For them, that was enough, but not for Suzanna.
Suzanna launched a one-woman crusade to allow Texans to carry hidden loaded handguns if they pass a safety course and get a license. And in 1996, five years after George Hennard’s rampage, it became law, although concealed weapons remained illegal in places such as churches, stadiums, government offices, courts, airports, and restaurants serving alcohol.
Now married to Greg Hupp, the man she was dating at the time of the Luby’s shooting, Suzanna ran for the Texas legislature and won handily. She continued her crusade for gun rights, testifying passionately in Congress and states where fear of random crime had forced a legislative response.
“I’ve lived what gun laws do,” she told them all. “My parents died because of what gun laws do. I’m the quintessential soccer mom, and I want the right to protect my family. What happened to my parents will never happen again with my kids there.”
The media beat a well-worn track to her door. She got airtime with all the major networks and ink in most of the country’s magazines and newspapers. She became the first woman ever honored with a life membership to the National Rifle Association.
After serving five terms in the Texas legislature, Suzanna retired with Greg to raise her two sons on her central Texas horse farm. She has written an unpublished manuscript about her life, the Luby’s massacre, and gun rights, but mostly she jealously guards her time with her children—worrying about lack of time is one of the posttraumatic effects she must endure.
Suzanna now carries a gun with her almost everywhere, hidden in a purse or holster. She even has a special gun purse for her evening wear. She still eats out at restaurants, preferring places where she’s known—and where she knows almost everyone. She always sits where she can watch the door, usually near the back. If a strange, lone man saunters in, she pays closer attention. If a dropped glass shatters on the floor, she freezes for a startled moment.
But she’s ready.
And she never mentions George Hennard’s name, denying him the notoriety that even a single whispered breath grants. He is just “the gunman” or “the killer,” her way of reducing him to the pathetic, unfinished, nameless soul that he will always be to her.
A COLD SKY, WATERCOLORED IN SHADES OF GRAY, hung low over the parish voting hall on Election Day 2008. Tim Ursin hunkered into his coat and inched along in the long line outside, trying to keep warm. The brisk wind carried a hint of Gulf salt. He’d spent his whole life in these bayous, going on sixty-six years now, and he loved the water, but today wasn’t a good day for fishing. Today was for voting. A black man talking about hope looked like he might win this historic presidential election, not just for Louisiana, but for the country and maybe the world.
“Cold one today,” said the young African American man in his mid-thirties in line ahead of him. He turned his back to the wind, facing Tim.
“It is.”
“Line’s movin’, but I wish it was movin’ faster.”
“Got nothin’ else to do today,” Tim said. “Can’t fish.”
“I hear ya,” the man said. “I love to fish, but today just ain’t the day.”
The young man introduced himself to Tim. He was a truck driver with a family.
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a fishing guide,” Tim said. He reached in his pocket for a business card and the young man saw the silvery steel hook where his left hand once was.
“I hope you won’t be offended,” the curious man said, “but what happened to your hand?”
Tim smiled. People always wanted to know about the hook, even if they didn’t ask. He was used to it. And, hell, he’d told the story so many times in the past thirty-five years, he didn’t mind telling it again.
“It’s okay. I was a firefighter. I’ve been retired from the New Orleans Fire Department since ’75. I was shot a long time ago, in ’73, by a sniper at the Howard Johnson. Lost my arm up to here,” he said, wrapping his good right hand around the stump of his left forearm.
The young man’s eyes flickered with recognition as Tim told about that other cold morning in New Orleans when he crossed paths with a killer.
“I heard about that guy! I was just a little kid, but my parents talked about it,” he said. He stumbled slightly over his next words. “He was …he was a black guy, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, but he …,” Tim started to say.
“I’m sorry, man. I mean, that you were shot by a …a black man.”
“Hey, you didn’t do it,” Tim assured him. “I appreciate that, but you don’t have to be sorry or feel bad for what somebody else did. Didn’t matter what color he was then, and doesn’t now.”
“Thanks, man,” he said. “But if it happened to me, I just don’t know how I couldn’t be bitter …”
They talked about the shooting as long as they could. Inside the voting area, they parted ways in front of the poll workers’ table.
