[News] Katrina's Hidden Race War

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Katrina's Hidden Race War

By <http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/a_c_thompson>A.C. Thompson

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105>This article appeared in the 
January 5, 2009 edition of The Nation<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105>.

December 17, 2008

A.C. Thompson's reporting on New Orleans was directed and 
underwritten by the Investigative Fund at 
<http://www.nationinstitute.org/>The Nation Institute. 
<http://www.propublica.org/>ProPublica provided additional support, 
as did the<http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org/> Center for 
Investigative Reporting and 
<http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/>New America Media.

A vigilante shot Donnell Herrington twice shortly after Hurrica


CHANDRA MCCORMICK AND KEITH CALHOUN
A vigilante shot Donnell Herrington twice shortly after Hurricane 
Katrina struck New Orleans.

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second 
he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on 
the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body 
racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina 
crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, 
who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I 
didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 
32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his 
cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, 
who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole 
in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they 
started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his 
feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of 
lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered 
Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his 
attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even 
seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander 
and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand 
pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the 
gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, 
is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, 
immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers 
district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is 
largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's 
a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," 
says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white 
New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

A wide street lined with towering trees, Opelousas Avenue marks the 
dividing line between Algiers Point and greater Algiers, and the 
difference in wealth between the two areas is immediately noticeable. 
"On one side of Opelousas it's 'hood, on the other side it's 
suburbs," says one local. "The two sides are totally opposite, like 
muddy and clean."

Algiers Point has always been somewhat isolated: it's perched on the 
west bank of the Mississippi River, linked to the core of the city 
only by a ferry line and twin gray steel bridges. When the hurricane 
descended on Louisiana, Algiers Point got off relatively easy. While 
wide swaths of New Orleans were deluged, the levees ringing Algiers 
Point withstood the Mississippi's surging currents, preventing 
flooding; most homes and businesses in the area survived intact. As 
word spread that the area was dry, desperate people began heading 
toward the west bank, some walking over bridges, others traveling by 
boat. The National Guard soon designated the Algiers Point ferry 
landing an official evacuation site. Rescuers from the Coast Guard 
and other agencies brought flood victims to the ferry terminal, where 
soldiers loaded them onto buses headed for Texas.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could 
have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood 
victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime 
would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, 
blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber 
and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault 
rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the 
streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose 
band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of 
them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put 
it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

The existence of this little army isn't a secret--in 2005 a few 
newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms 
in articles that showed up on an array of 
<http://www.bobtuley.com/gun_seizures.htm>pro-gun blogs; one 
<http://www.oxfordpress.com/news/content/shared/news/nation/stories/09/10KATRINA_ALGIERS.html>Cox 
News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." Herrington, 
for his part, recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When 
the Levees Broke. But until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized 
what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has 
asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just 
trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to 
a different, far uglier truth?

Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down 
figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of 
Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the 
bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, 
firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and 
studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. 
What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days 
after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as 
its government collapsed.

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader 
pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven 
people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, 
while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the 
catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed 
African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, 
told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding 
through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious 
crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested 
for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was 
never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over 
during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than 
a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with 
so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none 
of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

Hill, who runs Tulane's Southern Institute for Education and Research 
and closely follows the city's racial dynamics, isn't surprised the 
Algiers Point gunmen have eluded arrest. Because of the widespread 
notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster 
unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the 
vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By 
and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are 
exempt--that even if they committed these crimes, they're really 
exempt from any kind of legal repercussion," Hill tells me. "It's sad 
to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and 
none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any 
kind of crime against an African-American during that period."

You can trace the origins of the Algiers Point militia to the 
misfortune of Vinnie Pervel. A 52-year-old building contractor and 
real estate entrepreneur with a graying buzz cut and mustache, Pervel 
says he lost his Ford van in a carjacking the day after Katrina made 
landfall, when an African-American man attacked him with a hammer. 
"The kid whacked me," recalls Pervel, who is white. "Hit me on the 
side of the head." Vowing to prevent further robberies, Pervel and 
his neighbors began amassing an arsenal. "For a day and a half we 
were running around getting guns," he says. "We got about forty."

Things quickly got ugly. Pervel remembers aiming a shotgun at a 
random African-American man walking by his home--even though he knew 
the man had no connection to the theft of his vehicle. "I don't want 
you passing by my house!" Pervel says he shouted out.

