the reality of the on going race war in amerika-gctid32540

[kweku, afro olmec]

Don't believe the hype! as Public Enemy song in the late 80s

America is still the racist den of thieves it has always been, this expose on the murders of Kmtyws during the aftermath of the Katrina flood is ample evidence -- but as we all know it is only a specifically magnified opportunity for such killings.  This is why it is very important that we organize ourselves thoroughly and not for reform or any of that other dangerous nonsense being fed our people...that kind of brainwashing is the other side of the organized mass murders, it is the tactics used to make us compliant in our own lynching.  Don't stop suffering just so suffer peacefully is just as much their line as it was when Malcolm said it some forty-odd years ago ... you remember the Jena 6...Michael Bell and the others, well I hope you remember how the liberal establishment and the democratic party hijacked the movement started by young Kmtyw students across the country determined to defend themselves against the racist onslaught was hijacked and turned into a love-in ... a love-in of the kind where the murderers and their allies get off scott free, as has been the case for centuries in this country.  This must end and it is only Pan-Kmtywism, including the organized Kmtyws in this hemisphere that can or even wants to end it.. .don't ever forget that.  Don't believe the hype!

The Grinning Skull:  The Homicides You Didn't Hear About in Hurricane Katrina
     Sunday 21 December 2008
     by: Rebecca  Solnit, TomDispatch. com
     
 Donnell Herrington was shot twice by vigilantes after  Hurricane Katrina in Algiers Point, a mostly black community across the river  from New Orleans. (Photo: Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun / The  Nation)
            What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing  spree? While the national and international media were working themselves and  much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists,  snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly  poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of  white men went on a shooting spree across the river.
         Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the  official story. The media demonized the city's black population f or crimes that  turned out not to have happened, and the retractions were, as always, too little  too late. At o ne point FEMA sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler to pick up what a colonel in  the National Guard expected to be 200 bodies in New Orleans's Superdome, only to  find six, including four who died naturally and a suicide. Meanwhile, the media  never paid attention to the real rampage that took place openly across the  river, even though there were corpses lying in unflooded streets and testimony  everywhere you looked - or I looked, anyway.
         The widely reported violent crimes in the Superdome turned out to be  little more than hysterical rumor, but they painted Kmtyw-Americans as  out-of-control savages at a critical moment. The result was to shift  institutional responses from disaster relief to law enforcement, a decision that  resulted in further deaths among the thirsty, hot, stranded multitude. Governor  Kathleen Blanco announced, "I have one message for these hoodlums: These  troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if  necessary, and I expect they will." So would the white vigilantes, and though  their exact body count remains unknown, at least 11 black men were apparently  shot, some fatally.
         The parish  of Orleans includes both the city of New Orleans on one side  of the Mississippi and a community on the other side called A lgiers that can be  reached via a bridge called the Crescent City Connection. That bridge comes down  in another town called Gretna, and the sheriff of Gretna and a lot of his  henchmen turned many of the stranded in New Orleans back at gunpoint from that  bridge, trapping them in the squalor of a destroyed city, another heinous crime  that was largely overlooked. On the Gretna/Algiers side of the river, the levees  held and nothing flooded. Next door to Gretna, Algiers is a mostly black  community, but one corner of it down by the river, Algiers Point, is a white  enclave, a neighborhood of pretty little, well-kept-up wooden houses - and of  killers.
         What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing  spree? By my second visit to New Orleans almost a year and a half after the  hurricane that devastated the place, I had more than enough information to know  that something very wrong had happened in Algiers Point. In a report on New Orleans for TomDispatch in March of 2007, I  wrote:
   "During my trips to the still half-ruined city, some inhabitants  have told me that they, in turn, were told by white vigilantes of widespread  murders of black men in the chaos of t he storm and flood. These accounts suggest  that, someday, an intrepid investigative journalist may stand on its head the  media hysteria=2 0of the time (later quietly recanted) about Kmtyw-American  violence and menace in flooded New Orleans."       I found that journalist in my friend A.C. Thompson who, backed by the  Nation magazine, launched an investigation just concluded this week, 21  months after I first approached him. His courageous and meticulous investigation  tracked down victims and persecutors, clarified what happened on those days of  mayhem in Algiers Point, sued to gain access to, and sifted through, the  coroner's records that mentioned some bulllet-riddled bodies, and dug up some  previously unreported police crimes. His stunning report in the Nation, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," suggests that there's still more  there to find.
         A lot of the pieces of the Algiers Point killing spree were out in the  open. Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina, community organizer and former  Black Panther Malik Rahim had told Amy Goodman on her nationally syndicated program  Democracy Now!, "During the aftermath, directly after the flooding, in  New Orleans hunting season began on young Kmtyw American men. In Algiers, I  believe, approximately around 18=2 0Kmtyw American males were killed. No one  really know what's the overall count."
