding of their city, the waters in which bodies floated and poisonous snakes swam, the heat that blistered skin and killed many, the apocalyptic days in which people gave birth and died on freeway overpasses surrounded by unclean waters, in which many despaired of ever being taken from a city that had utterly collapsed into a wet and filthy ruin, or that people tried to give away their children so that they might be evacuated first. It was being abandoned by their fellow human beings and their government. And more than that, it was being treated as animals and enemies at the moment of their greatest vulnerability.
MURDERERS
It Made People Crazy
When I came to the Gulf Coast, I thought that my subject was the extraordinary communities of volunteers that had sprung up in the wake of Katrina and become funnels through which hundreds of thousands had come to the region, and that is one of my stories. But though no one seemed to be looking for the story of the murder of perhaps dozens of African American men, I couldn’t avoid it. At first it was all secondhand. Or thirdhand. On my first trip to New Orleans after Katrina, I heard that an uptown woman had said her son had seen the forces patrolling the French Quarter shooting black men and throwing their bodies in the river. A friend who’d done extensive investigations himself in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane knew someone who’d witnessed a military escort on one of the rescue boats shoot down two young black men stranded on a rooftop. The black men had fired first, but probably into the air—much of what would be imagined as sniper fire or threats were shots fired to get attention. (It turned out that an astonishingly high number of New Orleanians of all classes and races seemed to own pistols, rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatic weapons. Even the most altruistic rescuers went out in boats with sidearms as well as life vests.) But the witness later committed suicide.
This was all hearsay, but it didn’t arise from the kind of fears and stereotypes that the other rumors did. It was white people talking about the savage things other white people had done to black people. And then there was Jeremy Scahill’s account in The Nation magazine of private security firms—part of the mercenary army that along with the official army overran the city in the wake of the storm—firing into the night at “ black gangbangers.” They were allegedly returning fire, though none of the hired enforcers had been hit. They left behind, in their own words, “moaning and screaming.” The army showed up to check out the mercenaries, but no one investigated the injured then or after. A few days after the storm, middle-aged Danny Brumfield was shot in the back by police in broad daylight, in front of his son and daughter, outside the New Orleans Convention Center. He had a pair of scissors in his hand, and the police inside the car claimed their lives were in danger. His family said the scissors were for cutting up cardboard to make shelters for his grandchildren.
Sixteen months after the hurricane, seven policemen were indicted on murder and attempted-murder charges for the one incident that did become well known: the September 4, 2005, shooting on the Danziger Bridge that left two people dead and four wounded. The police claim they were responding to reports of snipers. Witnesses said there never were any snipers. One of the dead was a mentally retarded man, age forty, Ronald Madison. Madison’s brother Lance said the two were walking across the bridge to the dental office of a third brother when shooting broke out. The police claim that Ronald Madison reached for a weapon in his waistband, but his brother, a longtime Federal Express employee who has no criminal record but was arrested that day for attempted murder, says they were unarmed. The retarded man got five bullets in the back, though the police report says he was shot only once. Nineteen-year-old James Brisette was walking with a friend’s family to get groceries when the police opened fire. He died. One of his teenage friends was hit by bullets in the hands, elbow, neck, and stomach and now has a colostomy bag. The friend’s aunt, Susan Bartholemew, had her forearm blown off. “My right arm was on the ground lying next to me,” she recalled. Her husband was shot four times. The Bartholemews’ daughter was unhurt. The policemen were out of uniform and had emerged from a rental van. The victims thought they were vigilantes. The indictments led to no convictions, though in late 2008, the United States Justice Department opened an investigation into the shootings at the request of some of the victims’ families.
Michael Lewis, a native son of the affluent Uptown area, wrote a wryly humorous piece about his and his neighbors’ experiences of Katrina and the fears that afflicted them. The few who remained behind in unflooded Uptown were mostly men convinced they needed to protect their property, turning each pretty old home into a fortress to be guarded with an arsenal. “Pretty quickly, it became clear that there were more than a few people left in the city and that they fell broadly into two categories: extremely well armed white men prepared to do battle and a ragtag collection of irregulars, black and white, who had no idea that there was anyone to do battle with. . . . The police had said that gangs of young black men were looting and killing their way across the city, and the news had reached the men inside the forts. These men also had another informational disadvantage: working TV sets. Over and over and over again, they replayed the same few horrifying scenes from the Superdome, the Convention Center, and a shop in downtown New Orleans. If the images were to be reduced to a s
entence in the minds of Uptown New Orleans, that sentence would be ‘Crazy black people with automatic weapons are out hunting white people, and there’s no bag limit!’ ” Lewis can afford to be amusing because he assumes the people who sat on their porches armed to the teeth didn’t actually use their weapons. That’s probably true of Uptown. Elsewhere, crazy white people with automatic weapons were killing black men and joking about it.