Pervel tells me he feared goons would kill his mother, who is in her 
70s. "We thought we would be dead," he says. "We thought we were 
doomed." And so Pervel and his comrades set about fortifying the 
area. One resident gave me video footage of the leafy barricades the 
men constructed to keep away outsiders. Others told me they created a 
low-tech alarm system, tying aluminum cans and glass bottles together 
and stringing them across the roads at ankle height. The bottles and 
cans would rattle noisily if somebody bumped into them, alerting the militia.

Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was 
engulfing the city and claim they had no other choice than to act as 
they did. They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a 
paramilitary formation protecting their neighborhood from 
opportunistic thieves. "I'm not a racist," Pervel insists. "I'm a 
classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders 
were disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by 
the National Guard's decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing 
as an evacuation zone. "I'm telling you, it was forty, fifty people 
at a time getting off these boats," says Roper, who is in his 50s and 
works for ServiceMaster, a house-cleaning company. The storm victims 
were "hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city," 
he says. "I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the 
outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

The militia, according to Roper, was armed with "handguns, rifles 
[and] shotguns"; he personally carried "a .38 in my waistband" and a 
"little Uzi." "There was a few people who got shot around here," 
Roper, a slim man with a weathered face, tells me. "I know of at 
least three people who got shot. I know one was dead 'cause he was on 
the side of the road."

During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored-car 
driver for the Brink's company and living in a rented duplex about a 
mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out 
windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping 
rain on Herrington's possessions. On the day of the shooting, 
Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the 
stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point 
ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.

Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two 
shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into 
a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. 
The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed 
pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you 
niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us 
in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us 
suffer.... I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen 
interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to 
fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued 
an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told 
their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty 
bad from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a 
black pickup truck, he begged them for help. "I said, Help me, help 
me--I'm shot," Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was 
immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, "Get away from 
this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you. We're liable to kill 
you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on out here?

He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the 
front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him 
in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson 
Medical Center, where, medical records show, he was 
<http://www.thenation.com/special/ac/herrington_xrays.pdf>X-rayed at 
3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays 
found "metallic buckshot" scattered throughout his chest, arms, back 
and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the right neck." 
Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for 
emergency surgery.

"It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles 
Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't 
gotten to the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his 
internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."

After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air 
conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a 
medical facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans 
months later, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station, 
whose officers patrol the west bank, and learned there was no police 
report documenting the attack. Herrington, who now has a wide scar 
stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he spoke with 
failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still 
bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was 
willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there 
real quick," he says. "I feel these guys should definitely be held 
accountable. These guys had absolutely no right to do what they did."

Herrington, Alexander and Collins are the only victims, so far, to 
tell their stories. But they certainly weren't the only ones attacked 
in or around Algiers Point. In interviews, vigilantes and 
residents--citing the exact locations and types of weapons 
used--detail a string of violent incidents in which at least eight 
other people were shot, bringing the total number of shooting victims 
to at least eleven, some of whom may have died.

Other evidence bolsters this tally. Thomas, the surgeon who treated 
Herrington, staffed one of the few functioning trauma centers in the 
area, located just outside the New Orleans city line, not far from 
Algiers Point, for a full month after the hurricane hit. "We saw a 
bunch of gunshot wounds," he tells me. "There were a lot of gunshot 
wounds that went unreported during that time." Though Thomas couldn't 
get into the specifics of the shooting incidents because of medical 
privacy laws, he says, "We saw a couple of other shotgun wounds, some 
handgun shootings and somebody who was shot with a high-velocity 
missile [an assault-rifle round]." The surgeon remembers handling 
"five or six nonfatal gunshot wounds" as well as three lethal gunshot cases.

In addition, state death records show that at least four people died 
in and around Algiers Point, a suspicious number, given that most 
Katrina fatalities were the result of drowning, and that the 
community never flooded. Neighborhood residents, black and white, 
remember seeing corpses lying out in the open that appeared to have been shot.

While the militia patrolled the streets of Algiers Point, the New 
Orleans Police Department, which had done little to brace for the 
storm, was crippled. "There was no leadership, no equipment, no 
nothing," recalls one high-ranking police official. "We did no more 
to prepare for a hurricane than we would have for a thunderstorm." 
Without functioning radios or dispatch systems, officers had no way 
of knowing what was happening a block away, let alone on the other 
side of the city. NOPD higher-ups had no way to give direction to 
unit commanders and other subordinates. As the chain of command 
disintegrated, the force dissolved into a collection of isolated, 
quasi-autonomous bands.

