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No Justice for the African-Americans Targeted by White Vigilantes After the Katrina Flooding
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on December 20, 2008, Printed on December 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/114286/
In the days after Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana and
Mississippi, the bodies of African American men began to turn up on the
streets. But these weren't the bloated corpses of drowned Gulf
residents whose images were beamed around the world. Instead, their
nameless bodies contained bullet holes, slain at the hands of persons
unknown. A number of these killings took place in the community
of Algiers Point, a small, isolated place west of the Mississippi and a
"white enclave" in a largely African American area. Situated between
the Lower Ninth Ward and the rescue point for so those who were trying
to flee, a band of residents there responded to accounts of
post-hurricane looting by arming themselves to the teeth and going out
in search of criminals, lynch-mob style. "The existence of this
little army isn't a secret," reports investigative journalist A.C.
Thompson in his groundbreaking investigative article just published in
the Nation, "Katrina's Hidden Race War."
"In 2005, a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in
glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs;
one Cox news story called it 'the ultimate neighborhood watch.' " With
so many questions unanswered about the extrajudicial killings committed
by these white vigilantes, Thompson spent 18 months trying to piece
together the mystery of what happened in New Orleans. With the support
of the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund, he traveled to Algiers
Point, where he spoke with black men who had been targeted and shot,
the families of slain men, and those who had gone out and participated
in these white vigilante mobs. Many months -- and one lawsuit --
later, the result is a huge feat of investigative reporting that
reveals the racist logic that drove these mobs and which centers around
some basic but critical questions that have gone unanswered for years:
Who killed these men? And why has there never been any accountability? AlterNet's Rights & Liberties Editor Liliana Segura corresponded with A.C. Thompson to ask him the story behind the story. Liliana Segura: How did you come across this story?
A.C. Thompson:
Author Rebecca Solnit, a friend, encouraged me to chase the story.
She'd been in New Orleans, working on an alternative history of
disasters, which will be published in 2009. Rebecca kept hearing these
stories about shootings on the west bank of the Mississippi, crimes
attributed to a group of white vigilantes. Crime reporting isn't her
specialty, so she pushed me to follow up, throwing a bunch of leads and
ideas at me and prodding me, vigorously, to investigate. From
start to finish, I spent about a year-and-a-half on the project,
although I didn't work on it every day. During that time, I also put
hours into some other stories, including several investigative pieces
about the murder of Oakland [Calif.] journalist Chauncey Bailey, who
was assassinated in 2007. I made four trips to New Orleans, and spent
about two months in the city. When I wasn't in New Orleans, I was
working the phones, reading through documents, writing, tracking people
down, trying to come up with new leads. The lawsuit brought by me
and the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund also gobbled up many
months. We sued Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard for the right to
copy every single autopsy report tied to Hurricane Katrina. All we
really wanted were the autopsies documenting shooting victims, but
Minyard refused to give us those, saying he couldn't sort them out from
all the other autopsies. So we wound up demanding everything, as we
were allowed under Louisiana law. We won. And the coroner now owes the
Investigative Fund some $10,000 in attorney fees, which he hasn't paid. LS:
It's a huge piece and it creates as many -- if not more -- questions as
answers. What are some of the things that didn't make it into the
article? AT: William Tanner -- the Good
Samaritan in the [story's] sidebar -- lost his car when it was torched,
possibly by the police, also paid a heavy financial price. He and his
wife had to pay about $300 per month on the car for three years to pay
it off, even after it was ruined. They say the insurance company
wouldn't cover it, a major burden for a working-class couple. There
is also at least one police-involved shooting nobody has investigated.
Multiple sources told me two SWAT officers took out a suspected thief
with sniper shots; these SWAT cops also talked about this in New Orleans Magazine.
It may have been a justified shooting, I don't know. But my
understanding is that NOPD never investigated to determine whether it
was a reasonable shooting. Other than the story in New Orleans Magazine, I've seen no mention of this case anywhere. Also: I never saw an autopsy that matched this slaying, which seems suspicious. LS: How did the people you interviewed respond to you when you went down to New Orleans?
AT:
In most cases, the vigilantes were incredibly frank. I've never been
around so many people talking so openly about shooting incidents. I was
really shocked when Wayne Janak, who is in the story, spilled his whole
story about hunting down a suspected looter, holding him at gunpoint
and threatening to kill him. Whoa. That was a crazy moment. LS: What did you expect going into the story? AT:
I was completely naive before I went to New Orleans. I was a virtual
Bambi before I started spending time in New Orleans. Nothing there
works as it should. I figured I could just make a public-records
request to the coroner for the autopsy reports and in a few weeks I'd
know how many people were shot to death after Katrina. Wrong. When I
called the coroner asking about records, a staffer there told me the
office didn't abide by the state law, which requires autopsies to be
made public. I mean this person just came out and said, "We don't
follow the law." Every time I dealt with the local government, it
was the same. Getting answers to basic questions was near impossible.
