Politics > Politics-USA > New Orleans SWAT team entered the convention center - with the single goal of rescuing two white women
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Politics > Politics-USA |
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"J H" |
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15 Sep 2005 09:04:48 AM |
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New Orleans SWAT team entered the convention center - with the single goal of rescuing two white women |
washingtonpost.com
'It Was as if All of Us Were Already Pronounced Dead'
Convention Center Left a Five-Day Legacy of Chaos and Violence
By Wil Haygood and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 15, 2005; A01
NEW ORLEANS - For five eternal-seeming days, as many as 20,000 people,
most of them black, waited to be rescued, not just from the
floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina but from the nightmarish place where
they had sought refuge.
During that time, the moon that hovered over the Ernest N. Morial
Convention Center seemed closer than anyone who could provide those
inside the center with any help.
On the fourth day, after TV had been filled with live reports from the
center describing sexual assaults, robberies and gunfire, single
mothers desperately seeking help for their children and fathers doing
their best to protect them, the federal official charged with leading
the hurricane response, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,
responded to an interviewer's question by saying it was the first he
had heard that people "don't have food and water in there."
"It was as if all of us were already pronounced dead," said Tony Cash,
25, who endured three nights of hunger, violence and darkness at the
convention center. "As if somebody already had the body bags. Wasn't
nobody coming to get us."
No one has been able to say how many people died inside the convention
center; police, military and center officials estimate the number is
about 10. Nor has there been any attempt to document the number of
assaults, robberies and rapes that eyewitnesses said occurred from the
time the first people broke into the convention center seeking shelter
on the afternoon of Monday, Aug. 29, and when units of the Arkansas
National Guard moved into the center on Friday, Sept. 2.
But even without those numbers, what happened in the convention center
stands as a harsh indictment of government's failure to help its
citizens when they needed it most. That futility was symbolized by the
presence in the convention center for three of the most chaotic days
of at least 250 armed troops from the Louisiana National Guard. They
were camped out in a huge exhibition hall separated from the crowd by
a wall, and used their trucks as a barricade when they were afraid the
crowd would break in.
The troops were never deployed to restore order and eventually
withdrew, despite the pleas of the convention center's management.
Louisiana Guard commanders said their units' mission was not to secure
the facility, and soldiers on the scene feared inciting further
bloodshed if they had intervened. "We didn't want another Kent State,"
said Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of the active-duty
military forces responding to Katrina. "They weren't trained for crowd
control."
In more than 70 interviews, with both military and law enforcement
officials -- who were themselves sometimes inside the center -- and
with many of the survivors who suffered over the course of several
nights, a chilling portrait emerges of anarchy and violence,
exacerbated by young men from rival housing projects -- Magnolia, St.
Bernard, Iberville, Calliope.
"Everywhere I went, I saw people with guns in their hands," said Troy
Harris, 18. "They were putting guns to people's heads."
Recounting their pleas for milk for their babies, for food, for
protection, many survivors described the same sense of bewilderment
and anger -- broadcast, surreally, on live television. "This is
America," one woman shouted into the TV cameras. What she meant was,
this is not supposed to happen here.
Too Late to Leave
It was Saturday, Aug. 27, when New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin pleaded
with city residents to leave. Katrina would be on land in less than
two days. A day earlier, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had declared a
state of emergency, prompting heightened preparation by the Louisiana
National Guard.
But by this point, the appeals from Blanco and Nagin were aimed at one
group in particular -- the poor. Those with resources had already
bolted.
Many simply had no way of leaving on their own. Many who had survived
hurricanes figured this wouldn't get them, either. "They tend to look
at evacuation orders as scare tactics," said Troy Jarreau, a New
Orleans schoolteacher who has taught many children from impoverished
households.
But by Monday, after Katrina hit New Orleans and the levees had
broken, a different reality was clear. "Get out! Get out now!" was the
message on WYLD ("Wild for Jesus"), a popular black radio station. It
was repeated on Q93-FM, heavy with rhythm and blues and rap music.