Around Algiers Point people say they rarely saw cops during the week 
after Katrina tore through Louisiana, and in this law enforcement 
vacuum the militia's unique brand of justice flourished. Most 
disturbing, one of the vigilantes, Roper, claims on videotape 
recorded just weeks after the storm that the shootings took place 
with the knowledge and consent of the police. When we talk he makes 
the same assertion: "The police said, If they're breaking in your 
property do what you gotta do and leave them [the bodies] on the side 
of the road."

As we drive through Algiers Point in a battered white van, Roper 
tells me he witnessed a fatal shooting. Roper says he was talking on 
his cellphone to his son in Lafayette one evening when he spied an 
African-American man trying to get into Daigle's Grocery, a corner 
market on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, which was shuttered 
because of the hurricane. Another militia member shot the man from a 
few feet away, killing him. "He was done," Roper recalls.

During our conversations, Roper never acknowledges firing his weapon, 
but in 2005 a Danish documentary crew videotaped him talking about 
his activities. In this footage Roper says, when pressed, that he did 
indeed shoot somebody.

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is 
more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he 
tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink 
structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three 
of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he 
says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me 
he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were 
looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with 
them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby 
shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot 
gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the 
suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be 
merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit 
in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good 
enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know 
Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing 
tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary 
produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, 
gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned 
white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the 
hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like 
pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native 
of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, 
"I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing 
next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this 
neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags 
about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. 
When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of 
buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a 
pussy community."

Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake 
from the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents 
gathers to celebrate the arrival of military troops sent to police 
the area. Addressing the crowd, one local praises the vigilantes for 
holding the neighborhood together until the Army Humvees trundled 
into town, noting that some of the militia figures are present at the 
party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud of 
every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled locals.

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race 
war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A 
former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she 
fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle 
was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against 
black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the 
opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the 
east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed 
African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One 
of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and 
several other family members describing his adventures with the 
militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an 
African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, 
she says, was "gleeful"--her cousin was happy that "they were 
shooting niggers."

An Algiers Point homeowner who wasn't involved in the shootings 
describes another attack. "All I can tell you is what I saw," says 
the white resident, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of 
reprisals. He witnessed a barrage of gunfire--from a shotgun, an 
AK-47 and a handgun--directed by militiamen at two African-American 
men standing on Pelican Street, not too far from Janak's place. The 
gunfire hit one of them. "I saw blood squirting out of his back," he 
says. "I'm an EMT. My instinct should've been to rush to him. But I 
didn't. And if I had, those guys"--the militiamen--"might have opened 
up on me, too."

The witness shows me a home video he recorded shortly after the 
storm. On the tape, three white Algiers Point men discuss the 
incident. One says it might be a bad idea to talk candidly about the 
crime. Another dismisses the notion, claiming, "No jury would convict."

According to Pervel, one of the shootings occurred just a few feet 
from his house. "Three young black men were walking down this street 
and they started moving the barricade," he tells me. The men, he 
says, wanted to continue walking along the street, but Pervel's 
neighbor, who was armed, commanded them to keep the barricade in 
place and leave. A standoff ensued until the neighbor shot one of the 
men, who then, according to Pervel, "ran a block and died" at the 
intersection of Alix and Vallette Streets.

Even Pervel is surprised the shootings have generated so little 
scrutiny. "Aside from you, no one's come around asking questions 
about this," he says. "I'm surprised. If that was my son, I'd want to 
know who shot him."

By Pervel's count, four people died violently in Algiers Point in the 
aftermath of the storm, including a bloody corpse left on Opelousas 
Avenue. That nameless body came up again and again in interviews, a 
grisly recurring motif. Who was he? How did he die? Nobody knew--or 
nobody would tell me.

After hearing all these gruesome stories, I wonder if any of the 
militia figures I've interviewed were involved in the shooting of 
Herrington and company. In particular, Pervel's and Janak's anecdotes 
intrigue me, since both men discussed shooting incidents that sounded 
a lot like the crime that nearly killed Herrington and wounded 
Alexander and Collins. Both Pervel and Janak recounted incidents in 
which vigilantes confronted three black men.