There were vigilantes, and they committed the most heinous crimes during Katrina—well documented but not publicly acknowledged. The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on the devastation of its own city, but the newspaper didn’t always ask tough questions. In the commemorative Katrina book the paper published, there’s a photograph of a chubby, snub-nosed white man in an orange T-shirt sleeping on his side, an arsenal next to him. The caption reads, “On a balcony in Algiers Point, resident Gary Stubbs catches a couple of hours of sleep as part of a self-appointed posse that guarded the neighborhood against looters. The weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle, five shotguns, a derringer, a flare gun, and a pistol, were donated by evacuees who had given the neighborhood defense force permission to enter their homes and take what they needed.” CNN’s Katrina picture book ran the same picture with the caption, “A New Orleans man grabs a couple hours of sleep next to an arsenal of guns. He and several friends rode out Hurricane Katrina. . . . The guns were donated to them by out-of-town residents so they could protect everyone’s property.” Most people would come up with two questions immediately: did people menace that property? And did the vigilantes shoot them? The answers appear to be no and yes. The media didn’t ask those questions, though the answers were pretty easy to come by.
New Orleans is both a city and a parish—the latter being the term Louisiana uses for its counties—and New Orleans Parish stretches across the broad Mississippi to claim Algiers, a small portion of what is usually called the West Bank. As the Mississippi snakes along to form the undulating southern edge of the city, it creates a bulge on the northern shore that is the community of Algiers, a mix of old and new houses with black and white inhabitants. At the top of the bulge is Algiers Point, a neighborhood of pretty pastel-painted cottages with gingerbread trim where some of the bloodiest crimes of Katrina took place. A native New Orleanian told me that there on the West Bank, the other side of the river—where no flooding and what appears to be the worst massacre took place—officials issued her cousin a bulletproof vest, a badge, and a gun and told him to “go shoot niggers.” He may not have, but some did, and the confessions fueled by a sense of impunity and perhaps by guilt have seeped out everywhere. At the Common Ground clinic founded in Algiers shortly after the storm, everyone who came in for an injection or a dressing or medication also needed to tell their story, and the volunteers heard a lot.
Aislyn Colgan, a young medic who worked there in the early days, told me, “We made it a policy early on that everyone getting a [tetanus or immunization] shot had to get their blood pressure taken and their temperature taken and do the whole thing, which allowed me or whom-ever to sit down and have a conversation and that was mostly what we were doing. ‘How’s your house? How’s your family?’ Some of the hardest parts of it was hearing people talk about how they had lost everything. Just so many people, one after another: ‘I’ve lost everything, I’ve lost everything.’ That became the daily norm. . . .” She admired the religious strength that got many people through the loss of ancestral homes, of all their worldly goods, of family members.
But that young medic from Oakland, California, a sturdy fair-haired woman with a broad, honest face, also told me, “In Algiers, a lot of people in the white neighborhood formed vigilante groups. They got in their vehicles and drove around. More than one person told me, told me personally, that yes, ‘We shot seven people and we killed them.’ Or ‘We killed five people and we don’t know what happened to the other two.’ Or ‘It was four and three.’ And people were saying that you would’ve done the same thing, ‘You don’t understand, they were coming for you,’ because of the chaos and probably the rumors that the sheriff was spreading. But that was what was scary to me: people have this capacity for good but also this tremendous capacity for evil. One of the most intense conversations I had was with this woman who said: ‘They were coming for our TV and we had to shoot them. If we hadn’t shot them, they would have come back with their brothers and killed us.’ I think the same thing that brought people to completely rearrange their priorities, to be like, ‘What ever I’m going to do, I’m going to rescue you, if that means I have to get this refrigerator to float and pole you back one by one I’m going to do it.’ I think the same kind of response was ‘You are not going to get near my house.’ It made people crazy.”