Just finding phone numbers for public officials was a challenge. LS: There
is a sidebar to the story, focusing on the case of one man in
particular, Henry Glover, whose murder seems to have taken place with
the knowledge of New Orleans police. Why did you decide to concentrate
on him? AT: The family of Henry Glover has been
incredibly damaged by his death. Can you imagine what its like to have
your loved one die like that: abandoned by the cops who could've helped
him and then set ablaze like a pile of rubbish? I'd call his sister,
and she'd just start bawling on the phone. For a long time, his mother
wouldn't talk to me because it was just too hard. The photos of
Glover still haunt me. I've been very close to a lot of death, but
those photos of Glover -- nothing but a skull and bones and some burned
meat and ashes -- haunt me. They show up in my dreams. And that brings
me to a larger point, which is that surveying so much death is not
healthy. LS: Perhaps it should come as no
surprise that post-Katrina autopsies were completely disorganized. But
it was surprising that county officials would be so unwilling to
release them. Why so much secrecy? AC: I don't
know why they were so secret. And I shouldn't speculate. What I can
say, for sure, is that the coroner and his staff have adopted a very
oppositional approach towards the media. He keeps saying he won't give
autopsy records to reporters covering one of the biggest stories in
recent history, and journalists like myself keep suing. I should also
say that Lori Mince, the attorney who handled our case, really
understands why this material should be public. She worked very, very
hard to bring it into the light. There are a ton of lessons to be gleaned from the autopsies of Katrina victims. Who died? How did they die? Where did they die? Unfortunately,
none of these questions have been fully answered, because the Orleans
Parish coroner won't make these records public -- unless you take him
to court, as we did. The coroner's position -- which stands in
contravention of Louisiana law -- means state health researchers and
academics haven't been able to study these autopsy documents. Those
autopsy documents are also flawed in many ways. This is something that
nobody has really discussed. The coroner's autopsy records don't
include info about where people were found, what they were wearing at
the time, what was found at the death scenes (i.e.: was a gun lying
next to the body?). An autopsy file should include this kind of info so
the coroner can make an accurate determination as to what happened to
the dead person. Was it murder? Suicide? Was there a suicide note?
Without this type of info, a coroner -- and by extension, law
enforcement -- will have trouble figuring out how the deceased died,
and following up, if necessary. Also, since there's no info about
locations where bodies were discovered, police and prosecutors would
have a great deal of trouble bringing charges in any murder cases from
the post-storm days. When you have no written proof of where a body was
found, you've immediately got a whole lot of reasonable-doubt issues
for a jury to ponder. Was the body really found on Bourbon Street as
this guy from the coroner's office remembers? Or could his memory be
wrong? With no written record you're screwed. LS: You
write about the few media outlets that covered these murderers as doing
so "in glowing terms." One called the gangs "the ultimate neighborhood
watch." To what extent do you think this speaks to a deeper problem in
the coverage of race in the South? AC: I don't
know if it's just the South. I think media outlets across this nation
struggle in their coverage of race and ethnicity. The stories I read
about the Algiers Point militia disturbed me on several levels. Here's
why: The notion of a group of white people patrolling their
predominantly white neighborhood with guns should raise immediate
questions for any journalist, especially one working in New Orleans.
First question: What role is race playing in the formation and
activities of this little army? I didn't get the sense that reporters
who covered the Algiers Point vigilantes brought much skepticism or
consciousness about race to their reportage. I could be wrong, but I
didn't see it in what I read. LS: One of the
disturbing things about your piece is how these vigilantes placed
property so high above human life. You write that they considered
themselves "righteous defenders of property." Do you think this warped
value system is something that is an intrinsic part of our culture that
Hurricane Katrina brought to the surface? AC: I
would hope that this story -- and some of the news coverage from the
time period -- would generate some introspection, would cause people to
scrutinize the value systems put vividly on display by the catastrophe.
For example, the decision by certain law-enforcement officials to bar
New Orleanians from leaving the city and walking over the Crescent City
Connection bridge into Gretna, which is the next town over. You
have to wonder about people's priorities. It was pretty shocking to me
to hear about an entire neighborhood trying to wall itself off from
flood victims, trying to become an ad hoc gated community, which is
what happened in Algiers Point. At the same time, they're were
some really heroic and selfless things that went on during that time
period, as well. There were many people who lost everything and risked
losing their lives to help people. Donnell Herrington, who was shot in
Algiers Point several days after Katrina made landfall, is one of those
people. When the storm hit, he was sitting in his grandparents'
apartment in the St. Bernard Housing Project. That area was deluged
with water, and Herrington went out and got a skiff and rescued people
who were facing drowning. He delivered them to a highway overpass out
of the water. He says he felt "compelled" to try to save folks. LS: Are you still working on the story? AT: I'd
encourage anyone who has any information about the vigilante activities
or the murder of Henry Glover -- or anyone else -- to contact me. I'm
still pursuing the story. I expect to publish some follow-up stories
soon, and this body of reporting may well become a book or film.
Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/114286/
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