by Cathy Scott
For photographer Clay Myers, it wasn’t the silence that felt different from other rescue details he’d been on; it was the large number of loose animals: “While every neighborhood I was in had its share of shy, frightened dogs, that one by far had the most. Dogs were running at top speed away from us. They were terrified of being caught.”
Mike and Clay didn’t learn until afterward that the school had been a refuge where evacuees stayed with their pets for at least three days. For Mike, learning later about the shootings inside the school was disturbing. “I am horrified by this crime,” he said. “To think that I stood unknowingly outside a place where so many people’s beloved animals were brutally killed overwhelms me with grief and sadness. When we stood outside that school, it seemed like nothing was alive, except us—and then Clay found Angel.”
Kris Wartelle, spokeswoman for the Louisiana attorney general, said publicly that she couldn’t comment early on about how many officers may have been involved, except to say they had a list of deputies they were questioning in connection with the cases. Early speculation ruled out any involvement by National Guard officers. On September 29, after the bodies of animals were discovered at Sebastian Roy Elementary School on Bayou Road, St. Bernard Sheriff Jack Stephens told CNN that he was not prepared to say without reservation that it wasn’t one of his officers who did it. He made a point of describing the violent acts as despicable.
About sixty people had evacuated with their pets to Beauregard Middle School, including lifetime resident Kit Bauer. She was rescued on August 29 from her attic when neighbors in a boat heard one of her dogs barking. They motored her to Beauregard, where she and her dogs spent three days. When she was forced to leave her dogs at the school, Kit wrote a note that included her cell phone number in chalk on a wall outside the classroom where she’d left her dogs. It read, “In this room are 6 adult dogs and 4 puppies. Please save them. Kit.” The puppies were three-week-old Dachshunds and were still nursing. Kit left water and opened three boxes of Fruit Loops cereal for them. Out of the ten, one dog, Indy, was located two weeks after the storm at a shelter and returned to Kit. The adult dogs were shot to death. The puppies were never located.
Jodie Jones, another evacuee, also left a note at a school. She and her husband, Clay, had evacuated the Saturday after the levees broke. A half mile down Bayou Road, the Joneses left their three cats and a dog in the hands of deputies at the makeshift evacuee center at St. Bernard High School. To their horror, two of their cats were fatally shot four weeks later inside the carriers they had delivered them in. They never found their third cat. All were ten to twelve years old.
“I asked the deputies to promise me they’d get my animals to safety,” Jodie said. “They assured us nothing was going to happen to them.”
Their dog, Suzie, somehow escaped being shot and was located in a foster home. “Suzie made it to California,” Jodie said, but “she died three days before we were scheduled to get her. I think she died of grief.” At least, Jodie said, it was comforting to know that Suzie died in a home and not at the hands of rogue officers. “I trusted the deputies,” Jodie said. “It is such a shock and such a heartbreak that anybody could just shoot [those animals].”
Another lucky dog was Angel the Pit Bull, who also survived. Angel was rescued from St. Bernard High School twenty-two days after the storm. She was plucked from the second-floor library, the scene of target practice against the animals. Angel, whose real name is Sassy, was spotted by Best Friends photographer Clay Myers on September 20 as he walked across the grounds of the high school, looked up, and saw a Pit Bull staring down at him from a second-floor window. Clay walked up the grimy stairs to the second floor, and Angel, who was frightened, jumped out a window onto the roof. Clay didn’t want her to jump off the roof, so he summoned dog handler Ethan Gurney, also with the team that day, to help. Ethan arrived a few minutes later and was able to slip a loop lead around the dog’s neck and walk her safely out of the school to the waiting transport van. Dehydrated and scared, Angel was driven to Camp Tylertown.
Angel had her twelve puppies while in a van on her way to her Houston foster home. Evacuee Jenny Fourcade, who had been at the school with Angel’s owner, read her story and saw a photo of Angel on the Best Friends Web site. She left a comment, saying the dog’s name was Sassy, and then notified the dog’s person. Once a positive identification was made with the owner, arrangements began for Angel to go home. Her person learned that Angel had given birth to twelve puppies and that ten survived and were adopted out.
