A Paradise Built in Hell (39 page)

Aislyn Colgan, a young medic who worked there in the early days, told me, “We made it a policy early on that everyone getting a [tetanus or immunization] shot had to get their blood pressure taken and their temperature taken and do the whole thing, which allowed me or whom-ever to sit down and have a conversation and that was mostly what we were doing. ‘How’s your house? How’s your family?’ Some of the hardest parts of it was hearing people talk about how they had lost everything. Just so many people, one after another: ‘I’ve lost everything, I’ve lost everything.’ That became the daily norm. . . .” She admired the religious strength that got many people through the loss of ancestral homes, of all their worldly goods, of family members.

But that young medic from Oakland, California, a sturdy fair-haired woman with a broad, honest face, also told me, “In Algiers, a lot of people in the white neighborhood formed vigilante groups. They got in their vehicles and drove around. More than one person told me, told me personally, that yes, ‘We shot seven people and we killed them.’ Or ‘We killed five people and we don’t know what happened to the other two.’ Or ‘It was four and three.’ And people were saying that you would’ve done the same thing, ‘You don’t understand, they were coming for you,’ because of the chaos and probably the rumors that the sheriff was spreading. But that was what was scary to me: people have this capacity for good but also this tremendous capacity for evil. One of the most intense conversations I had was with this woman who said: ‘They were coming for our TV and we had to shoot them. If we hadn’t shot them, they would have come back with their brothers and killed us.’ I think the same thing that brought people to completely rearrange their priorities, to be like, ‘What ever I’m going to do, I’m going to rescue you, if that means I have to get this refrigerator to float and pole you back one by one I’m going to do it.’ I think the same kind of response was ‘You are not going to get near my house.’ It made people crazy.”

The murders were no secret. There were plenty of rumors, but the evidence was there. When I mentioned them, some people looked at me as if I was a gullible, overwrought bleeding-heart outsider, and then paused thoughtfully and said, “Well, actually. . . .” Then they’d add a new detail, a new firm of mercenaries set loose in New Orleans, a new vigilante crime they’d heard about. That was the locals. I tried to enlist a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from another part of the country to investigate, and she said she was going to check out the story with her friends at the
Times-Picayune
to see if there was anything to it. I was furious. It wasn’t a rumor or a theory. I had the evidence. So did much of the rest of the world. More than a million people saw the premiere of Spike Lee’s 2006 HBO documentary,
When the Levees Broke
. It includes an interview with Donnell Herrington of Algiers, a sturdy, soft-spoken African American guy not nearly as tall as his basketball college scholarship would suggest.

Spike Lee found him and put him in
When the Levees Broke
. Standing on the levees near the Algiers ferry, he told just the story of how he was shot by vigilantes, not who he was and what he had done before, or what happened afterward. On camera in that film that was seen by so many millions of people, Donnell pulled up his shirt and said, “This is the buckshots from the shotgun.” His torso was peppered with lumps. And then he gestured at the long, twisting raised scar that wound around his neck like a centipede or a snake: “And this is the incision from the surgery from the buckshots that penetrated my neck and hit my jugular vein.” A man described his own attempted murder on nationwide television, and no one thought to investigate? Even Spike Lee, who had devoted a whole documentary to the murder of four little girls during the civil rights era, just cut away to news footage of Governor Blanco announcing that they were going to restore law and order.

Lee’s film was the most widely available piece of evidence. But I’d also offered the journalist a copy of another documentary, Danish filmmaker Rasmus Holm’s ironically titled
Welcome to New Orleans
, which focused on the events in Algiers Point. In it, longtime Algiers resident Malik Rahim showed the camera the body of a black man lying on his face near the street, bloated from the heat, abandoned. As he also told the nationally syndicated news program
Democracy Now
, “During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in New Orleans, hunting season began on young African American men. In Algiers, I believe, approximately around eighteen African American males were killed. No one really knows what’s the overall count. And it was basically murder. It was murder by either the police or by vigilantes that was allowed to run amok.”