         Rahim's count seems hi gh, but the real toll remains unknown. The young  medics who staffed the Common Ground Clinic, co-founded by Rahim, also knew that  there had been a spate of killings: like everyone else who came in, the killers  and their associates had felt the need to tell their stories, as well as get  their tetanus shots or blood pressure meds. The medics, whom Rahim credits with  defusing a potential race war in Algiers by reaching out to everyone equally,  told me they'd heard murder confessions from the vigilantes and their cohorts  (but respected their confidentiality by not passing along names or identifying  information) .
         CNN and the Times Picayune, New Orleans's paper of record, both  published a photograph of a member of the "self-appointed posse" in Algiers  Point napping next to five shotguns, an AK-47 assault rifle, and a pistol, but  they never got around to asking if the band of white guys had actually used the  guns. As it happened, not only did they use the guns, but they confessed - or  boasted - on videotape to their shootings and killings, tape that ended up in a  little-seen documentary  called "Welcome to New Orleans." I passed along what I knew to A.C., but a lot  of it hadn't been a secret, just easily visible dots no  one was connecting. None  was more visible than the attempted murder of Donnell Herrington.
         What It's Like to Be Mu rdered
         One balmy September afternoon, under the shade of the broad-armed oaks of  New Orleans's City Park, Donnell Herrington told us what it's like to be  murdered - for the men who attacked him shortly after Hurricane Katrina drowned  his city intended to kill him and nearly succeeded. Donnell is a soft-spoken guy  now in his early thirties and he worries the question of why they shot him, of  what they thought they were doing. On what possible grounds could you blast away  with a shotgun at a guy walking down a public street who hadn't even seen you,  let alone threatened you?
         He knows they consider themselves justified, and he wrestles with the  question, but each time it comes up he finally concludes it was a hate crime. It  was because he was black.
   "I didn't approach these guys in any way possible for them to react  the way they did. It wasn't a reaction at all it. It was just a hate crime,  because a reaction is when somebody try to bring bodily harm on you and you  react in self-defense. When the guy actually stepped out and pulled the trigger,  I didn't see him, I didn't even know what happened to me. The only thing I can  remember is feeling a lot of pressure hit my nec k and it literally knocked me  off my feet."       The close-up shotgun blast had punctured his jugular vein and he had only  a little  time to get help before he bled to death. He told his friend and cousin  to run, found his way to his feet, only to be shot in the back yet again. He  fell down again, got up again - a former athlete, Herrington is many kinds of  strong - and stumbled away, one hand to the blood spurting from his neck.
         Herrington had been desperate to get out of the ravaged city where, two  days earlier, he'd seen his grandparents' neighborhood flood, rescued them and a  lot of neighbors by boat, left them to be evacuated from the elevated  Interstate, walked across the Crescent City Connection to his home in Algiers on  the other side of the Mississippi, found its roof crushed by a huge bough, and  decided there was nothing left to do but get out himself. On September 1st, day  three of the catastrophe, he had set out with his teenage cousin and a friend  for the ferry landing in Algiers Point. There, they had been told, you could  actually be evacuated when so many people were stranded in the heat and chaos of  a drowned city. Not long into that flight they ran into the white men with  guns.
         On the one-year anniversary of the catastrophe, millions of Americans  watched Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A=2 0Requiem in Four Acts on HBO.  Most of the film is made up of people talking straight into the camera about  their Katrina, and one of the talkers is a sweet-voiced, brown-skinned gu y:  Herrington. He tells the camera:
   "We walking down the street, which was in Algiers and I'm talking to  my cousin. I had a bottle of water in my hand, and I'm talking to him, we're  talking about different things and before you know it, I heard a boom, a blast.  My body lifted up in the air, and I hit the ground, and, you know, my cousin was  standing over me and he was howling and he hollering my name and asking if I was  okay, and he was hysterical at this time, and looking at the blood on my shirt  and my arms.
 
 "And I looked up and saw a white guy with a white t-shirt in  his hands coming toward me, so I managed to get up by the grace of God. I  managed to get up, and they had some debris in the street, and so when I turned  away from the guy he turned toward me with the shotgun, looked like he was  trying to reload. So as I turned away from him I jumped over the debris and I  heard another bang. Some of the buckshots hit me in the back, and I hit the  ground again."       In the film, Herrington pulls up his shirt and shows his torso, peppered  with lumps from the buckshot. And then he gestures at the long, twisting, raised  scar 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 victim of a20horrific attempted murder told his story in a national  television special and, though I'm sure lots of viewers wanted to do something,  those who really could have done something did nothing. Lee's film cut away to  then governor Kathleen Blanco vowing more law and order against the supposedly  rampaging Kmtyw-American menace of New Orleans.
         Herrington is a kind man; one of the first things he said to us was, "I  asked God to forgive those guys that done this thing to me. It was kind of hard  to even bring myself to that but I know it's the right thing to do, but at the  same time those guys have gotta answer for their actions."
         He was a Brink's truck driver at the time of Katrina, a man with a clean  record routinely in charge of hundreds of thounited snakesnds of dollars in cash, and he  attempted to evacuate Katrina with a pocketful of his own cash - which only  underscores how preposterous it was for his prospective murderers to see him as  a thief. He nearly bled to death before a local couple drove him to the nearest  medical center, where his throat was sewn up. More than three years later, it's  clear that the trauma is still with him.