Today, Angel is again living in St. Bernard Parish. When she first returned home, Jane Ezell, Angel’s person, took her to their old house. When they walked Angel down the street, she saw the house, perked up, and ran into the yard. Jane described it as a special moment for Angel, because it was obvious she remembered and it made her feel more secure to go home again.
Carol Hamm stayed at the high school for two days, waiting for her husband and son, who used their boat to rescue people stranded on rooftops and in attics of flooded homes. While at the high school, Carol said, “One moment [the deputies] told us we could take our pets, and the next moment they said we couldn’t. My husband was still at the house with our dogs.”
Her husband paddled a boat and dropped off their four dogs at Beauregard Middle School because sheriff’s deputies told him to go there and that officers would take the dogs to an animal shelter for safekeeping. Then he and their son went to the high school to be with Carol. A day later they all were evacuated, thinking they’d retrieve their dogs in a few days.
A lot of residents had evacuated with their animals to St. Bernard High School, one of the other makeshift refugee centers where Angel’s person had left her, and where others, like the Hamms, also left their pets, believing them to be in safe hands. “People were there with dogs, cats, and birds, too. You name it, people brought them,” Carol said. “There was an old woman who wanted to take her Yorkie. The dog was so tiny, she could fit it in her purse. They made her leave it.”
While still at the high school waiting to be evacuated, Carol overheard a deputy say to another officer that as soon as people left, he was going to shoot the pets. Carol and others confronted the officer. “A medic was also there,” Carol said, “and he told me he wouldn’t let anything happen to [the pets].”
It wasn’t until September 30 that Carol returned to the middle school to look for their family pets, after she was contacted by CNN and asked to meet the TV crew there. What they found—the remains of family pets—was unspeakable. “It’s the worst memory I’ll ever have,” Carol later said. “The bodies were being removed. It was horrible. I was crying over strangers’ dogs. Only three of our dogs were in the room. We saw a Golden Retriever, two Yorkshire Terriers, all breeds, and a lot of Pits and Rotties. Some were shot running, one as he ran up the stairs. Bullet, our Husky mix, was shot in the head.”
While the investigations into the shootings continued, those whose pets were either lost in the carnage or reunited with them tried to move on. Carol and her family, who now live in Temple, Texas, have been reunited with Daisy, the sole survivor among the four dogs they left at the school. Somehow, Daisy survived. Carol has her own theory, noting that Daisy “has always been an escape artist.” A Best Friends team in the area picked up Daisy in late September. She, too, was taken to Camp Tylertown and then placed in foster care in Iowa. The foster family later returned her to the Hamms.
Christopher and Crystal Acosta, after living in a hotel for a couple of months, eventually moved into a FEMA trailer on their property in St. Bernard Parish while they repaired their house. Crystal had a healthy baby girl, Iceie, who was born September 1, just after Crystal had evacuated. Novocain, the dog who had been left near the barges, was reunited with the family four and a half months after the storm. His foster mom, Kim Moore, drove Novocain from Ohio to Louisiana. At the reunion, she described him as a good dog and said while she would miss him, she was happy to bring him home. And the day
Christopher and his wife saw Mercedes again for the first time, Christopher was emotional, telling reporters who met him and his dog at the middle school that he loved her and was grateful to get her back. Christopher’s uncle’s dog, a German Shepherd, also somehow escaped from the school and was found on his porch when his person returned home.
For the pet owners not as lucky as the Acostas, returning to St. Bernard Parish was difficult. Jodie Jones returned to her home on Valentine’s Day after she and her husband received keys to their FEMA trailer. She couldn’t help but miss her pets. Going home brought back memories, she said. “You know how when you pull up in the driveway you’re used to them barking, and when you go inside they’re happy to see you?” she said. “It was like we expected to see them, but they weren’t there. It’s been difficult. My pets were my children. I can’t get over the abuse.”
Kit Bauer, who now lives out of state, won’t be returning to St. Bernard Parish. “There’s nothing to go back to,” she said. As for the investigation into the shootings, Kit said she doesn’t want to dwell on what the deputies may or may not have done. She’d known some of those officers for years and went to school with at least one of them. They took good care of her, she said, while she was at the school, and she appreciated that. Her only hope, she noted, was that her dogs hadn’t suffered.