There were bodies lying on the street in the place that had never flooded, the comparatively undamaged place where no one was dying of thirst or heatstroke. A lot of people seemed reluctant to take the word of Rahim, an ex-Black Panther with dreadlocks halfway down his back, but there was that body on camera. There was Herrington’s testimony, and the mute testimony of his savaged body. And on Holm’s film there were vigilante confessions, if confession is the right word for cheery, beer-enhanced boasting. At a barbecue the Dane managed to attend shortly after Katrina, a stocky white guy with receding white hair and a Key West T-shirt chortled, “I never thought eleven months ago I’d be walking down the streets of New Orleans with two .38s and a shotgun over my shoulder. It was great. It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”

A tough woman with short hair and chubby arms added, “That’s not a pheasant and we’re not in South Dakota. What’s wrong with this picture?”

The man said happily, “Seemed like it at the time.”

A second white-haired guy explained, “You had to do what you had to do. If you had to shoot somebody, you had to shoot. It’s that simple.”

A third said, “We shot ’em.”

The woman said, “They were looters. In this neighborhood we take care of our own.”

And the last man to speak added, “You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community.”

Here was the marauding, murdering gang the media had been obsessed with, except that it was made up of old white people, and its public actions went unnoticed.

Moved by his anguish over the murders, I vowed to Rahim that I would get them investigated and exposed. Eventually, I brought together the
Nation
magazine with the best and most fearless investigative journalist I know, A. C. Thompson, and handed over my evidence and contacts. A.C. is equally at ease with rogue cops and gang bosses and has broken a lot of crime stories in his day. The magazine supported many visits to look into records, launch a legal battle with the coroner (who was withholding autopsy information on all Katrina’s dead and “lost” many of these public records), and interview the victims and the perpetrators. Nine months later, still waiting to get the coroner’s records, A.C. sat at my kitchen table and riveted me with his accounts of whom he’d met and what he’d already figured out.

He’d become close to Donnell Herrington. And he’d talked to the vigilantes, who unlike even convicted killers doing life without parole he’d interviewed for other investigations, readily confessed to murder. Boasted of it, really. One guy who took him home to show him incriminating videotape and photographs of what he and his companions had done said, “People think it’s a myth. But we killed people.” The vigilantes told Adam that they’d shot three black men one morning and that they knew they were looters, because they had tote bags with them. The bags were full of nice sports apparel. Definitive evidence. A.C. wanted to tell them that when people attempt to evacuate their region, they often take clothes, their best clothes, and that if you know anything about inner-city African American men between about fifteen and thirty-five, they wear sports gear a lot. What does it mean to assume that anything a black man carries is stolen? But it wasn’t his job to educate them, just to let them talk.

And they talked. The vigilantes had gotten the keys of some of their neighbors who’d evacuated, set up barricades—even felling trees—to slow down people’s movement through their area, accumulated an arsenal, and gone on patrol. Unfortunately, they were also between the rest of New Orleans Parish and the ferry terminal from which people were being evacuated; a lot of people had good reason as well as every right to walk through those streets. At one point they even demanded a black man leave the neighborhood, even though he lived a few blocks from where his neighbors threatened him. Suddenly, in that mixed neighborhood, blacks were intruders. The vigilantes were convinced that their picturesque neighborhood on the other side of the river would be overrun by looters, and they claimed the men they shot were looters, but they did not report the loss of even a garden hose or a flowerpot from a single front yard. “What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?”

One balmy September afternoon in 2008, A.C., Donnell, and I sat at a picnic table in New Orleans’s City Park under the spreading oak trees with the ferns running up their thick arms and the Spanish moss dripping down their fingers. Big black butterflies flitted through the soft, humid air, and squirrels chased each other around the trees. A.C. found Donnell Herrington, the vigilantes’ surviving victim, the hard way, since he was one of the myriad displaced and bounced around by the aftermath of the storm. He looked through obituaries for relatives, looked the relatives up in phone books, and they eventually led him to the man. Donnell told us in a soft, level voice what he had seen, done, and suffered during those three days. His story arcs through the best and worst of disasters and human behavior. Before Herrington was a victim he was a rescuer. He saved old people. He saved children. He saved family. He saved the neighbors. He saved strangers. The twenty-nine-year-old could have evacuated his hometown, New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approached, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave his grandparents. Their home in the St. Bernard housing project out near City Park on the north side of town weathered the hurricane fine, but later that day the water began to rise, mysteriously, horrifically, until it had filled the first floor of the buildings all around and what had once been a city was a weird lake. No help appeared, but word spread that if you could get to the elevated interstate you could get evacuated from the flooded city. Some of the stranded people, like his grandparents, were frail; some couldn’t swim.