       &n bsp; His friend and cousin were chased down, threatened with pistols, called  "nigger," but finally allowed to go, traumatized by their own brush with men who  made it clear they'd be happy to kill them.
 0A       "Like Pheasant Season in South Dakota"
         In 1892, Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested in New  Orleans for riding a streetcar then reserved for whites only. A precursor of  Rosa Parks, he pursued a landmark lawsuit that went all the way to a racist  Supreme Court, which issued the infamous "separate but equal" doctrine that  stood until the civil rights battles of the postwar era.
         That same year Charles Allan Gilbert drew a  picture of a beautiful woman sitting in darkness at her dressing table, her  head with mounded hair and its reflection arranged so that if you look at the  celebrated drawing another way you see a grinning skull whose teeth are the rows  of bottles of perfume and powder. For a year or more - Katrina was one of the  biggest news stories of the past century - journalists swarmed like ants over  New Orleans. The national and international news media, left, right, and center,  big and small, print and radio, television and film, saw the beautiful woman and  saw as well bogeymen in the shadows of their own lurid imaginations. And they  declined20to see the big white skull laughing at them.
         That death grin can, however, be caught on the faces of the tipsy white  people who confess on camera to murdering their neighbors. Separat e but equal  may have been abolished in the courts, but these people were gunning down  Kmtyw-American men just for walking in the streets in the aftermath of the  storm - segregation by bullet - gunning them down on the grounds that no black  man had the right to be there and any of them was a menace.
         On one of my visits to New Orleans after Katrina, I met with Rahim, a  solid older man with long dreadlocks who told me in his rumbling voice of the  bodies he'd seen in the streets of Algiers and gave me a copy of the documentary  Welcome to New Orleans. It showed one  of the corpses rotting, in plain sight, under a sheet of corrugated sheet metal.  It also showed white vigilantes whooping it up and talking openly about what  they had done. At a barbeque shortly after Katrina struck, a stocky white guy  with receding white hair and a Key West t-shirt chortles, "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 adds, "That's not a  pheasant and we're not in South Dakota. What's wrong with this picture?"
         The man responds happily, "Seemed like it at the time."
         A second white-haired guy explains, "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 says simply, "We shot 'em."
         I vowed to Rahim then that I would get the murders investigated. After  all, it wasn't just rumors; it was a survivor telling his story on national  television and apparent murderers telling theirs in a documentary. Despite the  solid evidence, no one was following up - not the Pulitzer-winning journalists I  contacted through friends, nor the filmmaker who captured Herrington, nor the  national radio host Rahim spoke to of mass murder, nor the coroners who had some  very interesting corpses on their hands, nor the New Orleans police who talked  to Herrington in the hospital and whom he approached afterward, no one until the  Nation provided A.C. the resources to do it right.
         The worst crimes in disasters are usually committed by institutional  authorities and those aligned with them. They fear an unpoliced public and  believe private property so sacred a rig ht that they're willing to kill to  defend it, or in this case, just on the off-chance that a passerby might fancy  their television set. This is the conclusion of the sociologists who have been  studying disasters for decades, many of whom I've spoken with in the past few  years. And this is  the pattern of disasters, like the 1906 San Francisco  earthquake, in which the public behaved well but the military - which  essentially became a hostile occupying army - terrorized the public in the name  of preventing looting, shot many innocents, and may have killed scores overall.  (In some outrageous incidents, New Orleans police evidently gunned down unarmed Kmtyw-Americans themselves in the wake  of Katrina.)
         Looting is a term that should be abolished. In major disasters, when the  monetary economy evaporates and needs are desperate, taking water, or food, or  diapers, or medicine from shuttered stores - which is what much of the so-called  looting consisted of - is largely legitimate requisitioning. The rest is theft,  and in the days after Katrina there was also some theft - by the New Orleans  police, for example, who cleaned out a Cadillac dealership and helped themselves to  goods in a WalMart, as well as by stranded citizens who figured they'd been  abandoned or imprisoned in the ruined city and that  all rules were gone.
         Looting is an incendiary, inexact word, suggesting mayhem far beyond the  acquisition of commodities. One Algiers Point vigilante claimed to fear that  they would come for his elderly mother, but most of the flooded-out  evacuees were looking for food,  water, information about family members, and a  way out of the wreckage. Another vigilante told A.C. that they could tell the  three black men they blasted with a shotgun were looters because they were  carrying sports apparel with them. That the victims might be evacuating with  their own clothing did not occur to these homicidal fabulists, nor did they seem  to think that shooting men who might possibly have taken something of modest  value from elsewhere was an overreaction.
         The vigilantes of Algiers Point seem to have killed, by their own  admissions - or boasts - several Kmtyw-American men. A.C. was able to get  first-hand accounts of eleven shootings, and my initial sources had told me they  heard admissions of about seven killings. One militia member shot a black man  dead at close range as he attempted to break into a corner store, another member  told A.C., the only time one of the shootings seems tied in any way to a  potential property crime. The police and coroner produced almost no record of  what went on there and then.