This time, those who stayed behind found themselves wading, or
swimming, using every ounce of energy to get themselves to the
Louisiana Superdome, which had served as a refuge in previous
hurricanes. But the indoor stadium had begun filling as early as
Sunday, and by the next day, officials had started turning people
away. It was becoming overcrowded, and the floodwaters had begun to
encircle it.
The convention center, a sprawling complex of meeting halls nearly a
mile long near the Mississippi River, was never intended as a shelter,
said Capt. M.A. Pfeiffer, an operations officer with the New Orleans
Police Department. "It was supposed to be a bus stop where they
dropped people off for transportation. The problem was, the
transportation never came."
As rising water engulfed the Superdome on Monday, trucks and vans that
were rescuing people from the I-10 overpass and other locations began
dropping them off on the dry road in front of the center. It was the
only option, police said. Quickly, the crowd grew to 1,000 people.
Katrina had ripped a hole in the center's roof, dumping pools of
rainwater into Hall C in the middle of the huge complex. The center
lost electricity and water pressure, but otherwise damage was not
severe.
Monitoring the damage were about 40 essential convention workers --
carpenters, electricians and unarmed security guards -- supervised by
the center's president, Jimmie Fore, who had arrived there Sunday
determined to ride out the storm. Joining them were about 300 other
employees and their families seeking shelter.
As a crowd gathered outside and it became dark, Fore said he sensed
trouble, so he went down to the sidewalk and made an appeal. He warned
those arriving that the center had no food, water, electricity,
medical care or other provisions to serve as a shelter. They ignored
him. "They just kept coming," he said.
Security guards had locked the building, but later that night, people
began yanking on the doors and eventually opened one. "Once one got
in, they let all the others in," said Fore, explaining that the doors
had "panic hardware" and could not be locked on the inside.
At the Superdome, officials had devised a security plan to check for
weapons. No such plan was put into place for the convention center,
even as the numbers of people seeking shelter swelled and swelled.
Descent Into Danger
Leon Doby, 26, had gotten daughters Leah, 1, and Khaylin, 3, out of
their home, put them in a crate, tied the crate with rope to his
waist, then began swimming. He hustled his way, finally, onto a
motorboat. It sped off to the Superdome, all aboard exhausted.
At the Superdome, they were rebuffed, and pointed in the direction of
the convention center, 10 blocks away.
By the time Doby -- with the crate and the two daughters -- arrived
Tuesday, he found himself gazing into thousands of bewildered faces.
Gripping his daughters, he walked fast -- exactly where he was going,
he did not know -- but he passed an elderly lady who seemed to be
listing in a wheelchair.
"I went down the hall," he said. "By the time I was back, she was
already gone."
Doby would spend four days at the center. All he had for himself and
two girls during that time was a sandwich and two bottles of water
that a stranger had given him.
Linda Cash, 26, arrived with her two children, Clarence, 6, and Cyrin,
2. "Soon as I got there," Cash recalled, "I saw fighting. I saw people
throwing chairs. People pulling guns out, right in front of little
children."
Near where Cash had hunkered down Monday night, she noticed a little
boy having difficulty breathing. She figured he was having an asthma
attack or an anxiety attack. She and others nearby spotted a
too-seldom-seen police officer. The officer came over, his gun drawn.
Cash said she pointed to the young boy. "The officer checked the boy,"
Cash remembered, "then turned to us and said there was nothing he
could do."
The officer vanished. The boy was dead -- a death confirmed by three
others interviewed for this article.
Another officer soon appeared, and Cash and the others figured he
would remove the dead child. "But that officer told us he had come
over to our area to check on some gunshots he heard near us," she
said. The body stayed there.
By Tuesday, the center's population had exploded to nearly 20,000.
"The lights never came on, for some reason, all the way," Cash said.
And among those thousands were gangsters, though maybe not members of
gangs. Community activists for years had been warning the city's
leadership about the folly of mixing youths from one housing project
with youths from another.
"You declare martial law," said Jazz Washington, a community activist,
"and to these gangsters that just means, 'We can kill you and keep on
moving.' "
A gang broke into the locked alcohol storage areas and suddenly had 50
cases of hard liquor and 200 cases of beer. And before long, there
were scenes of gangsters, drunk, groping after young girls -- and
those scenes not far from the ones of women in corners, balled up,
praying all frozen with a Hobson's choice: the gangsters, or the
floodwaters.
