by Cathy Scott
When Connie called BayBay’s name at Camp Tylertown, it didn’t appear that BayBay knew who was calling her. She sniffed the ground and didn’t look up. “BayBay!” Connie said a bit louder. With that, BayBay lifted her head and walked over to Connie, staring at her and sniffing the air. “BayBay, it’s me,” Connie said. Then suddenly, BayBay’s entire body wagged, and she recognized her person. She threw herself against Connie, who had knelt down, and licked her face. Volunteers and staffers stood there watching. Instead of sadness, everyone was beaming. One more pet was going home to her people.
Back home, BayBay is still wagging her tail. “She’s so happy now,” Connie said. Before Katrina, BayBay had spent a lot of time outside. Now she spends her days and nights in the house. “At night, BayBay likes to sleep underneath the dining room table,” Connie said. “There’s a tablecloth, and it’s like a tent. She goes under there, and she’s out like a light.” But she has spunk, too. “She’s six years old, but she has a lot of energy,” Connie said. “She loves her walks. I’ve been taking her on walks at night because it’s so hot right now during the day. She can’t wait to get inside.”
A cat named Garfield was reunited several weeks after the storm, but almost by accident. The Tyson family e-mailed photos back and forth with Rude Ranch animal rescue in Haywood, Maryland. One in particular looked like their feline. The resemblance was close enough that Nita Tyson and her twelve-year-old daughter made the two-hour drive from Front Royal, Virginia, to see for themselves. They were disappointed when they arrived and realized he wasn’t Garfield after all. While there, however, Bob Rude, who runs the rescue with his wife, showed Nita some other cats, even though he thought it was a longshot that any of them was Garfield. Nita stopped at one kennel to take a closer look, and there was Garfield. The Rudes called him Bite Boy.
“He arrived at Camp Tylertown with a lot of bite wounds on the lower half of his body, and he had a nasty upper respiratory infection,” Bob said. “He was never all that friendly with people and would only tolerate us.” But when they got him out of his kennel, he rolled over and “started pawing the air and showing definite signs of recognition,” Bob said. Before Nita and her daughter left for home with Garfield, Nita called her husband to let him know that she had seen a stray neighborhood cat called Itsy Bitsy hanging around near the rescue. Nita wanted to adopt the stray, so the family returned a few weeks later to take Itsy Bitsy home, too.
For many pets, it was as if they’d resigned themselves to never finding their families. You could see it in their eyes, the deep sadness that had washed over them as the floodwater covered the streets and overtook their homes, leaving them stranded. That phase of their lives, in a home with people, seemed like a long-ago memory because so much had happened to them in between. When they were reunited, it seemed to come as a surprise. Volunteers who watched the reunions didn’t take their eyes off the dogs and cats: the pets’ looks were indifferent at first, but when they realized they were being called by their guardians, unforgettable signs of recognition filled their eyes.
A reunion of a different sort took place in January 2006 at Celebration Station’s triage center between newborn puppies and their mother, a Miniature Pinscher mix. Her rescuer, Brenda, had dropped off the dog at the triage center the day before, because she, her husband, and their two young children were living in their car and couldn’t care for the dog any longer. They’d found the dog, whom they’d named Pretty Mama, in late November, three months after the storm, in the backcountry eating from a pile of trash. Brenda and her husband took Pretty Mama in, not realizing she was pregnant. When Pretty Mama arrived, it was obvious to volunteers at Celebration Station that the dog was producing milk and had recently nursed pups. Brenda was asked where the babies were, and she said they had all found new homes.
Still, it didn’t make sense that Pretty Mama’s puppies could be old enough to be adopted out considering their mother was full of milk and obviously uncomfortable. For the next day and a half, Pretty Mama was inconsolable. When she was taken for walks, she desperately looked under every bush and around every corner, hoping to find her pups.