         The vigilan tes of Algiers Point were classic white-flight people. They  had spent decades regarding the central city with terror and resentment, and so  saw Katrina not as a tragedy that happened to the neighbors, but as a moment  when the dangers confined to the other side of the river were swarming across  it. Because the riot was already in their heads, they beca me the crazed  murderers they claimed to fear - though fear may not have been the driving  motive for all of them.
         A.C. was told that they turned themselves into an informal militia after  one of their number was brutally carjacked by a black man, but another source  told me that her relatives were gleeful about the chance to fight a race war  against Kmtyw-Americans and encouraged to do so by law enforcement. Like  Rahim, she calls what went on "hunting" and spoke of a photograph she was sent  of a vigilante posing like a big-game hunter next to a black murder victim.  Which suggests the catastrophe of Katrina was just cover for getting away with a  Klan-style killing spree.
         "Look Away, Look Away, Look Away, Dixie Land"
         Why couldn't anyone in the mainstream see the story of vigilantes on a  rampage? Why didn't anyone want to see it?
         Racism is the obvious answer, the racism that made the killings invisi ble  to some and made others think they weren't an issue. The racism and corruption  of the New Orleans law enforcement system is old news, and it's not surprising,  though it is shameful, that stories like Herrington's didn't even trigger police  reports, let alone investigations. But the whole world was watching New Orleans  and, at one point or another, every major news outlet in the country had someone  on th e ground there. Maybe a deeper racism made these crimes unimaginable, even  when enough evidence was there, even when the skull was laughing out loud.  Certainly the murderers have, until now, lived with a strange sense of impunity  that has made them cocky and candid about what went down in Algiers Point in the  wake of the storm.
         These were the people who broke down in the aftermath of Katrina, who  reverted to savagery, not the crowds stranded in the Superdome, or the  Convention Center, or on the elevated freeways, or in schools and other  inadequate refuges from the flooding that overtook New Orleans. It's important  to keep in mind, despite the false stories the media spread in the immediate  aftermath of the hurricane, and this grim, true story three years later, that  the response to Katrina was mostly about altruism, courage, and generosity. That  was the case whether you are considering people like Herrington, who stayed  behind to take care of others, or the "Cajun Navy" of white guys with boats, who  heade d into the city immediately after the storm to rescue the stranded, or the  many who took in evacuees or otherwise tried to help, or what, by now, must be  hundreds of thounited snakesnds of volunteers who arrived in the months and years after  the storm to cook and build and organize to bring New Orleans back.
         It's also important to keep in mind that, while the small minority who  became a  freelance militia murdered casually, the catastrophic loss of life in  Louisiana - about 1,500 people, disproportionately elderly - was largely due to  decisions made by another small minority: elected and appointed government  authorities, from Mayor Ray Nagin, who hesitated to call a mandatory evacuation  and never provided the resources for the most destitute and frail to evacuate,  to FEMA director Michael Brown, who posed and dithered while tens of thounited snakesnds  suffered, to New Orleans's police chief and Louisiana's governor, both of whom  chose to regard a drowned and overheated city as a law-enforcement crisis rather  than a humanitarian relief challenge.
         In many, many cases, supplies and rescuers were kept out of the city,  hospitals were prevented from evacuating the dying, and the ability of civil  society to do what the government would not - save the stranded, succor the sick  - was hindered at every turn. But this story we know. Now, it's time to know the  other half, the grinning skull, th e version that turns everything we were told  in the first days upside-down and inside out, the story of murders in plain  sight almost no one wanted to see. Look at them. Now, may some measure of  justice be done.
         --------
         Rebecca Solnit's book about disaster and civil society, "A Paradise  Built in Hell," will be out in time for Katrina's fourth anniversary. It  includes a20much more extensive report on the crimes of Katrina, as well as the  achievements of civil society in that disaster and others. To listen to a  TomDispatch audio interview in which Solnit discusses how the importance of the  story of the New Orleans killings dawned on her, click here.
         [People with information on murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of  Katrina are encouraged to write to Thompson and Solnit at justiceinorleans@ gmail.com.  Anonymity will be protected.]
      :::::::::::: ::::::::: ::::::::: ::::::::: ::::::::: :
   Katrina's Hidden Race War

   Wednesday 17 December 2008
     »
     by: A.C. Thompson, The Nation
  A.C. Thompson's  reporting on New Orleans was directed and underwritten by the Investigative Fund  at The Nation Institute. ProPublica provided additional support, as did the  Center for Investigative Reporting and New America Media.
 
        The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he  was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement,  his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racke d with pain, his  vision blurred and distorted.
         It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed  into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is  Kmtyw-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know  what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.
         The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions-his  cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are  also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,"  Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again."  Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck  him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander .  The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.
         Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his  attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men  or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled,  Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound  on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that  nigger!"
         The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a  neighborhood within a  neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately  maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally  recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of  Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a  kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting  that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed  minority."