As for the legal cases against the officers charged with opening fire on the pets left in the three schools by their owners, helping with the case through his videotape was what David Leeson was trained to do. “I wasn’t out looking for an ax to grind that day,” said the veteran newspaper photographer. “I didn’t raise a rifle that day. I raised a camera. I did what I’m supposed to do as a journalist. Journalists are the watchdogs of society. I let others judge and let the truth come out. It’s gratifying to see that there are times when both the media and the system work.”
17
Putting Haley First
FOR A DOG NAMED HALEY, a pending reunion with her people took on a different twist. Both her owners and her foster dad agreed that the difficult decision they were about to make was the right one for Haley.
Haley’s family, Doris and Henry Wyman, searched for their dog after they evacuated. They later learned that a month after the storm, Haley, whose original name was Boo, had been found in the Lower Ninth Ward on the still-standing back porch of their battered wooden shotgun house—so named because a shotgun could fly through the open front door to the back of the house, never hitting a thing as it sailed down the long, narrow hallway. That type of construction was typical of the more affordable houses of New Orleans, but the simple structure didn’t hold up well during a hurricane. The Lower Ninth Ward was left abandoned longer than other communities because so many homes in the working-class neighborhood had been flattened, and there was nothing more than debris to return to. Still, pets like Haley remained in the uninhabited Ninth Ward until they were rescued.
After Katrina, Doris said she could only imagine how Haley must have felt, alone outside the house and wondering where all the people had gone. Henry had stayed for a week upstairs in their home with Haley and their cat, Lucky, until National Guardsmen arrived and ordered him to leave. “Give me a second,” Henry told them. He went back upstairs, emptied a bag of dog food, and walked out of the house without his pets. He did not want to leave, his wife explained. “It pained him to leave Boo and Lucky,” Doris said—so much so that not knowing what happened to their pets threw Henry into a depression for months. He didn’t hold much hope that he’d ever see them again. After all, the Lower Ninth, as the district is called, was the hardest hit in the New Orleans area. Many of the homes were thrown off their cinder-block foundations and crushed by floodwaters that burst through broken levees at the nearby Industrial Canal. Doris didn’t know what had happened to their rental house, their belongings, or their pets.
Then the Wymans returned home a few weeks later to find a note on the back of their house saying that their dog had been rescued and was at base camp in Tylertown, Mississippi. Their cat, however, had not been found. After the match with Haley was made, workers began to make arrangements to pick up the German Shepherd mix from her foster home in South Lion, Michigan, and return her to the Wymans in New Orleans.
However, just a couple of days before the scheduled home-coming, the Wymans reconsidered. They decided, after much discussion, to leave Haley in her foster home. “The biggest thing after all this time is knowing she is okay and that she is in a loving home,” Doris said in a telephone interview. “We’re in an apartment and our landlord doesn’t want a big dog here.” Also, because they don’t have a yard, “I’d hate to bring her to an insecure situation and have her lost again. It was terrible not knowing where she was.”
Mike Magyar, Haley’s foster parent, agreed to adopt Haley. In her new home, where she’s been since November 2005, she has the company of another dog, Harley, also a German Shepherd mix. Mike was fine with returning Haley to her family when that was the plan. “There was no way I would keep her from them,” Mike said. “I had no problem giving her back, because she was their dog. But if they’ve got no place to take her to, I’m happy to keep her.”
“Once we talked to Mister Mike,” Doris explained, “my husband’s whole demeanor changed because he knew she was okay. That was the main reason my husband stayed behind. Knowing that this gentleman is going to take good care of her, that’s all that matters to us. She’s like a child to us. You hope they go out there in the world and that they’re doing well and they’re loved.”