“She’s frantic, looking about for her puppies,” said Juliette Watt, a volunteer coordinator at the center. “It’s heartbreaking. Isn’t there anything we can do to ease her stress?” It appeared that Pretty Mama was both distressed over being away from her puppies and in discomfort because she was engorged with milk.
Because Pretty Mama was so distraught, we called Brenda, who’d given us her number, to see if we could find out when the puppies were born and where they were. Brenda said all the adoptions had fallen through when the potential owners saw how young the puppies were. The babies, whose eyes were still closed, hadn’t eaten, she said, since they’d been taken away from their mother.
“What should we do?” Brenda asked. “They’re only three and a half weeks old.”
“Bring them here so they can nurse,” she was told.
A little later, around ten o’clock, Brenda walked into Celebration Station carrying a laundry basket. Inside were two female and two male puppies—two black, one red, and one tan—piled on top of one another. At first, it didn’t look like they were breathing, but as we picked them up, they awakened and started whimpering.
What happened next was a relief to everyone at the center, especially Pretty Mama. As a group of volunteers stood to the side watching, the puppies were handed to the mama dog one by one. They immediately started to nurse while she was still on her feet. When her puppies were finished, Pretty Mama finally began to relax with her babies sound asleep against her belly. Brenda and her family left the center loaded with shampoo, soaps, toothpaste, handwipes, canned goods, and a children’s book and stuffed animals for the kids—all donated items shipped to the center. Several volunteers and staffers took up a collection, and the family was given a handful of cash.
Pretty Mama, who that night was set up in a puppy room with her babies, lovingly nursed and cleaned up after them. She wasn’t given a chance to be a mom, good or bad, when she was separated from her pups by people. A few days later, mama and babies left for a foster home. Brenda and her family’s lives improved as well. Within a week they were living in a hotel in Metairie in government-subsidized temporary housing.
By being taken away from their mother so soon, the puppies were put at risk, said Kristi Littrell, a Best Friends adoption coordinator who has experience bottle-feeding newborns. “Eight weeks is a minimum age,” she explained. “Usually, at six weeks they’re weaned on gruel, but mom is still with them.” In addition, she said, their immune systems are compromised without puppy milk. “If they’re ripped away from mom, the puppy milk replacement doesn’t have immunity boosters. Brenda helped save the puppies by taking them back to their mom.”
16
A Dog Named Angel
A PIT BULL NAMED ANGEL, rescued from St. Bernard High School eighteen days after the storm, survived more than a hurricane. She was plucked from the second floor of the school, which had been the scene of a bloodbath against pets. Even so, pregnant Angel, along with Mercedes, Novocain, Daisy, and a handful of other dogs and cats, survived and was ultimately reunited with her family. The shootings at the school were an unfortunate—yet perhaps intentional, at the hands of rogue cops—side effect of the flooding of this Gulf Coast fishing community.
It all started when the entire parish of St. Bernard, much of which runs along the cypress-lined St. Bernard Highway, was underwater. The community was closer to the path of the storm than any other and was exposed to a surge of water from the Gulf of Mexico. It flooded in large part because of extensive levee failures along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal, a seventy-six-mile shipping channel.
Hundreds of evacuees in St. Bernard escaped the storm on August 29 by boating to three area schools (Sebastian Roy Elementary School, Beauregard Middle School, and St. Bernard High School), and many of them brought along their pets. A few days later, sheriff’s deputies ordered th
em to get into the back of dump trucks—without their pets—so they could be dropped off at the nearby town of Violet. There, they would catch a barge to higher ground. The evacuees left, thinking that law enforcement officers would care for their pets. They were wrong.
Twenty-one-year-old Christopher Acosta was one of the residents who borrowed a boat to rescue friends and relatives—and their animals. Before the storm hit, Christopher sent his wife, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy, out of New Orleans to stay with family. He remained at their house with his dogs, Mercedes and Novocain, to try to ride out the storm. After the wall of water hit their house, he left with a few friends and family members and their dogs—twelve people in all. They got into his uncle’s boat and motored to Beauregard Middle School in St. Bernard Parish. It took three trips, Christopher said, to get all their dogs to the school.
