The Bridge

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Fred Johnson had left the Hyatt Hotel the morning after Katrina in a cab. He had thought he'd get right back home to keep planning his annual Labor Day parade. But he didn't get that far. The streets were flooded. What are you thinking then? Um I don't know. I I I mean I I don't know. I I really don't know. Fred knew the parade was off, but he didn't know what was gonna happen next. So he headed back to the hotel. Turns out he was heading right into the heart of the action.

The Hyatt became an operating base for the whole city government in response. Fire and Police, the National Guard, FEMA, the Army Corps. The hotel manager even turned over his living quarters for the mayor to use. So when we get back to the in the hotel we sittin' in the lobby, and the police chief run in. Eddie Compis was the chief of police of the New Orleans Police Department. He knew Fred from around the community. He said, Fred, Fred.

Come here man, come here, come here. I need your help. I need your help. I know how you work in the community. I need your help. I need your help. So he's shaking me. He's got me by my two shoulders. And he's talking to me and he's shaking the shit out of me. Compass was worried. The Hyatt had supplies. He told Fred that he thought looters were coming to break in.

And I don't know something happened where they're saying there's a group of men that's coming. The word on the street is that the hide has everything you want. Let's go loot to hire. He says, listen, they coming, they coming. I need you to go get all the men you could get. It was a strange moment, a time when the normal rules were in flux.

A time when Fred Johnson, a man wearing summer shoes and a khaki kangle and possessing no actual policing experience, could reasonably be asked to protect a twenty seven storey hotel from looters. He didn't get a badge or a uniform or anything like that, but Fred was officially deputized. I got deputized because he shook the shit out of me. That's how I got deputized. Yeah, after he shook the shit out of me. Uh Yeah. There ain't no hold up your hand and put your hand on the Bible and all that.

Me Amen. If that's what you call a debit, he shook the shit out of me. I said, Eddie, I got you, bro. I got, I'm with you. Stop shaking me. There were hundreds of people still taking refuge in the third floor ballroom. The thought of armed looters storming the place would have been terrifying.

Fred gathered his buddies from the Black Men of Labor and then recruited all the men from the ballroom, had them silently tap each other on the shoulder and discreetly leave the room so people wouldn't be alarmed. They didn't have weapons or any real idea of what they'd do if anyone showed up. It was a bluff. But a bluff was all they had. See listen bruh, we need you to just stand by the door so that the looters

If they should come this way, they see cats standing at the door. They don't know whether you're armed or not, right? Because it you didn't have many police officers at that point.

Over 200 officers were off the job. Some had evacuated, and they weren't coming back. Even lots of the ones who stayed had lost homes or loved ones in the flooding. Cops had lost service weapons and cars, and resorted to carrying their own shotguns and assault rifles, and driving commandeered vehicles. Some got caught looting stores themselves. Before the storm, the force was notorious for brutality and corruption. After the storm, it seemed like it was disintegrating entirely.

This is something that no one had ever handled before. Chief Eddie Compus had been a street cop who rose up the rank. He became chief at forty three, one of the youngest in the country. When the storm hit, he sent his pregnant wife and toddler away. He was stressed. Some of his own family members were trapped in the floodwater. And he had no way to communicate with his officers. Just imagine

The whole radio system's gone down. So you can't communicate by radio. The phone system's going down. You can't communicate by phone. I was literally in a in a military vehicle driving through the water, going from district to district, checking on the troops. It was very difficult, you know, it really was. Without communications, all information was credible information.

More and more, news reports painted the people left behind as violent and dangerous and turned them into monsters in the eyes of the people in charge. Even the police chief and the mayor started to repeat misinformation. It all became a feedback loop. If the media was reporting that mobs of armed looters were roving the streets, if the police chief was saying it too, people thought it was real. It wasn't for me to second guess it.

What I know was there were a lot of women and children and old people in that building. and whether they were real or whether they were not I didn't have the luxury to take that position. Fred says, looters never did show up that day. He spent the next couple weeks running what he called missions for authorities in the city. Rescues, supply runs, and Chief Compass did what he could to keep things together, but he was struggling to keep himself together.