Hoping to solve the mystery, I show Herrington and Alexander video of 
Pervel, Janak and Roper, all of whom are in their 50s or 60s. No 
match. The shooters, Herrington and Alexander tell me, were younger 
men, in their 30s or 40s, sporting prominent tattoos. I have not been 
able to track them down.

New Orleans, of course, is awash in tales of the horrible things that 
transpired in the wake of the hurricane--and many of these wild 
stories have turned out to be fictions. In researching the Algiers 
Point attacks, I relied on the accounts of people who witnessed 
shooting incidents or were directly involved, either as gunmen or 
shooting victims.

Seeking to corroborate their stories, I sought out documentary 
evidence, including police files and autopsy reports. The NOPD, I was 
told, kept very few records during that period. Orleans Parish 
coroner Frank Minyard was a different story. The coroner, a 
flamboyant trumpet-playing doctor who has held the office for more 
than thirty years, had file cabinets bulging with the autopsies of 
hundreds of Katrina victims--he just wouldn't let me see them, in 
defiance of Louisiana public records laws.

After wrangling with the coroner for more than six months, I decided 
to sue--with a lawyer hired by the Investigative Fund at The Nation 
Institute--to get access to the autopsies. (We weren't the first to 
take the coroner to court. CNN and the New Orleans Times-Picayune had 
successfully sued Minyard, seeking particular Katrina-related 
autopsies.) This past May, Orleans Parish district court judge Kern 
Reese ruled in our favor, ordering Minyard to allow me to review 
every autopsy done in the year after the storm. But I soon learned 
that reconstructing history from the coroner's mess of files was next 
to impossible, because the paper trail is incomplete. "We carried the 
records around in our cars, in the trunks of our cars, for four 
months and, I mean, that--that was the coroner's office," Minyard 
said in a sworn deposition obtained during the course of our suit. 
"I'm sure some of the records got lost or misplaced." Even the 
autopsy files we got were missing key facts, like where the bodies 
were found, who recovered them, when they were recovered and so forth.

Many of the manila file folders the coroner eventually turned over 
were empty, and Minyard said he'd simply chosen not to autopsy some 
twenty-five to fifty corpses. The coroner also told us he didn't know 
exactly how many people were shot to death in the days immediately 
after the storm--"I can't even tell you how many gunshot victims we 
had"--but figured the number would not "be more than ten."

Under oath Minyard proceeded to say something stunning. The NOPD, he 
testified, was only investigating three gunshot cases, all of them 
high-profile--the Danziger Bridge incident, in which police killed 
two civilians, and the shooting of Danny Brumfield, who was slain by 
a cop in front of the Convention Center. Minyard's statement 
buttressed information I'd gotten from NOPD sources who said the 
force has done little to prosecute people for assaults or murders 
committed in the wake of the storm.

I contacted the police department repeatedly over many months, 
providing the NOPD with specific questions about each incident 
discussed in this story. The department, through spokesman Robert 
Young, declined to comment on whether officers had investigated any 
of these crimes and would not discuss any other issues raised by this article.

Sifting through more than 800 autopsy reports and reams of state 
health department data, I quickly identified five New Orleanians who 
had died under suspicious circumstances: one, severely burned, was 
found in a charred abandoned auto (see "Body of Evidence," page 19); 
three were shot; and another died of "blunt force trauma to the 
head." However, it's impossible to tell from the shoddy records 
whether any of these people died in or around Algiers Point, or even 
if their bodies were found there.

No one has been arrested in connection with these suspicious deaths. 
When it comes to the lack of action on the cases, one well-placed 
NOPD source told me there was plenty of blame to go around. "We had a 
totally dysfunctional DA's office," he said. "The court system wasn't 
much better. Everything was in disarray. A lot of stuff didn't get 
prosecuted. There were a lot of things that were getting squashed. 
The UCR [uniform crime reports] don't show anything."

In response to detailed queries made over a period of months, New 
Orleans District Attorney spokesman Dalton Savwoir declined to say 
whether prosecutors looked into any of the attacks I uncovered. The 
office has been through a string of leadership changes since 
Katrina--Leon Cannizaro is the current DA--and is struggling to deal 
with crimes that happened yesterday, let alone three years ago, 
Savwoir told me.