"They took so much, they couldn't drink it all," said George Lancie,
manager of the center's food-service company, who had been at Fore's
side.
In the chaos, the youths hotwired anything that would move, including
electric utility carts and forklifts. Tony Cash saw the forklifts
being driven about in zigzags. "They were nearly running over people,"
he said. "I'm telling you, it was crazy."
Fore was at a loss as to how to quell the danger. He said he tried
desperately to call local and state emergency authorities. But he
never got through. And he looked and looked for the arrival of local
police.
"You might see them drive by," he said. "Is that providing security?"
New Orleans police officials said they could not safeguard the center
after Katrina left them short of officers, vehicles and a dependable
communication system. And when their armory flooded, they were short
of ammunition. Dozens of officers tried patrolling outside around the
convention center, but, according to Lt. Melvin Howard, the crowds and
darkness made it difficult and dangerous to work inside.
Police could not use flashlights without giving away their position
and becoming possible targets, Howard said. Nor could they open fire,
if confronted, without the risk of killing innocent people.
Troy Harris, 18, who had survived a gunshot to the stomach on the hard
streets of New Orleans, thought he could handle himself anywhere in
the city. The darkened convention center gravely tested his moxie.
"They were robbing people in there. At gunpoint," he said. "Somebody
robbed me of a hundred dollars."
Even police officers were afraid, Harris said. "I saw police officers
in the bathroom taking off their uniforms!" he said. "I'm telling you,
they were taking off their uniforms and throwing their badges down!"
Doby saw prostrate bodies near the bathroom -- dead or unconscious, he
didn't know. He told his little girls it was okay to soil themselves.
His hungry girls in his arms, Doby was furious.
At daybreak, many would flee outside, where TV cameras gave them
desperate moments to make appeals. But for the most part they had
nowhere else to go. It was as if they were marooned in some faraway
locale, on some faraway island -- instead of New Orleans.
Rumors were treated as fact -- both inside the convention center and
out. A later report that there were 200 bodies in the convention
center and the Superdome brought a coroner's unit rushing from St.
Gabriel and Baton Rouge, La.
One night, said Steve Rochon, a deranged man started yelling, "Here
comes the water!" -- intimating the Mississippi was about to flood the
center. A panic ensued, and mothers grabbed children.
The deaf didn't know what was happening. The old in the wheelchairs
couldn't move. But the stampede was on anyway. A mother screamed that
someone was stepping on her baby.
"People just started panicking," recalled Rochon, himself forced to
move animatedly on a prosthetic leg. "People were getting run over
each other."
At one point, a police car drove up. Perhaps good news. Perhaps ships
were steaming up the Mississippi over there right now.
A police officer tossed out a few bottles and drove off. It ignited a
free for all. Doby himself looked on in horror as a man -- arguing
over the water -- struck another man with a two-by-four. "That man, he
was split" in the head, said Doby. "He was leaking. He just dropped,
face first."
Back inside, Doby was stilled by yet another confrontation. Three
women were arguing, over what everyone seemed to be arguing about:
lack of food, water, space. One of the women -- a snap-of-the-finger
quick -- plunged a pair of scissors into the shoulder of the woman she
had been arguing with.
Everywhere, a new woe. A group of people desperate for food broke into
the kitchen. When they tried to cook something, a fire erupted.
Desperate to Flee
By Wednesday night, Fore and eight colleagues had locked themselves in
an office. A gang had threatened to break through, rattling the door.
A security guard informed Fore the situation appeared to be getting
worse in the center.
Fore and his aides had parked their cars over in Hall J, and Fore
decided they had to make a break. Thursday afternoon, they moved
stealthily to their cars. When they reached them, they slipped inside
and fled.
Wednesday, some buses arrived, but of the thousands in the convention
center only a tiny number could board. They had been standing outside,
where the buses rolled to a stop.
Then there was a miracle: Seven more buses rolled up. The race was on
to get to them. Linda Cash, slow off the draw, grabbed her children
anyway. And started racing. "Then the buses pulled off," she said.