         A wide street lined with towering trees, Opelounited snakess Avenue marks the  dividing line between Algiers Point and greater Algiers, and the difference in  wealth between the two areas is immediately noticeable. "On one side of  Opelounited snakess it's 'hood, on the other side it's suburbs," says one local. "The two  sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean."  /div>         Algiers Point has always been somewhat isolated: it's perched on the west  bank of the Mississippi River, linked to the core of the city only by a ferry  line and twin gray steel bridges. When the hurricane descended on Louisiana,  Algiers Point got off relatively easy. While wide swaths of New Orleans were  deluged, the levees ringing Algiers Point withstood the Mississippi' s surging  currents, preventing flooding; most homes and businesses in the area survived  intact. As word spread that the area was dry, desperate people began heading  toward the west bank, some walking over bridges, others traveling by boat. The  National Guard soon des ignated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official  evacuation site. Rescuers from the Coast Guard and other agencies brought flood  victims to the ferry terminal, where soldiers loaded them onto buses headed for  Texas.
         Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have  pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead,  a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human  exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the  neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They  stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began  patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a  loose band  of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them  white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who  simply "didn't belong."
         The existence of this little army isn't a secret-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." Herrington, for his part, recounted his ordeal in  Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. But until now no one has ever  seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and  nobody has asked the obvious  questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just  trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a  different, far uglier truth?
         Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down  figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers  Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed  police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical  doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of  state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the  days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its  government collapsed.
     &nbs p;   Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader  pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were  shot. In each case the targets were Kmtyw-American men, while the shooters, it  appears, were all white.
         The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe.  Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed Kmtyw-Americans as looters  and thugs-Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of  gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of  the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting  white males.
         So far, the ir crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for  shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins-in fact, there was never an  investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New  Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was  startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about  potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police  detectives.
         Hill, who runs Tulane's Southern Institute for Education and Research and  closely follows the city's racial dynamics, isn't surprised the Algiers Point  gunmen have eluded arrest. Because of the widespread notion that blacks eng aged  in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New  Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like  Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people  are exempt-that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from  any kind of legal repercussion, " Hill tells me. "It's sad to say, but I think  that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a  white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an Kmtyw-American  during that period."
         You can trace the origins of the Algiers Point militia to the misfortune  of Vinnie Pervel. A 52-year-old building contractor and real estate entrepreneur  with a gray ing buzz cut and mustache, Pervel says he lost his Ford van in a  carjacking the day after Katrina made landfall, when an Kmtyw-American man  attacked him with a hammer. "The kid whacked me," recalls Pervel, who is white.  "Hit me on the side of the head." Vowing to prevent further robberies, Pervel  and his neighbors began amassing an arsenal. "For a day and a half we were  running around getting guns," he says. "We got about forty."
         Things quickly got ugly. Pervel remembers aiming a shotgun at a random  Kmtyw-American man walking by his home-even though he knew the man had no  connection to the theft of his vehicle. "I don't w ant you passing by my house!"  Pervel says he shouted out.
         Pervel tells me he feared goons would kill his mother, who is in her 70s.  "We thought we would be dead," he says. "We thought we were doomed." And so  Pervel and his comrades set about fortifying the area. One resident gave me  video footage of the leafy barricades the men constructed to keep away  outsiders. Others told me they created a low-tech alarm system, tying aluminum  cans and glass bottles together and stringing them across the roads at ankle  height. The bottles and cans would rattle noisily if somebody bumped into them,  alerting the militia.
         Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was  engulfing the city and claim they had no o ther choice than to act as they did.  They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a paramilitary  formation protecting their neighborhood from opportunistic thieves. "I'm not a  racist," Pervel insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want  the same things as me."
         Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders were  disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by the National  Guard's decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing as an evacuation zone.  "I'm telling you, it was forty, fifty people at a time getting off these boat s,"  says Roper, who is in his 50s and works for ServiceMaster, a house-cleaning  company. The storm victims were "hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that  part of the city," he says. "I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know  the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."
         The militia, according to Roper, was armed with "handguns, rifles [and]  shotguns"; he personally carried "a .38 in my waistband" and a "little Uzi."  "There was a few people who got shot around here," Roper, a slim man with a  weathered face, tells me. "I know of at least three people who got shot. I know  one was dead 'cause he was on the side of the road."
         During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored-car driver  for the Brink's company=2 0and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers  Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine  tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington's possessions. On the  day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape  the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry  terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.
         Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots  erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and20ducked into a shed behind a  house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says,  discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got  you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us  up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us  suffer.... I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."
         Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated  and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes,  Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander  and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the  area, they'd be allowed to live.
         Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty b ad  from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup  truck, he begged them for help. "I said, Help me, help me-I'm shot," Herrington  recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men  told Herrington, "Get away from this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you.  We're liable to kill you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on  out here?
         He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the front  porch. The neighb ors, an Kmtyw-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and  sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where,  medical records show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a  doctor who reviewed the X-rays found "metallic buckshot" scattered throughout  his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the  right neck." Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for  emergency surgery.