People had no idea, you know, the challenge that we had. I mean, we were actually disseminating food in the Super Dome. I mean we were rendering first aid to people who were in need of medical attention. I mean, these were police officers doing this. But as the days went on, some of the danger came from the police officers themselves. You know. The few bad things that happened, which were horrific, just overshadowed all the good things that went down. And that's unfortunate. It really is.

Part four. The bridge.

Jarvis De Berry was a columnist for the Times Piccune during Katrina. He wrote about policing and crime before the storm. The day after the storm, he was one of the first to confirm the city was flooding. He'd gone out with a photographer down the interstate, drove until they hit water. So we went as far as we could go. That was the high rise, uh the the bridge that takes you over the industrial canal.

And there were police officers there and they were helping people through the water there, people who were being rescued from their homes. They went back to the newspaper office, but soon that was flooding too. He and other reporters evacuated in the back of delivery trucks. In Baton Rouge, they set up a newsroom in exile. But Jarvis is mostly just getting bits and pieces of information. I didn't know what to believe about what was happening in New Orleans at that point.

There was so many tall tales being told about New Orleans, some of them from official sources, that it it you you had to be skeptical about everything. Mayor Nagan was still up in the Hyde Hotel, out of sight for a lot of the week. Which meant Chief Compass became one of the city's main spokesmen. And the stories he told were a little wild. You know, it's just like unchecked violence in the Superdome and unchecked violence in the Convention Center. And our police chief.

Then Eddie Compass was telling a story about how the Convention Center, his officers were engaged in a firefight. inside the convention center and they didn't know where the bad guys were and the only way they could trace them down was by the muzzle flashes of their guns. With a dangerous cocktail of anger, fear, and desperation brewing, a mob beat them back, according to the chief of police. says 15,000 people are trapped in the city's convention center and some are being raped.

And be You know, that was what was frustrating that people allowed themselves to believe that black people were capable of just just pure unadulterated savagery, that as soon as the lights go out, we would just turn to raping babies for sport. The NOPD had been on edge since the day after the storm. That day, a New Orleans police officer and his partner saw some guys breaking into a convenience store in Algiers. the officers approached the men, and one of them shot one of the officers.

There is late word tonight from Louisiana State Police that a New Orleans police officer was shot by a looter. The police officer's condition is not known. That shooting supercharged all the rumors about looting. Basically made every description of violence sound plausible to some folks, including leadership in the department itself. Police and media were describing the city as being under siege.

There is little or no safety in the city of New Orleans tonight. We just heard our colleague talk about being at a police station on the roof of the police station down below the police that have shown up for work. say they will defend the station. That's the point they're at, simply defending the station. And we saw a note The mayor wanted somebody to demand martial law. Some police thought they had it.

ProPublica reported that a police commander told his officers that they had authority to shoot looters. The governor of Louisiana said the National Guard would do the same. It was the NLPD versus the world. What was interesting though was that the the real savagery that we heard about came from the police department. On Thursday, an officer shot a man named Henry Glover in the back at a strip mall in Algiers.

Glover was found bleeding outside and was brought to a makeshift NLPD headquarters nearby. There, another officer took the car with Glover's body inside. And uh His car is eventually found incinerated on the Mississippi River levee in Algiers and Henry Glover's body is in the back of it. The next night, New Orleans police officers pulled up outside the convention center. A forty-five-year-old grandfather named Danny Brumfield walked up to the police car.

The police say he jumped on the hood of their car. Other people say he was just trying to get the cops' attention. An officer shot and killed Brumfield. He said that Brumfield had lunged at him with a shiny object. and that he shot him in self-defense. An autopsy revealed that Brumfield was shot in the back.