"And no one was on them. That's when I knew I really had to find a way
out of there."
On Thursday, Cash left, taking her children and stealing a car that
eventually got her to Baton Rouge. That same day, the New Orleans
police made a dramatic entrance. Sgt. Hans Ganthier and 12 other New
Orleans SWAT team members entered the center, M-4 commando rifles at
the ready. Prayers had been answered -- only it was a rescue mission
of a different purpose.
A Jefferson Parish police deputy had appealed to SWAT team Capt. Jeff
Winn for help in bringing out his wife and a female relative from the
center. "He knew they were there and was hearing nightmarish stories,"
said Ganthier, who declined to identify the officer for security
reasons.
Winn approved the mission.
When the SWAT team entered at 11 a.m., the Jefferson Parish officer
called out his wife's name. She heard him, and along with the relative
rushed to his side. The SWAT team put the women in the middle of the
team, then backed out the door.
Once it became clear that the SWAT team had come with the single goal
of rescuing two white women, anger exploded.
"Racists!" one man cried out.
"Some people were upset we weren't rescuing them," said Ganthier.
"It's hard to leave people behind like that, but we were aiding an
officer."
'A Mob, Crazy Mentality'
By Tuesday night, a contingent of at least 250 Louisiana National
Guard troops was hunkered down in Hall A, off Julia Street at the
northern end of the building.
The armed troops, from at least two engineering battalions -- the
769th and 527th -- had been assigned to set up a base at the center to
prepare for debris removal and road clearing, as well as rescue and
security. But they had enough food and water only for themselves and
had no immediate orders to provide assistance or security for the
thousands of evacuees in their midst, according to interviews with a
dozen enlisted soldiers and officers.
Instead, as the danger level grew, they felt they must first protect
themselves.
"There was way too many of them and way too few of us," said Master
Sgt. Chad Anderson, 37. "Since we couldn't help them, it was best to
avoid them. They had a mob, crazy mentality."
Whenever the soldiers left the center on missions, they drove west on
Julia Street and away from the throngs of people begging for food and
water along Convention Center Boulevard. "When they saw the soldiers,
they'd think, 'That's food,' " said Sgt. Karla Spillers, 26. "We
didn't have any for them. We had to feed our own people."
Spillers said she felt pain at the knowledge that teenage girls were
wandering around the center, alone, knowing they were possible prey.
"There were prisoners, mobsters, gangs" in there, she said.
Almost as soon as they arrived, Guard commanders became concerned
enough about the safety of their troops that they ordered more weapons
and ammunition. On Wednesday night, there was kicking and banging on
the doors to Hall A, where the guardsmen were. "They were trying to
break the doors and get us," said Anderson. "They knew we were there."
"About 9 that night, we started barricading the doors," said Staff
Sgt. Bryan Lowery, a supply sergeant with the 527th battalion.
Guardsmen parked at least three dump trucks next to the doors to block
them, and Lowery began dispensing weapons and ammunition.
"It scared me," Spillers recalled. "Everyone went to get their weapons
from the backs of the trucks."
That night, Guard commanders figured the convention center was
untenable as a staging base. And they, too, left the center despite
what Fore said were his pleas to stay.
"We were told they couldn't help us unless the order came down from
the top, from a lot of people," Fore said. "The only time they
partnered with us was when there were gunshots in the area where they
were actually staying. They protected themselves."
Maj. Keith Waddell, commander of the 769th Engineer Battalion, said
his unit was never asked to quell the violence at the convention
center. "The idea of helping with the convention center never came
up," he said. "We were just preparing ourselves for the next mission."
Waddell said he believes that, if so ordered, the Louisiana Guard
forces present would have been adequate to get the center under
control.
"I feel confident we could have controlled it, with the numbers we
had," Waddell said.
But senior commanders indicated they had ruled out that possibility.
Col. Stephen C. Dabadie, chief of staff of the Louisiana National
Guard, said the engineer units were "not designed to secure the
convention center."
The Troops Arrive
Early Thursday, the Guard troops packed up and rolled out amid angry
calls from the crowd inside. Twenty-four hours elapsed before more
troops arrived -- including a contingent of the Arkansas National
Guard, imposing enough so that no one tried to bother them.