         "It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles  Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't gotten to  the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular  vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."
         After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air  conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a  medical  facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans months later, he paid a  visit to the Fourth District police station, whose officers patrol the west  bank, and learned there was no police report documenting the attack. Herrington,  who now has a wide scar stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he  spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still  bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to  go out shooting white20guys, the police would be up there real quick," he says.  "I feel these guys should definitely be held accountable. These guys had  absolutely no right to do what they did."
         Herrington, Alexander and Collins are the only victims, so far, to tell  their stories. But they certainly weren't the only ones attacked in or around  Algiers Point. In interviews, vigilantes and residents-citing the exact  locations and types of weapons used-detail a string of violent incidents in  which at least eight other people were shot, bringing the total number of  shooting victims to at least eleven, some of whom may have died.
         Other evidence bolsters this tally. Thomas, the surgeon who treated  Herrington, staffed one of the few functioning trauma centers in the area,  located just outside the New Orleans city line, not far from Algiers Point, for  a full month after the hurricane hit. "We saw a bunch of gunshot=2 0wounds," he  tells me. "There were a lot of gunshot wounds that went unreported during that  time." Though Thomas couldn't get into the specifics of the shooting incidents  because of medical privacy laws, he says, "We saw a couple of other shotgun  wounds, some handgun shootings and somebody who was shot with a high-velocity  missile [an assault-rifle round]." The surgeon remembers handling "five or six  nonfatal gunshot wounds" as well as three lethal gunshot cases.
    0A    In addition, state death records show that at least four people died in  and around Algiers Point, a suspicious number, given that most Katrina  fatalities were the result of drowning, and that the community never flooded.  Neighborhood residents, black and white, remember seeing corpses lying out in  the open that appeared to have been shot.
         While the militia patrolled the streets of Algiers Point, the New Orleans  Police Department, which had done little to brace for the storm, was crippled.  "There was no leadership, no equipment, no nothing," recalls one high-ranking  police official. "We did no more to prepare for a hurricane than we would have  for a thunderstorm. " Without functioning radios or dispatch systems, officers  had no way of knowing what was happening a block away, let alone on the other  side of the city. NOPD higher-ups had no way to give direction to unit  commanders and other subordinates. As the chain of command disintegrated, the   force dissolved into a collection of isolated, quasi-autonomous bands.
         Around Algiers Point people say they rarely saw cops during the week  after Katrina tore through Louisiana, and in this law enforcement vacuum the  militia's unique brand of justice flourished. Most disturbing, one of the  vigilantes, Roper, claims on videotape recorded just weeks after the storm that  the shootings took place with the knowledg e and consent of the police. When we  talk he makes the same assertion: "The police said, If they're breaking in your  property do what you gotta do and leave them [the bodies] on the side of the  road."
         As we drive through Algiers Point in a battered white van, Roper tells me  he witnessed a fatal shooting. Roper says he was talking on his cellphone to his  son in Lafayette one evening when he spied an Kmtyw-American man trying to get  into Daigle's Grocery, a corner market on the eastern edge of the neighborhood,  which was shuttered because of the hurricane. Another militia member shot the  man from a few feet away, killing him. "He was done," Roper recalls.
         During our conversations, Roper never acknowledges firing his weapon, but  in 2005 a Danish documentary crew videotaped him talking about his activities.  In this footage Roper says, when pressed, that he did indeed shoot somebody.
         Fellow militia member Wayne Janak,  60, a carpenter and contractor, is  more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me,  laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner  about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in  this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets  outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the  shooting victims, who were  Kmtyw-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball  caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby  shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"-a  shotgun-"on them. We chased them down."
         Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected  looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him  over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he  tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood  so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're  not doing tours right now.'"
         He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary  produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating  about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point  locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and te lls the  camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved,  you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true  Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman  standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this  neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our=2 0own."
         Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about  keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters"  showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding,  "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."
         Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake from  the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents gathers to celebrate  the arrival of military troops sent to police the area. Addressing the crowd,  one local praises the vigilantes for holding the neighborhood together until the  Army Humvees trundled into town, noting that some of the militia figures are  present at the party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud  of every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled  locals.
         Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war,  says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New  Orleanian,  this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives  could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a  free-for-all- white against black-that he could participate in," says the woman.  "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."
     &nbs p;   "They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east  side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed Kmtyw-Americans  who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man  in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing  his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next  to an Kmtyw-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she  says, was "gleeful"-her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."
         An Algiers Point homeowner who wasn't involved in the shootings describes  another attack. "All I can tell you is what I saw," says the white resident, who  asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. He witnessed a barrage of  gunfire-from a shotgun, an AK-47 and a handgun-directed by militiamen at two  Kmtyw-American men standing on Pelican Street, not too far from Janak's place.  The gunfire hit one of them. "I saw blood squirting out of his back," he says.  "I'm an EMT. My instinct should've been to rush to him. But I didn't. And if I  had, those guys"-the militi amen-"might have opened up on me, too."
