[lit-ideas] KKKatrina: Superdome Report From The Louisiana National Guard
- From: "M.A. Camp" <macampesq@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 08:00:40 -0500
Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated
The Seattle Times
^<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2002520986&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=katmyth26&date=20050926>|
9/26/05 | Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell
NEW ORLEANS After five days managing near riots, medical horrors and
unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard
Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence
inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA Beron doesn't remember his name
came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and
three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalled the doctor
saying.
The real total?
Six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to
his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the
handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of
ice.
State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the
official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies
were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no
one had been murdered inside the stadium.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been
recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only
one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and
law-enforcement officials.
That the nation's frontline emergency-management officials believed the body
count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores
of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as
fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city's top officials,
including the mayor and police superintendent.
The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees mass murders,
rapes and beatings have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by
any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and
civilian officials in positions to know.
"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason
Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the
Dome. "Don't get me wrong bad things happened. But I didn't see any killing
and raping and cutting of throats or anything ... 99 percent of the people
in the Dome were very well-behaved."
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department
administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were
inundated with false reports.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only
confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina making
it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this
year.
"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two
sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying
crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they
[national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these
cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. ... It's
not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."
As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and
Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's
media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and
even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a
7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.
Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in
multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward
muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at
doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and
Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping
people" inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children
stepping over so many bodies "we couldn't count."
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly
African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity,
randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them
and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd
has descended to an "almost animalistic state."
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been
backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and
soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert
that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most
of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
"The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass
said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the
information, Compass said he didn't remember.
Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that
occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center and may never. "I'm
having a hard time getting a good body count," he said.
Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities'
response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to
situations that turned out not to exist.
Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of
evacuees about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the
Convention Center overwhelmed their security personnel.
The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by
increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col.
James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw
plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many
inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not
resort to violence.
"Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police
Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then
another guy the same six, and another guy saw them then that became 18."
Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security
checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified
and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th
Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin,
who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.
Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, where
he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through
about six inches of water, Watt's attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece
of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun he
accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to
jail, Baldwin said.
Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state
authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of
35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and
electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any
violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did
report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard
gunshots in the distance on about six occasions.
Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana
National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of
soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on
Friday.
It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance,
Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any
murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.
One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of
evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that "30 or 40 bodies"
were stored in a Convention Center freezer.
But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier
had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in
the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's
Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted
the review.
Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities many allegedly involving small
children may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously
underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at
this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, will be nearly
impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.
While numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes,
in particular the rape of two young girls in the Superdome ladies' room and
the killing of one of them, police and military officials say they know
nothing of such an incident.
--
Cheers,
M.A. Camp, Esq.
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