“I admire you,” the young truck driver said. “I mean, the way you look at it.”
“Life goes on,” Tim said. “Doesn’t do any good to dwell on something that happened a long time ago, you know? Everything has a purpose. Every day’s a gift. You just never know. I just gotta keep moving forward …and not just for me, but for the people around me, too.”
The man smiled, shook Tim’s hand, and was gone.
It’s funny, Tim thought, how the murky water of memory gets churned up on cold mornings.
STRAIGHT UP TO HELL
A chilly drizzle fell on New Orleans all night. For a few hours between the last late-night jazz riffs in the Quarter and the first peal of St. Louis Cathedral’s bells, the only sound was rain. The greasy blue Sunday morning streets, absolved of Saturday night, lay empty under leaden January skies.
Before dawn on January 7, 1973, Lieutenant Tim Ursin kissed his wife and three sleeping children good-bye, left his house, and arrived at New Orleans Fire Department, Station Fourteen, a little before 7 a.m. He was only twenty-nine but already a nine-year firehouse veteran and one of the NOFD’s most promising young officers, maybe even a future district chief. He had spent part of his rookie year at Engine Fourteen, as it was known in the department, and now was coming back to help out his shorthanded buddies.
RACIST SNIPER MARK ESSEX HELD POLICE AT BAY FOR SEVERAL HOURS SO SKILLFULLY THAT POLICE (SUCH AS THESE PLAINCLOTHES OFFICERS DUCKING FOR COVER OUTSIDE THE HOWARD JOHNSON MOTEL) BELIEVED THERE WERE SEVERAL SHOOTERS.
Associated Press
Engine Fourteen was a busy station near the center of New Orleans, surrounded by Charity Hospital, City Hall, downtown hotels, some dreary ghetto housing and projects, and one of New Orleans’s forty-two cemeteries, where big rainstorms had been known to pop airtight caskets right out of the waterlogged earth like macabre bubbles. In New Orleans, death and water have always had an uneasy kinship.
But Tim loved New Orleans, the city where he was born. His father had played drums with the great Pete Fountain and some of the Dixieland bands that set the rhythm for the beating heart of the Crescent City. He’d met his wife here and was raising three kids here, too. It had everything he ever wanted, and he never needed to leave. Sure, there was crime, pervasive corruption, decadence, and dreadful poverty, but the city hid it all behind a mask of Old World architecture and sumptuous menus of bayou cuisine, iron-lace balconies, and endless revelry.
Rainy winter Sundays were usually slow for firefighters, so Tim spent the morning helping with mundane chores around the station, sweeping floors, making beds, and washing the trucks. Because nobody cooked on leisurely Sundays, the firefighters usually ordered takeout.
Tim was the extra man today, so he volunteered to make a lunch run to a local burger joint a couple blocks away. He took everybody’s order and was heading to his car when somebody hollered for him to wait while they called another local place to see if they had hot lunches. When nobody answered, he turned to leave, but the firehouse radio beeped twice—the signal for a working fire
with visible smoke someplace in the city.
“Engines Sixteen, Fourteen, Twenty-seven, Truck Eight, Three-oh-two,” a dispatcher blared at 10:45 a.m. “Go to Howard Johnson Motor Court, three-three-zero Loyola. Working fire.”
The Howard Johnson was just two minutes from Engine Fourteen, damn near a straight shot. Firefighters scrambled as Tim quickly yanked on his bunker gear and grabbed a jump seat behind the pumper’s cab.
As they pulled up in front of the seventeen-story high-rise hotel, Tim saw black smoke belching from windows on the eighth or ninth floor. This was no mattress fire.
Worse, just six weeks before, a mysterious arson fire had swept through the top three floors of the seventeen-story Rault Center—a luxury office and apartment complex right next door to the Howard Johnson—killing six. Five had leaped to their deaths from fifteenth-floor windows because the firefighters couldn’t pump water high enough and had no ladders tall enough to rescue them. The New Orleans’s Fire Department had reason to be edgy about another skyscraper fire.