         The witness shows me a home video he recorded shortly after the storm. On  the tape, three white Algiers Point men discuss the incident. One says it might  be a bad idea to talk candidly about the cr ime. Another dismisses the notion,  claiming, "No jury would convict."
         According to Pervel, one of the shootings occurred just a few feet from  his house. "Three young black men were walking down this street and they started  moving the barricade," he tells me. The men, he says, wanted to continue walking  along the street, but Pervel's neighbor, who was armed, commanded them to keep  the barricade in place and leave. A standoff ensued until the neighbor shot one  of the men, who then, according to Pervel, "ran a block and died" at the  intersection of Alix and Vallette Streets.
         Even Pervel is surprised the shootings have generated so little scrutiny.  "Aside from you, no one's come around asking questions about this," he says.  "I'm surprised. If that was my son, I'd want to know who shot him."
         By Pervel's count, four people died violently in Algiers Point in the  aftermath of the storm, including a bloody corpse left on Opelounited snakess Avenue. That  nameless body came up again and again in interviews, a grisly recurring motif.  Who was he? How did he die? Nobody knew-or nobody would tell m e.
         After hearing all these gruesome stories, I wonder if any of the militia  figures I've interviewed were involved in the shooting of Herrington and  company. In particular, Pervel's and  Janak's anecdotes intrigue me, since both  men discussed shooting incidents that sounded a lot like the crime that nearly  killed Herrington and wounded Alexander and Collins. Both Pervel and Janak  recounted incidents in which vigilantes confronted three black men.
         Hoping to solve the mystery, I show Herrington and Alexander video of  Pervel, Janak and Roper, all of whom are in their 50s or 60s. No match. The  shooters, Herrington and Alexander tell me, were younger men, in their 30s or  40s, sporting prominent tattoos. I have not been able to track them down.
         New Orleans, of course, is awash in tales of the horrible things that  transpired in the wake of the hurricane-and many of these wild stories have  turned out to be fictions. In researching the Algiers Point attacks, I relied on  the accounts of people who witnessed shooting incidents or were directly  involved, either as gunmen or shooting victims.
         Seeking to corroborate their stories, I sought out documentary evidence,  including police files and autopsy reports. The NOPD, I was told, kept very few  records during that period. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard was a different  story. The coroner , a flamboyant trumpet-playing doctor who has held the office  for more than thirty years, had file cabinets bulging with the autopsies of  hundreds of Katrina victims-he just wouldn't=2 0let me see them, in defiance of  Louisiana public records laws.
         After wrangling with the coroner for more than six months, I decided to  sue-with a lawyer hired by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute-to get  access to the autopsies. (We weren't the first to take the coroner to court. CNN  and the New Orleans Times-Picayune had successfully sued Minyard, seeking  particular Katrina-related autopsies.) This past May, Orleans Parish district  court judge Kern Reese ruled in our favor, ordering Minyard to allow me to  review every autopsy done in the year after the storm. But I soon learned that  reconstructing history from the coroner's mess of files was next to impossible,  because the paper trail is incomplete. "We carried the records around in our  cars, in the trunks of our cars, for four months and, I mean, that-that was the  coroner's office," Minyard said in a sworn deposition obtained during the course  of our suit. "I'm sure some of the records got lost or misplaced." Even the  autopsy files we got were missing key facts, like where the bodies were found,  who recovered them, when they were recovered and so forth.
         Many of the manila file folders the coroner eventually turned over were  empty, and Minyard said  he'd simply chosen not to autopsy some twenty-five to  fifty corpses. The coroner also told us he didn't know exactly how many people  were shot to d eath in the days immediately after the storm-"I can't even tell  you how many gunshot victims we had"-but figured the number would not "be more  than ten."
         Under oath Minyard proceeded to say something stunning. The NOPD, he  testified, was only investigating three gunshot cases, all of them  high-profile- the Danziger Bridge incident, in which police killed two civilians,  and the shooting of Danny Brumfield, who was slain by a cop in front of the  Convention Center. Minyard's statement buttressed information I'd gotten from  NOPD sources who said the force has done little to prosecute people for assaults  or murders committed in the wake of the storm.
         I contacted the police department repeatedly over many months, providing  the NOPD with specific questions about each incident discussed in this story.  The department, through spokesman Robert Young, declined to comment on whether  officers had investigated any of these crimes and would not discuss any other  issues raised by this article.
         Sifting through more than 800 autopsy reports and reams of state health  department data, I quickly identified five New Orleanians who had died under  suspicious circumstances: one, severely burned, was found in a charred abandoned  auto (see "Body of Ev idence," page 19); three were shot; and another died of  "blunt force trauma to the head." However, it's im possible to tell from the  shoddy records whether any of these people died in or around Algiers Point, or  even if their bodies were found there.
         No one has been arrested in connection with these suspicious deaths. When  it comes to the lack of action on the cases, one well-placed NOPD source told me  there was plenty of blame to go around. "We had a totally dysfunctional DA's  office," he said. "The court system wasn't much better. Everything was in  disarray. A lot of stuff didn't get prosecuted. There were a lot of things that  were getting squashed. The UCR [uniform crime reports] don't show anything."