Herrington was strong, and so he found an inner tube and got into the vile water to look for a boat. “Another cousin of mine, just when we were thinking there was no hope, came along with a boat. I told him, ‘Let’s get our grandparents.’ That’s when I started helping people throughout the neighborhood.” Herrington stood in the prow of the small skiff, and he and a few friends poled the boat along through the murky waters with the submerged cars, stop signs, and other obstacles. They continued rescuing into the night, when the city without power became darker than he’d ever seen it before. On one of their night-rescue journeys, the one with his female cousins and their small children, they nearly flipped the boat, and Herrington recalls, “I was thinking, Lord, don’t let it tip over because we had babies on board, and if the babies would’ve fallen into the water, we probably couldn’t have saved some of them because it was too dark for us to see.” He estimates that in the four hours they were in the boat, they transported more than a hundred people from the flooded neighborhood to the interstate.

At daybreak, he, his cousin Marcel Alexander, then seventeen years old, and their friend Chris Collins set out walking the several miles on the freeway to downtown New Orleans, hoping to find help for his grandparents, who were sleeping on the asphalt with everyone else. “I saw some crazy, crazy, crazy things. . . . One young lady was having a baby on the interstate. I saw people dead on the interstate, some older people who just couldn’t—it was crazy. I was just passing people up. My heart was going out to these people.” He wasn’t even allowed to get near the Convention Center, where thousands of evacuees would end up stranded, or the Superdome, and he wasn’t allowed to walk back up the interstate to check on his family. At that point he was close to the Crescent City Connection, the bridge across the Mississippi, and so Herrington decided to just walk several more miles to the Algiers home to which he and his girlfriend had moved a year earlier. Alexander and Collins came with him.

The apocalypse kept unfolding. Nothing was flooded over there, but a huge branch from the pine tree in front of his rented townhouse had smashed in the roof of the place, and it was not habitable. Most people had evacuated, and the place felt like a ghost town. One of the few remaining neighbors told him that people on the West Bank were being evacuated from the Algiers Point Ferry a few miles farther on. His cousin was worried about their family and on the verge of tears. “I kinda felt responsible for him, and I kept telling him, ‘You gonna be okay. You gonna be all right.’ ” The three young black men set out for the ferry, though Herrington didn’t know the way exactly. They ran into another man and struck up a conversation with him. He gave them directions, told them that he had a generator but was going to evacuate to Atlanta when he’d fixed a flat tire, and told them too that maybe the neighbors who miraculously had a working phone might let them use it. They did. Herrington called his family and assured them that he was okay, though in a few moments he would not be.

As they continued their journey, the guy with the flat said, “ ‘Be careful because these guys are walking around the area with shotguns,’ but I wasn’t paying that no mind.” A few blocks later, while Herrington had his head turned to talk to Alexander, a man he didn’t even see stepped out and pulled the trigger on a shotgun. “It happened so fast I didn’t even hear the loud boom. Like I said, I felt a lot of pressure in my neck and it lifted me off my feet and I hit the ground and I didn’t know what actually happened and I kinda blanked out for a second and my vision was kinda blurry, and when I opened my eyes I saw my cousin standing over me and I looked down at my arms and everything and some of the shots hit me in my arms, my neck, my chest, all over my body.” His jugular vein had been punctured and blood began to spurt out of his neck. Marcel stood over him, overwhelmed with horror, and Herrington looked past him to see the stout middle-aged man reloading and told his cousin to run. Facing death, he was still taking care of his family.