On the eleventh floor, he shot the hotel’s assistant manager point-blank in the head, blowing most of it away. On the tenth floor, he mortally wounded the general manager. On the eighth-floor patio, a gut-shot hotel guest floated in the hotel pool for two hours, playing dead.
On the eighth floor, Essex heard sirens outside. From the balcony of one room, he saw a firefighter scrambling up an aerial ladder toward hysterical guests on the floor above. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger, hitting the fireman. He racked another cartridge into the chamber and took aim again, but the gun didn’t fire. He didn’t have time for another shot. Cops on the ground were firing back, so he ducked for cover.
By 11 a.m., less than a half hour after Mark Essex laid siege to the Howard Johnson, police had set up a command center in the lobby, and hundreds of cops surrounded the hotel. Sharpshooters had taken positions atop nearby buildings while other cops tried to keep curious onlookers out of the line of fire.
But it was fruitless. Local TV stations were going live, and their feeds were being picked up by networks for wall-to-wall coverage. Mark Essex’s war was being televised. Worse, word was leaking out that the snipers were militant black revolutionaries, and many angry African Americans were gathering on the street outside the Howard Johnson to yell things like “Right on!” and “Kill the pigs!” every time shots were fired from the balconies above.
From his perch on the eighth floor, Essex began to pick off cops who were scurrying around the streets below. One after another, they were falling wounded and dead.
In the meantime, some cops—led by the NOPD’s second-in-command, Louis Sirgo—began to work their way through the choking black smoke into the bowels of the hotel, searching for what they believed were at least three snipers. In a darkened stairwell just above the sixteenth floor, Essex shot Sirgo in the spine almost point-blank, killing him.
For several hours, police exchanged fire with the phantom shooters, who continued to set fires. A circling police helicopter even took fire from the hotel. Descriptions of the shooters varied so widely that police were convinced they faced a small army of cold-blooded militants who held key strategic positions throughout the hotel. They were everywhere …and nowhere.
At 3:30 p.m., police began securing the hotel, floor-by-floor, hoping ultimately to corner the snipers on the top floor, where fires were burning unabated.
Sometime around 4 p.m., more than five hours after the first shots were fired, police believed they had pushed the snipers onto the hotel’s roof, where they had taken refuge in a concrete cubicle at the top of the stairwell and elevator shaft. It was a nearly impregnable bunker, especially since police were neither close enough nor armed with sufficiently powerful weapons to penetrate its thick walls.
Cops hiding in the stairwells below the cubicle could hear somebody moving around, cursing at sharpshooters on nearby buildings. “Africa! Africa!” he would chant. At odd intervals, a sniper would run out on the graveled roof, fire several shots at police, then scamper back into the safe pillbox.
“Come on up, you honky pigs!” Essex yelled once as he fired down into the stairwell. “You afraid to fight like a black man?”
“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” they screamed back. But all they could do was scream.
Even then, nobody knew exactly how many shooters were up on the roof, how they were armed, or how much ammo they had.
A HAIL OF GUNFIRE
One of the many Americans intently watching the violent drama unfold on television was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Pitman, a tough helicopter pilot who’d flown 1,200 combat missions in Vietnam, been shot down seven times, and won four Distinguished Flying Crosses. After the Rault fire, local Marines and Coast Guard chopper crews drew up contingency plans to help local police and fire departments in case of another high-rise fire. So where is the Coast Guard? Pitman wondered.
Fog, wind, and low skies made flying too dangerous, a Coast Guard commander told Pitman.
But Pitman knew the cops needed his help. At least seven people were dead and more than a dozen wounded. The snipers had the high ground and the firepower to do even more damage.
“Shit,” Pitman said. “It’s not too bad for me. I can fly up the river.”
Within an hour, Pitman and his crew were inching up the Mississippi River toward the city, sometimes only inches above the water. By 5:30, Pitman and three police marksmen were aloft in a twin-rotor military helicopter, with shoot-to-kill orders. Incredibly, they were about to strafe the roof of a downtown hotel in an American city—but this was a war.