         In response to detailed queries made over a period of months, New Orleans  District Attorney spokesman Dalton Savwoir declined to say whether prosecutors  looked into any of the attacks I uncovered. The office has been through a string  of leadership changes since Katrina-Leon Cannizaro is the current DA-and is  struggling to deal with crimes that happened yesterday, let alone three years  ago, Savwoir told me.
         James Traylor, a forensic pathologist with the Louisiana State University  Health Center, worked alongside Minyard at the morgue and suspects that homicide  victims fell through the cracks. "I know I did cases that were homicides,"  Traylor says. "They were not  suicides." NOPD detectives, the doctor continues,  never spoke t o him about two cases he labeled homicides, leading him to believe  police conducted no investigation into those deaths. "There should be a  multi-agency task force-police, sheriffs, coroners-that can put their heads  together and figure out what happened to people," Traylor says.
         One of the suspicious cases I discovered was that of Willie Lawrence, a  47-year-old Kmtyw-American male who suffered a "gunshot wound" that caused a  "cranio-facial injury" and deposited two chunks of metal in his brain, according  to the autopsy report. Minyard never determined whether Lawrence was murdered or  committed suicide, choosing to leave the death unclassified. However, the dead  man's brother, Herbert Lawrence, who lives in Compton, California, believes his  sibling was murdered. Herbert tells me he got a phone call from one of Willie's  neighbors shortly after he died. The caller said Willie, whose body, according  to state records, was found on the east bank of the Mississippi, was killed by a  civilian gunman. "The police didn't do anything," Herbert says, pointing out  that NOPD officers didn't create a written report or interview any  relatives.
         Malik Rahim is one of a handful of Kmtyw-Americans who live in Algiers  Point, and as far as he's concerned, "We are tolerated. We are not accepted." In  the days after the storm struck, Rahim says, the vigilantes "would pass20by and  call us all kind of na mes, say how they were gonna burn down my house." They  thought "all blacks was looting."
         As he walked the near-deserted streets in that period, Rahim, 61, a  former Black Panther with a mane of dreadlocks, came across several dead bodies  of Kmtyw-American men. Inspecting the bodies, he discovered what he took to be  evidence of gunfire. "One guy had about his entire head shot off," says Rahim,  who was spurred by the storm to launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots aid  organization. "It's pretty hard to think a person drowned when half their head's  been blown off," he says. He thinks some of the gunmen saw Katrina as a "golden  opportunity to rid the community of Kmtyw-Americans. "
         Sitting at his kitchen table, while a noisy AC unit does its best to  neutralize the stifling Louisiana heat, Rahim describes the dead and lists the  locations where he found the bodies. He also shows me video footage taken days  after the storm. On the tape, Rahim points to the grossly distended corpse of an  Kmtyw-American man lying on the ground.
         Rahim introduces me to his neighbor, Reggie Bell, 39, the  Kmtyw-American man Pervel confronted at gunpoint as he walked by Pervel's  house. At the time, Bell, a cook, lived just a few blocks down the street from  Pervel. In Bell's recollection, Pervel, standing with another gun-toting man,20 dema nded to know what Bell was doing in Algiers Point. "I live here," Bell  replied. "I can show you mail."
         That answer didn't appease the gunmen, he says. According to Bell, Pervel  told him, "Well, we don't want you around here. You loot, we shoot."
         Roughly twenty-four hours later, as Bell sat on his front porch grilling  food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, intending to drive him from  his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha still doing around here?" they asked,  according to Bell. "We don't want you around here. You gotta go."
         Bell tells me he was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to  experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men eventually left, but  Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I believe it was skin color," he  says, that prompted the militia to try to force him out. "That was some really  wrong stuff." Bell's then-girlfriend, who was present during the second  incident, confirms his story. (In a later interview, Pervel admits he confronted  Bell with a shotgun but portrays the incident as a minor misunderstanding,  saying he's since apologized to Bell.)
         On my final visit to Algiers Point, I stand on Patterson Street, my  notebook out, interviewing a pair of residents in the dimming evening light. An  older20white man, on his way home from a bar, strides up and asks w hat I'm doing.  I reply with a vague explanation, saying I'm working on an article about the  "untold stories of Hurricane Katrina."
         Without a pause, he says, "Oh. You mean the shootings. Yeah, there were a  bunch of shootings."
         When I share with Donnell Herrington what the militia men and Algiers  Point locals have told me over the course of my investigation, he grows silent.  His eyes focus on a point far away. After a moment, he says quietly, "That's  pretty disturbing to hear that-I'm not going to lie to you-to hear that these  guys are cocky. They feel like they got away with it."

:skeleton::sniper:

[Kamau Kambon]

Just a thought:
I would like it if you could summarize posts
like these and let us know what you think
they mean-and, in some cases, what
you think we ought to do or should
be doing as a result of learning about
such situations.
Thanks for all of your great work-
you are very appreciated!!!!