We Shot ’Em
The murders were no secret. There were plenty of rumors, but the evidence was there. When I mentioned them, some people looked at me as if I was a gullible, overwrought bleeding-heart outsider, and then paused thoughtfully and said, “Well, actually. . . .” Then they’d add a new detail, a new firm of mercenaries set loose in New Orleans, a new vigilante crime they’d heard about. That was the locals. I tried to enlist a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from another part of the country to investigate, and she said she was going to check out the story with her friends at the Times-Picayune to see if there was anything to it. I was furious. It wasn’t a rumor or a theory. I had the evidence. So did much of the rest of the world. More than a million people saw the premiere of Spike Lee’s 2006 HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke. It includes an interview with Donnell Herrington of Algiers, a sturdy, soft-spoken African American guy not nearly as tall as his basketball college scholarship would suggest.
Spike Lee found him and put him in When the Levees Broke. Standing on the levees near the Algiers ferry, he told just the story of how he was shot by vigilantes, not who he was and what he had done before, or what happened afterward. On camera in that film that was seen by so many millions of people, Donnell pulled up his shirt and said, “This is the buckshots from the shotgun.” His torso was peppered with lumps. And then he gestured at the long, twisting raised scar that wound around his neck like a centipede or a snake: “And this is the incision from the surgery from the buckshots that penetrated my neck and hit my jugular vein.” A man described his own attempted murder on nationwide television, and no one thought to investigate? Even Spike Lee, who had devoted a whole documentary to the murder of four little girls during the civil rights era, just cut away to news footage of Governor Blanco announcing that they were going to restore law and order.
Lee’s film was the most widely available piece of evidence. But I’d also offered the journalist a copy of another documentary, Danish filmmaker Rasmus Holm’s ironically titled Welcome to New Orleans, which focused on the events in Algiers Point. In it, longtime Algiers resident Malik Rahim showed the camera the body of a black man lying on his face near the street, bloated from the heat, abandoned. As he also told the nationally syndicated news program Democracy Now, “During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in New Orleans, hunting season began on young African American men. In Algiers, I believe, approximately around eighteen African American males were killed. No one really knows what’s the overall count. And it was basically murder. It was murder by either the police or by vigilantes that was allowed to run amok.”
There were bodies lying on the street in the place that had never flooded, the comparatively undamaged place where no one was dying of thirst or heatstroke. A lot of people seemed reluctant to take the word of Rahim, an ex-Black Panther with dreadlocks halfway down his back, but there was that body on camera. There was Herrington’s testimony, and the mute testimony of his savaged body. And on Holm’s film there were vigilante confessions, if confession is the right word for cheery, beer-enhanced boasting. At a barbecue the Dane managed to attend shortly after Katrina, a stocky white guy with receding white hair and a Key West T-shirt chortled, “I never thought eleven months ago I’d be walkin
g down the streets of New Orleans with two .38s and a shotgun over my shoulder. It was great. It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”
A tough woman with short hair and chubby arms added, “That’s not a pheasant and we’re not in South Dakota. What’s wrong with this picture?”
The man said happily, “Seemed like it at the time.”
A second white-haired guy explained, “You had to do what you had to do. If you had to shoot somebody, you had to shoot. It’s that simple.”
A third said, “We shot ’em.”
The woman said, “They were looters. In this neighborhood we take care of our own.”
And the last man to speak added, “You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community.”
Here was the marauding, murdering gang the media had been obsessed with, except that it was made up of old white people, and its public actions went unnoticed.
Moved by his anguish over the murders, I vowed to Rahim that I would get them investigated and exposed. Eventually, I brought together the Nation magazine with the best and most fearless investigative journalist I know, A. C. Thompson, and handed over my evidence and contacts. A.C. is equally at ease with rogue cops and gang bosses and has broken a lot of crime stories in his day. The magazine supported many visits to look into records, launch a legal battle with the coroner (who was withholding autopsy information on all Katrina’s dead and “lost” many of these public records), and interview the victims and the perpetrators. Nine months later, still waiting to get the coroner’s records, A.C. sat at my kitchen table and riveted me with his accounts of whom he’d met and what he’d already figured out.
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