Over the next several hours, Pitman played a cat-and-mouse game with the shooters. Time after time, the chopper took fire until it rose over the roof, then …nobody. The airborne police sharpshooters were pouring thousands of rounds into the concrete cubicle, but they couldn’t see anyone. Yet when the helicopter would move away, police observers on nearby buildings saw somebody run out and resume shooting.
Essex was hiding by climbing a water pipe and wedging himself under the bunker’s ceiling. So when the chopper hovered above, police marksmen couldn’t see him and their bullets ricocheted harmlessly all around him.
But once Pitman’s crew figured this out, a simple tactic was employed: While a fire truck on the ground pumped water into the hotel’s system, one of Pitman’s sharpshooters poured a stream of tracer bullets into the pressurized pipe. It exploded.
Cops on the chopper unleashed a ferocious storm of fire on the cubicle. Forced from his hiding place by a spewing pipe and flying concrete chips, Essex ran from the cubicle holding his rifle and looked straight up at Pitman.
He yelled something nobody heard and raised his fist in one last defiant act before he was slaughtered in a hail of gunfire.
A little before 9 p.m., Mark Essex lay dead on the roof of the Howard Johnson, but the war wasn’t finished. Police kept firing into his body without mercy, and they shot his rifle into bits so none of his accomplices could use it. Throughout the night, police radioed that other snipers were shooting at them, or that they saw gun flashes in the dark or heard taunts from hidden corners of the hotel.
And they watched the corpse of Mark Essex all night. An occasional night breeze would sometimes flutter through the shreds of his fatigues or his black turtleneck sweater and they would swear he was still alive. Somebody would shoot him again, just to be sure.
The next morning, after the sun had risen, cops stormed the roof and found only Mark Essex’s ruined body. It had been hit by more than two hundred bullets and was virtually unrecognizable. One leg was nearly severed. Pieces of him were scattered for yards around, including his jaw and tongue, which had been blasted across the roof. One witnesses said the body was so ravaged that “we nearly had to use a shovel to scoop him up.”
Essex’s racist rampage was among the worst mass shooting in American history, even if it fell out of the public consciousness unusually quickly. Firing more than a hundred shots, Essex had killed nine people and wounded thirteen more. Five of the dead and five of the wounded were police officers. Of Essex’s twenty-two victims, only one was black.
To this day, some cops believe with all their hearts that there were other snipers, but the official police ruling was that Mark Essex had acted alone. Police found no metal casings that matched any other gun but Essex’s .44 Magnum carbine.
Nevertheless, the Rault Center arson fire six weeks before is now generally believed to have been a dry run for Essex’s attack at the Howard Johnson. If true, his death toll would rise to a grim fifteen innocent people.
Black outrage erupted within hours of Essex’s death.
A QUICKLY FORGOTTEN STRUGGLE
Even before Essex’s body had been shipped back to Emporia in a simple wooden crate, black militant leader Stokely Carmichael praised Essex for “carrying our struggle to the next quantitative level, the level of science.”
And within days, columnist Phil Smith of the Chicago Metro News, an activist black weekly, eulogized Essex as
a “new hero in an old struggle.”
“Essex may not have been in love with white people, but that made him as normal as 30 million other Black people,” Smith wrote.
He suggested Essex was framed by a “sick white racist society” bent on the “systematic extermination of young Black men.” No young black man, he said, would ever “go berserk and kill white people for no reason.
“White people hate the idea that Black people, by virtue of their very existence, force whites to deal with their own dishonesty, deceit and criminal intent …White people truly believe ‘the only good nigger is a dead nigger,’” Smith seethed. “If there was one lesson that [Essex] had learned in his short life, it was that Black men are the most dispensable item in this country.”
Even Essex’s mother, resolute in her conviction that racism had transformed her cheerful little boy into a monster, was almost defiant when she spoke to reporters a week after the rampage.