Two days later, there was another tragedy on the Danziger Bridge. Danziger Bridge, so it's a bridge that goes over the industrial canal in the eastern part of the city. For all of the people who left uh New Orleans. Uh, there are a lot of people who didn't leave for for whatever reason. Near the west side of the bridge, two brothers had been holed up for days Lance and Ronald Madison.

For years, Lance had been a caretaker and protector for Ronald, who had an intellectual disability. They'd waited out the storm in their brother's dental practice. After a week passed, they decided to walk back to their home in the East. But they ran into the floodwater. So they decided to walk back. that Sunday morning they are walking across Danziger Bridge to his brother's dentistry practice, which is on the other side of the bridge. Uh there is another family

uh the Bartholomew family, and they have a nephew with them, Jose Holmes, and uh James Rassette, who is a friend of the family. They're all walking across Danziger Bridge. Around the time the two families crossed paths, police nearby got a call. An officer was under fire on the bridge. The actual events had led up to the call of Murky, but as it later turned out, the man who first reported the shots wasn't even a cop, and might not have actually seen or heard gunshots at all.

It was just another rumor. a group of officers on the back of a um not a police vehicle, but a moving van. Um they come to Danziger Bridge. believing that an officer has been shot down and from all reports they jump out of the truck firing. Yeah. The officer who was driving fired warning shots. The officers in the back jumped out and began shooting at the two families running for cover. They didn't wear uniforms. There were no sirens, no police cars. They never indicated they were police.

and two officers carried AK forty sevens. The families believe they were being ambushed by a group of murderers for no reason. It's complete mayhem on the bridge. The Madisons are running, the Bartholomew's are running, Brissett is running. Officers fire dozens of shots at them. JJ Brazette was shot in the neck, and Jose Holmes was shot in the face at close range. Then, an officer chased Ronald down too. Ronald is basically chased down and hunted and shot.

uh dead. Uh JJ Brissett is shot dead. Jose Holmes needs a colostomy back. Susan Bartholomew has her right arm blown off. None of these people are armed. The Danziger Bridge cover up began almost immediately. They arrested Lance Madison and put him in jail on bogus charges of attempted murder of police officers. They accused Jose Holmes, too. They planted a gun in evidence. And to add to the confusion in the media, they spun the story.

They told the press that the people they'd killed had shot at police officers and contractors. And we're learning more about a shooting on a New Orleans bridge. According to a police report, officers shot and killed five men today after the men fired on contract. As you can imagine, uh the nature of the devastation and the lack of communications here has led to a lot of misinformation. We have straightened that out. Apparently.

A group of Army Corps of Engineers contractors were on a bridge. They were shot at by a gunman. Police killed that gunman, but the Army Corps of Engineers are just fine.

Compass was not implicated in any of the killings or cover-ups that happened under his watch. But the stories he, other officials, and the media helped spread created an overreaction. They made things more dangerous all over the city. Business owners guarded their stores with guns. People hired private security to protect their homes. In a neighborhood called Algiers Point, a group of white vigilantes put up barricades. They patrolled the street with guns.

Witnesses told ProPublica that over the course of the week, the men shot at least eleven people. The witnesses weren't sure what happened to all of them. A family member said the men were trying to spark a race war. A month after the storm, Compass says Nagan forced him to resign. It's it was difficult, you know, and like I say in hindsight I made some mistakes. If I had to do it all over again, I would have vetted the information more. But

I was so afraid of being involved in a cover-up. Suppose some of those things were true, like the rapes were true, and I never would have reported them. What would you what would this interview be in now? Why did you cover it up, Chief? They gave you the information. Why didn't you report it? ¿Yes o no?

You know, I was the chief that will probably go on in history and a lot of people try to vilify me for not making all the right decisions. Well, I c I can't really care what people think about me. All I know is I gave my heart and soul to this police department. serious personal sacrifices. I allowed people that were very close to me to suffer hardship to do my job. And I did my job until I was actually forced out of my job. And that's the bottom line.

