I Thought I Was Done Crying

[luvthatduke]

But I wept after reading this today,
from the Washington Post:

www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR2005091402655&sent=no

Here are some excerpts from the 5 page article:

'It Was as if All of Us Were Already Pronounced Dead'
By Wil Haygood and Ann Scott Tyson

*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..."

* ...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..."

* "Everywhere I went, I saw people with guns in their hands," said Troy Harris, 18. "They were putting guns to people's heads..."

* 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..."

* 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..."

* 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...

* 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..."

* 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...

* 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...

* 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..."

* 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."

* 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."
-----------------------------------------------------


There is much more to the article, including information
about the Convention Center manager & employees,
describing their fear and eventual escape,
as well as a lengthy description of the arrival and departure
of the La. National Guard, and the arrival of the Arkansas Nat'l. Guard.