“I do think Jimmy was driven to this,” she said. “Jimmy was trying to make white America sit up and be aware of what is happening to us.
“I don’t want my son to have died in vain,” Nellie continued. “If this terrible thing will awaken white America to the injustices that blacks suffer, then some good will have come from it.”
Although the Howard Johnson attack swiftly resurrected the ghosts of Charles Whitman’s 1966 Texas Tower massacre (see chapter 6), it quickly fell out of the national media spotlight. Many observers believed stories about black rage ran counter to the media’s efforts to portray a nation where African Americans should be seen as innocent, noble, civilized victims of white oppression—more Rosa Parks than Nat Turner, a messianic slave who, inspired by an eclipse of the sun, led the mass-murder of at least fifty white people in 1831.
So black rage neither began nor ended with Mark Essex, but he became one of its most powerful symbols.
In 2002, snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo shot sixteen people, killing ten, in a reign of terror as the “D.C. sniper,” even plotting to kill white police officers in one grand finale. Muhammad was a twelve-year-old boy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the day Mark Essex laid siege to the Howard Johnson, and it seems unlikely that he was not affected somehow by a case that drew stark divisions between whites and blacks.
Nellie Essex buried her son’s bullet-shredded body in Emporia six days after the shooting. There were no military honors. At his funeral, one memorial wreath bore a sash that said “Power to the People.”
The Black Panthers of New York sent a telegram to the family applauding Mark Essex as “a black man, warrior, and revolutionary.”
For many years, Mark Essex’s grave sat unmarked in Emporia’s Maplewood Cemetery, not far from the grave of legendary newspaperman William Allen White. But his family eventually placed a modest granite stone, and local veterans now mark Essex’s grave with a small bronze military medallion.
TIM URSIN’S NATIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE BAYS AND INLAND WATERS AROUND NEW ORLEANS EVENTUALLY MADE HIM AN EXPERT FISHING GUIDE—BUT TURNING HIS WOUNDS INTO A COLORFUL REPUTATION AS “CAPTAIN HOOK” GAVE HIM A NEW LIFE.
Courtesy of Tim Ursin
Among the many ironies and enigmas still surrounding the Howard Johnson massacre, there’s this one: An American flag is planted on Mark Essex’s grave every Memorial Day.
“IT JUST WASN’T MY TIME”
Tim Ursin had never heard of Mark Essex, never looked him in the eyes. Their paths had never crossed until that miserable January morning at the Howard Johnson hotel.
He heard fragments of the story as he drifted in and out of sedation at the hospital, but he didn’t hear the full story of what happened that day until about three weeks later. By that time, he was involved in a different kind of fight.
During his six weeks in the hospital, Tim endured excruciating pain to save his arm.
As many as ten times, his wound was debrided, an agonizing procedure to strip away dead, rotting flesh from his wound. Doctors laid moist pig skin over the mutilated tissue to protect it from infection.
Later, surgeons planed paper-thin ribbons of skin from Tim’s thigh to seal the wound permanently and to finally offer some relief from the electric ache of air hitting the exposed meat and raw nerves.
But within his first two weeks, a repaired artery in his forearm burst. Rather than repair it, surgeons simply sealed it off—a risky move. A few weeks later, as a doctor examined his gangrenous thumb, he accidentally thrust his finger through the squishy rotten tissue of Tim’s hand. So they removed the thumb in hopes of saving the rest of his left hand.
Things didn’t get better. To stabilize the remaining palm and fingers, doctors inserted a stainless-steel pin in the wrist end of his shattered radius, but the pin eventually worked its way out through the skin of his hand.
His hand was now useless.
Tim had made many difficult decisions in his life, but the next one was easy. He asked his doctors to remove his mangled left hand entirely and replace it with a prosthetic stainless-steel hook.
While he was still in the hospital, the fire chief asked him to take on the department’s public information job, but Tim wasn’t a desk rider. If he couldn’t fight fires, he didn’t want to be around the firehouse, where he’d be reminded more of his weaknesses than his strengths. If he couldn’t ride a truck, he knew he would always be on the periphery of the brotherhood.