They stayed at the school for three days before sheriff’s deputies ordered everyone to go. They had to leave their dogs, whom they were told would be cared for at an animal shelter. So the group left all the dogs except for Novocain. Christopher thought he’d be allowed to take one dog with him on the ferry, and since he convinced the deputies, Novocain went with him.
The group rode in a dump truck with other evacuees to the Violet boat launch. When Christopher was turned away because he had Novocain with him, he waded with his dog to the nearby levee in Violet, across St. Bernard Highway, and walked him to the top of the berm, where it was dry. He left Novocain on the levee and then made his way back to the boat launch to catch the last ferry out. Meanwhile, Mercedes was back at Beauregard Middle School, along with dogs belonging to Christopher’s mother, uncle, cousin, and best friend.
After the refugees had been trucked from the schools to the Violet boat launch at Paris Road, they were ferried across the wide ribbon of the Mississippi River to the Algiers Landing on the west bank, at the foot of Canal Street overlooking the French Quarter. As they stepped off the barge, one of the first buildings they saw was the Algiers Courthouse. But justice was not meted out that day. It would, however, happen later.
Instead, parish residents were devastated to find out that the pets they’d entrusted to law enforcement officers had been killed. Some learned that awful truth a few weeks later when CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in early November 2005, broke the story that pets left at Beauregard Middle School had been shot to death. Retrieved from the scene were spent shells with the word “Tactical” imprinted on them, similar to police-issue munitions.
As soon as authorities gave the green light for residents to return home to St. Bernard Parish, a little more than two weeks later, Christopher Acosta drove straight to Beauregard Middle School where he’d left Mercedes. What he found were dead bodies, and that made him angry. The more bodies he saw, the angrier he got. He entered every classroom, searching. By his count, about forty deceased pets were in the building, including his mother’s small Pomeranian. But Mercedes wasn’t where he had left her. What Christopher didn’t know at the time was that Mercedes was still at the school, alive but trapped.
More than a month later, on October 27, Maxey Nunez, a resident who lived nearby and had weathered the storm at his house, was at the school when he heard a faint whimper. He had gone to the school to turn off the water there in order to increase the pressure at his house. He stopped what he was doing and followed the sound to the gymnasium weight room behind the main school building. Just then, Maxey heard a car on the abandoned road and ran out to flag it down for help. The words “Animal Rescue” were scrawled on the car’s side window, and inside were Kelle Davis, Samantha Holmes, and Barbara Dunsmore from Animal Rescue New Orleans. They parked the car, walked to the building with him, and found the whimpering dog, whose leash was stuck under a file cabinet. It was Mercedes. The three took her to Camp Tylertown’s M*A*S*H Unit so she could be treated by a vet—who said she wouldn’t have lasted much longer without water. Kelle later fostered Mercedes in her Texas home. In early January, with a CNN camera crew and a local newspaper reporter present, Mercedes was reunited outside the middle school with Christopher and his family, three months after they evacuated.
But most of the dogs weren’t so lucky. Many were found dead, some tethered, others shot in groups and scattered in classrooms.
In two separate lengthy criminal probes—first looking into street shootings recorded by a photojournalist on the scene, and then into the firing upon pets at the three schools—the Louisiana attorney general’s office in Baton Rouge sought justice. The findings of the investigators led straight to St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s deputies, many of whom were entrusted with the care of nearly three hundred dogs, some cats, and a few birds left at the schools.