Jarvis de Berry watched Compass that week from Baton Rouge. He of all people could understand how difficult it was. To do a tough job in the middle of a crisis. To do your job when you were sleeping on the floor, not showering for days, not knowing if your house was underwater or not. But he didn't think that stress or exhaustion could explain what happened that week. It just took that little bit of

deprivation for people to see people who live in this city as like enemies. And I think the I think it's probably fair to say all of those rumors contributed to that. to that shooting. The the rumor going around was that people were just savages and Mm. when you are being fed that information and you're being told that people are raping babies and sitting young girls' throats in the convention center and doing all kinds of stuff that human beings don't do.

then I think it becomes a lot more difficult to see people as human beings. It makes me afraid knowing just The kind of Really thin line that exists between civility and outright fatal chaos.

On Friday, not long before police killed a man outside the convention center, Leanne Williams was inside. She was watching National Guardsmen look down on her. She was afraid. And their family had a decision to make. Leanne Williams and her family had been stranded at the convention center, eating cans of beans, trying and failing to hotwire cars so they could escape. As far as they'd seen, there were no buses, no helicopters or trucks full of food.

Leanne started to think they were all gonna die there. So my mom went to talking to my stepdad and was like, you got to do something. We got to go. My child thinks we're going to die here. We got to go. So I remember us packing like the stuff we had, like our purses, you know, book bags and stuff we had. And I just remember us we started walking up conventional boulevard and it started raining.

They walked toward the Crescent City Connection Bridge. It connected New Orleans to a town called Gretna. Just the day before, a group of evacuees had tried to walk over the bridge, and Gretna police officers blocked the way. They allegedly fired gunshots over their heads. They had the s um national guards up there with the rifles. If you walk up there, they were sending you back down.

You can see them actually from the convention center because you can see the GNO bridge. So you can actually, when you look up, you can see them. All of them lined up. Just looking down. And we just walk in just to take our chances to see if they was gonna let us cross. In the week after Katrina, bridges were some of the only lifelines in and out of a city surrounded by water.

People cross him on foot, by truck, by bus, journalists like Jarvis, paranoid police officers, and people just trying to make their way out of a city in chaos. The crossings were unpredictable. Nothing was certain really, not even safety. But Leanne's family, they got lucky. We was walking and this lady swung with this RTA bus. A woman who drove city buses had taken one and decided to try and rescue people on her way out. She made one last swoop on that side of the bridge.

I'm pretty sure it was my dad saw the bus and we was hollering Help, help and just hey, all us just waving our hands up. And she happened to see us and she opened the door and my dad was like, Where you going? Can you please just take me and my family? Can you And she was like, sure, come on. And we really yelling to her because she's far away. And she was like, Yeah, come on, come on. You and your family, come on. We just went to running.

You know how you running and it's like you're just running in slow motion and you're just trying to get there? That's how it felt. So like a movie. Yeah. Seemed like it was far away. I'm just trying to get on the bus'cause this our chance. To get out of New Orleans. The woman stopped and let them on the bus.

We were just so happy, my whole family. We just was laughing and everybody like, We on the bus, we on the bus and we didn't know where we were going. We just was happy that we was out of the convention center. The Gretna police were letting vehicles across the bridge. The bus went through. Thank you. They decided to go to Baton Rouge, but many of the roads were either flooded or closed off.

Authorities stood watching some places. The bus pulled up to one of those spots on the back road. A National Guard soldier stopped it. And he was like, he stopped the bus. We thought we was gonna be well, I thought that we was gonna be in trouble. He was gonna make us give the bus up and we was gonna have to go back to the convention center. So I was scared. But something was off. Leanne noticed a soldier was standing there, with a woman and a baby.

But he was like, Can y'all please put them on a bus for me? They've been walking for days. And the lady she opened the bus, she was like, sure, sure, yeah. Um they could get on the bus. And he was like, just good luck, y'all. Just keep going, get outta here, get out of here. He said, just keep going to get out of here. They were on the road. They'd made it out safely. And right after they left New Orleans, the Four long days after the storm, The cavalry finally did arrive.