He leaned hard on his wife, Mary, in those dark days. A daughter and sister of firefighters, she never gave him a chance to feel sorry for himself. While he tried to keep himself together, she kept the family together. When people would stare at his hook, he felt more embarrassed for Mary and the kids than for himself.
When Tim’s sick leave ended in 1975, he drifted. He worked as a concrete tester, a boat salesman, and a sporting-goods clerk. He bought a boat and taught himself how to handle a fishing rod with his hook.
At first, friends were asking him to take them out on the bayous. Then he started doing a few weekend charters for rich fishermen from the interior.
By 1982, he was chartering fishing expeditions full time from Delacroix Island and then from Shell Beach, fishing the inland marshes and the outer bays for speckled trout and redfish. And he began to use a marketing moniker that, for better or worse, had literally come from above: Captain Hook.
When his fishermen ask, he often spins a wild tale about a hungry shark because it makes people laugh, but he makes no effort to hide the real story. Everybody on the water knows him as Captain Hook.
He still feels his phantom hand. He can tell you the exact position of it because when they clipped the tendons and tied them off, its sensory pose was fixed forever. The thumb is extended, the index and middle fingers spread apart, the ring finger curled in …
And he keeps the brass nozzle that saved his life. It still bears the bullet hole that might have been in his neck if not for the simple intervention of a different unseen hand.
But he seldom imagines what he might say to Mark Essex if they were to meet, finally, face to face. It no longer matters. He wants only to live without the hate that consumed the man who tried to kill him for no better reason than the color of his skin.
Every morning, Tim Ursin, more than ever a devout Catholic, says a prayer and thanks God for another day. And at the end of every Saturday, he attends Mass without fail.
But he’s philosophical about it. He bears no malice for Mark Essex, although he rarely speaks the name. He’s lucky to be alive—and most important, he knows it.
“I’ve been living on borrowed time for more than thirty-five years,” he says today. “It just wasn’t my time.”
The evening after he voted, Tim was watching television when the phone rang. It was the young black man he’d met at the election hall that morning.
“Look, I’ve been thinking about our conversation all day,” the man said. “I came home and told my wife that I met you and that you told me your story, and, well, I just kept thinking all day that you h
ave a good way of looking at a bad thing.”
“Thanks, man,” Tim said. “I appreciate it.”
“I’m sorry about the man …a black man …I don’t feel that way …”
“Hey, this was one man,” Tim said. “It wasn’t personal and it doesn’t make me feel any different about black people who don’t think that way. You can’t spend your life blaming others for what only a few bad people do. Hate will eat you up, man.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you taught me some things, and I just wanted to say …”
The man paused for a long moment.
“I just wanted to say I won’t ever forget you.”
And for the first time in a long time, Tim cried.
A MIDSUMMER THUNDERSTORM WAS BREWING to the west. A warm mist had settled over Milwaukee.
Reverend Roland Ehlke rolled up his car window against the sultry air and listened to the radio as he drove on his afternoon hospital rounds.
Then a newscaster broke in with a bulletin about a sniper who was killing people from a perch in a tower high above the University of Texas campus in Austin.
Reverend Ehlke turned up the volume and listened closely. After all, his twenty-one-year-old middle son, Cap, was on the UT campus, being trained for a Peace Corps job overseas.
“But it’s a big campus,” the pastor silently reassured himself. “He won’t be involved in this.”
Later, the newscaster came back on the air with more details about the unfolding tragedy in Texas. And again, Reverend Ehlke thought about his Cap. He was a little disappointed that Cap, who’d recently graduated from a Lutheran college, had skipped going directly to seminary and decided instead to go adventuring. When Cap joined the Peace Corps and got assigned to teach English to Iranian kids, he couldn’t exactly find Iran on the globe, but he didn’t care. He was going to see the world.
Delivered from Evil Page 15