Truck Eight, an aerial-ladder truck, pulled up in front of the hotel just ahead of Engine Fourteen, a water pumper. The operator was already setting his stabilizer jacks so he could extend his ladder to snatch frantic hotel guests who were already screaming from upper-floor balconies. But even if he were perfectly positioned, his ladder would only reach the ninth floor. Visions of the Rault Center were already starting to sweep through the heads of the firefighters on the ground.
A district fire chief grabbed Tim amid the chaos of running firefighters, civilians, and cops.
“Come with me,” he barked. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
They entered the hotel’s lobby as frightened guests streamed down stairwells from their rooms above. Anxious to know exactly what they faced, Tim instantly made a plan: He would take an elevator up to the sixth or seventh floor, then scramble up the stairs to the fire above. He grabbed two firefighters and started for the elevator but was quickly stopped by armed cops.
“Can’t go up there,” they said. “We got a guy with a shotgun trapped in the elevator, and we’re trying to get him out.”
Blocked from the stairs, too, Tim went back outside. Truck Eight sat empty, its crew working elsewhere. Its stabilizers were set, but there was nobody to operate its ladder.
Except Tim Ursin. He had trained on Truck Eight and knew how to deploy its life-saving, hundred-foot (30 meter) ladder.
He leaped up to the console on the back of the truck and began to maneuver the ladder into position, swinging it around toward the burning hotel, then extending it slowly to just below a ninth-floor balcony where he saw people yelling and waving hysterically. Some already had their legs over the railings, ready to jump. The whole operation might have taken four minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime to Tim.
Once the ladder was in place, he looked around. Firefighters were dashing everywhere but none was ready to go up.
“I can’t wait around,” he shouted to a cop nearby. “I’m going up. Gimme that washout line.”
Tim stuck his right arm through the coiled inch-and-a-half (4 centimeter) line—a sixty-pound (27 kilogram) hose that he could plug into a standpipe in the hotel’s internal fire suppression system—and stepped onto the ladder.
“Here’s your belt,” a passing firefighter said, tossing up the safety strap commonly used in ladder rescues. Tim would be more than eighty feet (24 meters) up, standing on the wet, narrow steps of a flexing ladder, wrestling with panic-stricken people.
“Ain’t gonna use it,” Tim said as he started up. “I’m going straight up and not stopping.” As he climbed, the washout hose’s five-pound (2 kilogram) brass nozzle slapped against the back of his knee, slowing him down. He paused at the seventh floor and told the people on the balcony twenty feet (6 meters) above to calm down. Steadying himself with his left hand on the rung at eye level, he reached behind his leg with his right hand and grabbed the dangling nozzle, which he tucked between his chin and left shoulder.
IF YOU FALL, YOU DIE
A loud bang erupted somewhere off to Tim’s left. The shock jolted his left arm as he reached up the hand rail, and he felt a soft rush of heat ripple across his face.
Somebody up there is tossing cherry bombs, he thought. These people could die, and they’re playing with fireworks?
Then his left arm began to burn, just a little at first. He looked down at the heavy sleeve of his fire coat to see lumpy gore spilling out, as if someone had opened a bloody faucet.
FIREFIGHTERS AND COPS RESCUED LIEUTENANT TIM URSIN (LYING ON THE GROUND) FROM THE AERIAL LADDER WHERE A BULLET FROM SNIPER MARK ESSEX’S .44 MAGNUM CARBINE NEARLY TORE OFF HIS LEFT ARM.
Associated Press
Tim pivoted, turning his back to the ladder. He tried to gather his wits, but he could literally feel his blood pressure dropping. He didn’t know what had happened, but he could tell from the thick flow of blood and the searing pain that he’d been hurt badly, and he wasn’t sure he’d make it to the ground alive.
Stay awake! he commanded himself. If you fall, you die.
He started down the ladder on his heels, steadying himself with his good hand.
He began to shout, to firefighters below, to the people above, to God …to anybody who could hear his act of contrition.
My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart …
His left arm seemed to be on fire, as if someone had jammed a white-hot poker up his sleeve into the soft flesh of his forearm.
…in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good …
He saw cops with rifles and handguns below, shooting up toward him. He realized he was caught in some kind of crossfire.