For some pets, Katrina, while devastating in so many ways, was the best thing that ever happened to them. The case of a red retriever and shepherd mix without a name whose owner had moved to Lake Charles is one example. The dog was wearing a collar with a rabies tag that led to her person. When reached, the owner described her as “a yard dog” he’d never taken the time to name; he simply referred to her as “Dog.” He had no place for Dog and, without hesitation, surrendered her to Best Friends. The rescuer who retrieved her from North Claibourne and Jourdan avenues next to the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in Orleans Parish described her as feral-like, scared, and aggressive, no doubt because of the solitary life she’d lived in a yard, not to mention having just survived a hurricane on her own. At the M*A*S*H Unit, she tested positive for heartworm, which was not uncommon for the yard dogs who were rescued.
Because she was fear-aggressive, the dog was transferred to the St. Francis Sanctuary to be treated for heartworm and begin work to increase her confidence. The dog, who was named Nicole, was put in a fifty-by-seventy-five-foot grassy run with Jordan, a shy Beagle also rescued from Katrina. Nicole and Jordan are able to get out of their run on the fifty-acre St. Francis property, which is fenced, and a few nights a week they “escape” by digging under the fence. Then they spend the rest of the night chasing field mice. “As soon as the caregivers arrive at work the next morning,” said St. Francis’s Heidi Krupp, “Nicole and Jordan hurry back, go under the fence, and return to their run.” Caregivers regularly fill the holes the pair digs, but they eventually make it out of their run again. “It’s become a regular routine for them,” Heidi explained. Today, Nicole—once called Dog—still lives at St. Francis and, Heidi reports, is still buddies with Jordan.
In a case similar to that of Haley, a Golden Retriever named Sassy was about to be reunited a month after the storm when her owners gave her up. The couple from New Orleans were contacted using a phone number, included on the dog’s tag, that was put back into service three weeks after the storm. The foster mom, Anne Park, was attached to Sassy, but more importantly, Anne said, the previously shy Sassy had adjusted well in her Colorado home. She was used to running and playing on their property with two other dogs. Anne called the lost-and-found office at base camp.
“Do you think the owners will let me keep her?” she asked.
“It won’t hurt to try,” she was told.
When the original owner was called, he said he had already
thought about not taking her back because he didn’t want to see Sassy go back to living outdoors again.
Before the storm, Sassy lived in the couple’s backyard because, the husband explained, his wife didn’t like fleas or fur in their home. He said he’d hate to see Sassy survive Katrina only to live out back again. But the decision to either keep or surrender Sassy, he said, was also his wife’s. He planned to discuss it with her and let us know. About an hour later, he called back to say he and his wife had agreed that they wanted what was best for Sassy and that they wanted her to remain in Colorado.
Today, Sassy—now called Loxi—lives on thirty-five acres with four horses. “She runs her entire body down the length of the fence while the horses follow her,” Anne said. “She itches and groans and loves it. Then she’ll turn around and do the other side with the horses turning around and following her. It’s hilarious.”
Anne and her husband adopted another Katrina dog, an Akita named Camelot. The two also live with a Greyhound and two Newfoundland dogs. “Loxi’s the instigator of play with two huge Newfies and a big Akita and a Greyhound, and usually the one that takes the roughest part of the play with pleasure,” Anne said. “My Newfie Rope will run up to her, bump her, and roll her completely over numerous times. She has such a good nature and goes back for more.
“She gets along great with all dogs and humans, and we couldn’t be happier with her.”
In another case, an at-risk Great Dane posed ongoing, expensive medical care for her owner, who was still displaced. While her person loved her, she put the dog’s well-being first.
Gracie, a beautiful but skinny Great Dane, was rescued on September 12, 2005, from a street in Gretna on the west bank of the Mississippi River just east of uptown New Orleans. Gracie needed long-term medical care. When the merle-colored dog, with her bluish-gray coat streaked with black and white, went through the admissions process at Camp Tylertown, animal-care manager Sherry Woodard noticed immediately that she was panting heavily. Worried that Gracie might overheat, Sherry walked her to volunteer Clay Myers’ personal RV, which Clay drove from Utah to Mississippi, and asked if Gracie could stay inside his air-conditioned quarters. “Bring her in,” Clay told her. Sherry had already given Clay a snake and a small Beagle who was crated to keep in the RV and out of the Mississippi heat.