James Traylor, a forensic pathologist with the Louisiana State 
University Health Center, worked alongside Minyard at the morgue and 
suspects that homicide victims fell through the cracks. "I know I did 
cases that were homicides," Traylor says. "They were not suicides." 
NOPD detectives, the doctor continues, never spoke to him about two 
cases he labeled homicides, leading him to believe police conducted 
no investigation into those deaths. "There should be a multi-agency 
task force--police, sheriffs, coroners--that can put their heads 
together and figure out what happened to people," Traylor says.

One of the suspicious cases I discovered was that of Willie Lawrence, 
a 47-year-old African-American male who suffered a "gunshot wound" 
that caused a "cranio-facial injury" and deposited two chunks of 
metal in his brain, according to the autopsy report. Minyard never 
determined whether Lawrence was murdered or committed suicide, 
choosing to leave the death unclassified. However, the dead man's 
brother, Herbert Lawrence, who lives in Compton, California, believes 
his sibling was murdered. Herbert tells me he got a phone call from 
one of Willie's neighbors shortly after he died. The caller said 
Willie, whose body, according to state records, was found on the east 
bank of the Mississippi, was killed by a civilian gunman. "The police 
didn't do anything," Herbert says, pointing out that NOPD officers 
didn't create a written report or interview any relatives.

Malik Rahim is one of a handful of African-Americans who live in 
Algiers Point, and as far as he's concerned, "We are tolerated. We 
are not accepted." In the days after the storm struck, Rahim says, 
the vigilantes "would pass by and call us all kind of names, say how 
they were gonna burn down my house." They thought "all blacks was looting."

As he walked the near-deserted streets in that period, Rahim, 61, a 
former Black Panther with a mane of dreadlocks, came across several 
dead bodies of African-American men. Inspecting the bodies, he 
discovered what he took to be evidence of gunfire. "One guy had about 
his entire head shot off," says Rahim, who was spurred by the storm 
to launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots aid organization. "It's 
pretty hard to think a person drowned when half their head's been 
blown off," he says. He thinks some of the gunmen saw Katrina as a 
"golden opportunity to rid the community of African-Americans."

Sitting at his kitchen table, while a noisy AC unit does its best to 
neutralize the stifling Louisiana heat, Rahim describes the dead and 
lists the locations where he found the bodies. He also shows me video 
footage taken days after the storm. On the tape, Rahim points to the 
grossly distended corpse of an African-American man lying on the ground.

Rahim introduces me to his neighbor, Reggie Bell, 39, the 
African-American man Pervel confronted at gunpoint as he walked by 
Pervel's house. At the time, Bell, a cook, lived just a few blocks 
down the street from Pervel. In Bell's recollection, Pervel, standing 
with another gun-toting man, demanded to know what Bell was doing in 
Algiers Point. "I live here," Bell replied. "I can show you mail."

That answer didn't appease the gunmen, he says. According to Bell, 
Pervel told him, "Well, we don't want you around here. You loot, we shoot."

Roughly twenty-four hours later, as Bell sat on his front porch 
grilling food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, 
intending to drive him from his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha 
still doing around here?" they asked, according to Bell. "We don't 
want you around here. You gotta go."

Bell tells me he was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to 
experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men 
eventually left, but Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I 
believe it was skin color," he says, that prompted the militia to try 
to force him out. "That was some really wrong stuff." Bell's 
then-girlfriend, who was present during the second incident, confirms 
his story. (In a later interview, Pervel admits he confronted Bell 
with a shotgun but portrays the incident as a minor misunderstanding, 
saying he's since apologized to Bell.)

On my final visit to Algiers Point, I stand on Patterson Street, my 
notebook out, interviewing a pair of residents in the dimming evening 
light. An older white man, on his way home from a bar, strides up and 
asks what I'm doing. I reply with a vague explanation, saying I'm 
working on an article about the "untold stories of Hurricane Katrina."

Without a pause, he says, "Oh. You mean the shootings. Yeah, there 
were a bunch of shootings."

When I share with Donnell Herrington what the militia men and Algiers 
Point locals have told me over the course of my investigation, he 
grows silent. His eyes focus on a point far away. After a moment, he 
says quietly, "That's pretty disturbing to hear that--I'm not going 
to lie to you--to hear that these guys are cocky. They feel like they 
got away with it."




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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