…I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things …
Could anyone hear? He wanted people to know he’d confessed his sins before he died up there.
…I firmly intend, with your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin …
Growing woozy, Tim saw his friend Huey Brown, a beefy tillerman on the ladder truck, hurrying up the ladder.
“I’m coming up to get you!” Brown yelled.
“No, get down!” Tim yelled back. “He’s gonna shoot you, too.”
Brown kept coming. “Fuck it!” he shouted.
Brown reached Tim and wedged his brawny shoulders under the wounded fireman’s legs. Slowly, rung by rung, he eased Tim the last twenty feet (6 meters) down the precarious ladder, knowing somebody was above them with a gun. Tim’s gushing blood streamed over Brown’s helmet, his shoulders, his face, and hands as he lowered his comrade to safety.
A New Orleans cop met Brown at the bottom of the ladder, while another officer covered them with a shotgun. They lowered Tim’s body off the fire truck’s rear turntable to a safe spot on the pavement behind Engine Fourteen, out of the line of fire.
A fireman cut off Tim’s heavy coat, exposing a gaping wound that looked like it was inflicted by a dull pickax on the meaty part of his left forearm. The bullet had passed completely through, shattering bone and nearly sawing his arm off completely. The fireman wrapped Tim’s black leather, NOFD-issue belt with a shiny silver buckle around Tim’s upper arm to stanch the bleeding before they loaded him in an ambulance.
LAST RITES
At Charity Hospital’s emergency room, nurses pushed Tim’s gurney against the wall as more shooting victims rolled in behind him. The place was pandemonium. The wounded were crying and moaning as overwhelmed doctors and nurses rushed around. Cops and firefighters scurried among them all, confused and in shock. Blood stained everything.
Tim fought the worsening pain. He begged for painkillers, but nobody was listening. They couldn’t give him anything until they knew the precise extent of his wounds.
Orderlies finally rolled Tim into an examination room, where he was transferred onto the cold, bare stainless-steel table beneath a bright light. He was fading fast. Except for the blinding light over him, the rest of the room appeared t
o be dark. Ghostly figures worked all around him, removed his clothes, searched for more wounds, probed his butchered arm, emptied blood from his boots, and murmured in uneasy tones words he couldn’t understand.
The bullet had blown away a biscuit-sized chunk of Tim’s arm flesh and smashed his radius, one of the two bones in his forearm. It severed his radial nerve and ruptured both arteries in his left arm. He had already lost more than three pints of blood, about one-third of his life fluid.
As he floated at the brink of consciousness, a prayer rose above the pain. Then a hand from the darkness daubed his forehead, eyes, and lips with oil, and made the sign of the cross over him.
“…may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed …”
He knew the voice. It was Father Pete Rogers, the fire department’s chaplain. He was giving last rites.
“…I grant you a plenary indulgence for the remission of all your sins, and I bless you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit …”
It was the last thing that Tim wanted to hear. He wasn’t even thirty. He had three kids and a wife. He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t ready.
He didn’t know that God or destiny or maybe just dumb luck had already intervened to save his life. The 240-grain, .44 Magnum bullet that mangled his left arm had passed completely through the thick sleeve of his fire coat and lodged in the annoying brass hose nozzle he had just tucked under his chin. It had stopped the slug from tearing into his neck.
And he didn’t know that the sniper took aim at him a second time, but maybe by the same trick of providence or fluke, his gun didn’t fire.
Tim drifted into unconsciousness on the table. The next thing he remembered was waking up in a dark hospital room. He heard moaning and solemn voices he didn’t recognize. In a few hours, he learned there were three gravely wounded cops with him there in the dark: Officer Skeets Palmisano had been shot in the back and the arm as he ran across a grassy mall in front of the hotel. Patrolman Chuck Arnold had been shot in the face as he stood in the window of an office building across from the hotel, and although his jaw was nearly gone, he had walked a few blocks to the nearest hospital. Officer Ken Solis was trying to keep onlookers back when a single bullet blew a massive hole in his right shoulder and his belly.
Delivered from Evil Page 13