Many of the guardsmen had recently returned from Iraq, and they
arrived wearing helmets and full body armor, and shouldering rifles.
To their surprise, they encountered virtually no violence -- only a
crowd of hot, frustrated, angry people desperate for food and water.
"A lot of them said we should have been there earlier," said Spec.
Keithean Heath of the Arkansas Guard's 39th Infantry Brigade.
Military commanders had worried the crowd would rush medevac
helicopters. Instead, soldiers faced little interference as they moved
to help frail and elderly people in wheelchairs in urgent need of
care, women cradling tiny infants and others about to give birth. The
soldiers set up food lines to hand out bottled water and packaged
military meals, and people lined up to receive them.
On Saturday, soldiers again lined up people and searched them before
loading them onto buses. They counted as many as 16,000 people who got
on the buses, an eerily quiet process.
Leon Doby, the daddy who swam his two young daughters to safety --
before they all arrived at the convention center -- had already left.
He headed out as he had arrived, his two little girls -- his
everything -- in the crook of his arms.
A genuine miracle: A man on the road picked them up and drove them all
the way to Dallas.
"That was hell," Doby said of the New Orleans convention center. "They
sent us to the grave."
Tending to the Dead
Three days after the evacuation, Staff Sgt. Juan Almonte, a medic with
the 82nd Airborne Division, slipped past a caution sign and through a
ripped metal door, bracing himself for the task ahead -- to "bag" the
bodies still inside the convention center.
Inside the food-service area near Hall A, sitting slumped in a black
wheelchair, was a woman of about 60 in a hospital gown. A man in a
shirt and jogging pants lay curled up on the concrete floor next to
her, his hand over his face.
To Almonte's right down a wide hallway, a large man -- the medic
guessed he was at least 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds -- lay with his arms
over his head and knees bent. Another woman in hospital scrubs lay a
few feet from him, next to aluminum cans and trays with stained but
elegant white dinner menus.
Around the bodies were pools of dried blood. Looking closer, he noted
swelling and abrasions on the corpses. He stared at what he found
next. On the gray, soiled floor several feet from the dead lay a pair
of shiny brass knuckles.
"My perception was that they were beaten to death," he said last week.
"Absolutely, they were killed."
Almonte and his fellow medics had to struggle to straighten the
corpses to fit them in double bags -- the large man took up one by
himself. The next day, about 20 boxes of body bags appeared in front
of Almonte's tent, and he told his men to prepare for more recoveries.
But no order ever came. Civilian authorities, he was told, would
handle "packaging and retrieval."
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| User: "d2e2" |
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| Title: Re: New Orleans SWAT team entered the convention center - with the single goal of rescuing two white women |
15 Sep 2005 03:37:25 PM |
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Judge Antonin Scalia, United States Supreme Court Judge, has up held the
right of Government to ignore crimes against the people of the United
States. The laws of this land are designed to protect the elite from
plebeian parasites which are here only to serve, not survive or prosper.
Jessica Gonzales made five telephone calls and a personal visit to the
Castle Rock Police Department over an eight-hour period urging police to
find the girls immediately and arrest her husband. The Police
declined to act, suggesting she wait until her husband brought the girls
home. The three daughters were murdered and the ex husband, the father of
the girls, then committed suicide.
Although Colorado has a very tough law requiring law enforcement to
protect its citizens, the Supreme Court decided that the Law does
not produce a Constitutional entitlement to Police protection, even when
state courts have recognized an imminent threat exists.
Now, considering this pronouncement from these conservative jurists, why
would you be shocked to find 20,000 or more people jambed into a
government building without food, water, basic sanitation facilities or a
police presences to insure order.
This seems outrageous, but, what seems even more outrageous is that 20,000
people actually allowed this crap to go on without forming up their own
security forces.
--
"I will bring honor to the process and honor to the office I seek. I will
remind Al Gore that Americans do not want a White House where there is 'no
controlling legal authority.' I will repair the broken bonds of trust
between Americans and their government."
George W. Bush, March 7, 2000
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