Photographer David Leeson, working for the Dallas Morning News, had been on assignment in New Orleans immediately following Hurricane Katrina. His camera produced the most damning evidence of alleged police wrongdoing. While driving between St. Bernard Highway and Judge Perez Drive near Chalmette, David, along with his coworker and staff photographer Tom Cox, had stopped to help a dog but were dismayed at what happened next. Two people in a Jeep and two officers in the back of a pickup truck drove to where David and Tom had parked and were giving water to the dog. Otherwise, David said, he and Tom would have driven off and wouldn’t have seen the dog shot to death. Instead, they ended up being witnesses. Right in front of them, deputies killed the dog they had been helping, David said.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer then filmed other events. On the raw tape, David said, the shootings of eight or nine other dogs can be heard—first gunfire and then yipping. Also disturbing was the admission by then Sergeant Mike Minton that he had, in fact, killed dogs by shooting them.
When the sergeant noticed David’s camera, he jumped in front of David and asked what was going on. David identified himself as being with the paper and asked the officer about the shootings. Sergeant Minton, David said, started talking on camera, with the red “on” light in plain view. “Really, it’s [to] benefit a dog, really, because, you know, where’s he gonna find food, where’s he gonna find water, you know? So, I just looked at it as it’s more humane, doing it to protect myself, but it’s more humane for the dog, you know. They tried to eat us. Four days into it, [a deputy] almost got eat up by a Pit Bull.”
The paper, under subpoena, turned over to the attorney general’s office David’s raw video footage of dogs being gunned down on the streets on September 7. The video included a sheriff’s deputy shooting two dogs.
Sergeant Minton, who was suspended by his department after an edited version of the conversation was posted on the Dallas Morning News Web site, resigned from his post. The video contained enough evidence for the attorney general’s office to continue its investigation, with a grand jury eventually indicting and charging Minton with a sundry of felony animal cruelty counts. Also indicted by the same grand jury was Clifford “Chip” Englande, a sergeant who, after the indictment, was assigned to administrative duties. Both men, who face up to ten years in prison if convicted, pleaded innocent. Minton’s attorney has said that his client shot only dogs that were dangerous.
According to Assistant Attorney General Mimi Hunley, for those dogs shot on the street, the attorney general’s office had the evidence of David Leeson’s film. For the dogs and cats shot inside the schools, proof lay in the video footage CNN’s news crew took when Anderson Cooper went there with animal abuse investigator Mark Steinway from Pasado Rescue. Anderson, looking subdued, began his newscast by telling viewers that they wouldn’t be able to tell from outside the innocuous-looking Beauregard Middle School, with its colonial-style architecture, that a slaughter had taken place inside.
On September 30, when Anderson and Mark arrived at the middle school, just fourteen dead animals remained, far fewer than Christopher Acosta had counted when he had been there two weeks earlier. Mark also videotaped the bodies found at the elementary and high schools, for a total of thirty-three dogs and cats found dead. The Pasado rescue group
covered the costs of necropsies (animal autopsies) for these animals and handed over the results to the attorney general’s office.
At a pretrial hearing, animal rights activists gathered outside the state district courthouse in Chalmette, some holding signs that read JAIL TIME FOR ANIMAL CRUELTY. Other animal proponents sat in on the proceeding.
Our group was horrified by what had happened. A team from Best Friends had gone to St. Bernard High School in the first days after animal rescue groups were given the green light to enter the parish. By then, on September 20, most of the bodies had been removed. Under the bleachers on the football field, however, were three dead dogs. One uninjured dog, a Rottweiler, was sitting next to the bodies as if watching over them. The frightened male Rottweiler was leashed and walked out from under the bleachers and then taken to Camp Tylertown that night.
I was with the team that day, and we didn’t inspect the bodies. We thought they’d died in the storm. In addition, CNN’s report hadn’t yet aired, and we didn’t know that the bleachers were where the animals’ remains had been stored until they were removed.
At the time, several of us commented on how many dogs and cats were running loose in just a three-block area of homes surrounding the high school. We rescued at least twenty-five pets that day alone from in and around the high school.
Volunteer Mike McCleese noted, “I can still hear the eerie silence of those streets—no sounds of machines or trucks or cars, no sounds of electricity, no children playing, no sounds of birds chirping or insects buzzing,” Mike said. “The only thing I heard was the crunch of drying sludge under my boots whenever I took a step.”