New Orleans residents get out of Gustav’s way

BECKY BOHRER (AP)

- Hurricane Gustav charged across the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday as residents fled New Orleans and the National Guard prepared to patrol evacuated neighborhoods in a city still recovering three years after Katrina.

Gustav dropped from a Category 4 to a Category 3 storm overnight, but forecasters warned it could gain strength from the gulf’s warm waters before making landfall as early as Monday.

Long before Mayor Ray Nagin’s mandatory evacuation order took effect Sunday morning for the city’s vulnerable West Bank, residents were already streaming out of New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast. Bumper-to-bumper traffic was reported in nearly every direction out of New Orleans, and on Bourbon Street, where the party seemingly never ends, only stragglers toting luggage were sporadically seen on the sidewalks.

Still, there were a few holdouts.

“You’d be a moron” not to be worried about the storm, Inez Douglas said at Johnny White’s Sports Bar & Grill.

But while she was keeping an eye on the storm, she wasn’t going anywhere.

Gustav crossed western Cuba on Saturday and has already killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean. It picked up speed upon reaching the gulf and was moving northwest at 17 mph with winds of 120 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center’s 11 a.m. EDT update. Hurricane-force winds extended 50 miles from the storm’s center.

Its center was about 325 miles southeast of the Mississippi River’s mouth. The storm could bring a storm surge of up to 20 feet to the coast and rainfall totals of up to 15 inches.

A hurricane warning for over 500 miles of Gulf coast from Cameron, La., near the Texas border to the Alabama-Florida state line, meaning hurricane conditions are expected there within 24 hours. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a mandatory evacuation order Sunday for some coastal areas of Mobile and Baldwin counties.

In New Orleans, Nagin used stark language to urge residents to get out of the city, calling Gustav the “the mother of all storms.”

“This is the real deal, not a test,” Nagin said as he issued the evacuation order Saturday night. “For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life.”

Forecasters were slightly less dire in their predictions, saying the storm should make landfall somewhere between western Mississippi and East Texas, where evacuations were also under way. It’s too early to know whether New Orleans will take another direct hit, they said, but city officials weren’t taking any chances.

The mandatory evacuation of the West Bank, where levee improvements remain incomplete, began at 8 a.m. local time, with the east bank to follow later Sunday. It’s the first test of a revamped evacuation plan designed to eliminate the chaos, looting and death that followed Katrina.

Residents of suburban Jefferson Parish, swollen by residents who did not return to New Orleans after Katrina, were also ordered to leave in the first-ever mandatory evacuation of the entire parish.

The city will not offer emergency services to those who choose stay behind, Nagin said, and there will be no “last resort” shelter as there was during Katrina, when thousands suffered inside a squalid Superdome. The city said in a news release that those not on their property after the mandatory evacuation started would be subject to arrest.

Many residents didn’t need to be ordered, with an estimated 1 million people fleeing the Gulf Coast on Saturday by bus, train, plane and car. They clogged roadways, emptied gas stations of fuel and jammed phone circuits.

At the city’s main transit terminal, a line snaked through the parking lot for more than a mile as residents with no other means of getting out waited to board buses bound for shelters in north Louisiana and beyond.

“I’m not staying for ‘em any more,” said Lester Harris, a 53-year-old electrician waiting at a bus pickup point in the Lower 9th Ward. He was rescued from his house by boat after Katrina. “I got caught in the water and spent two days on my roof. No food, no water. It was pretty bad.”

On Sunday, the lines were a much shorter.

“I’ll be glad when it’s over and I hope it doesn’t mess up the city too bad,” said Johnny Clanton, 59, waiting with a bag, hoping to catch up with a friend who also planned to leave the city.

The White House said President Bush’s plans to attend the Republican National Convention on Monday were on hold because of worries about Gustav. Bush had been scheduled to speak late Monday night in St. Paul, Minn.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff planned to travel to Louisiana on Sunday to observe preparations. And likely GOP presidential nominee John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, were traveling to Mississippi.

Many residents said the early stage of the evacuation was more orderly than Katrina, although a plan to electronically log and track evacuees with a bar code system failed and was aborted to keep the buses moving. Officials said information on evacuees would be taken when they reached their destinations.

Some began arriving Saturday in Arkansas, where the National Guard prepared to shelter thousands for weeks. At least 15,000 people sought refuge in the inland state in 2005, following Katrina and Rita.

Meanwhile, as many as 500 critical-care patients were being airlifted from hospitals along the Gulf Coast to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a spokesman said. The patients were being taken to about 20 hospitals around North Texas.

Traffic late Saturday night was stop and go on Interstate 10, heading west into Houston from the Louisiana border, as Texas prepared to house up to 45,000 evacuees, even though that state’s eastern stretches were within the range of where Gustav could make landfall.

In Beaumont, not far from where Hurricane Rita roared ashore as a Category 3 in 2005, residents were boarding up homes and leaving. In neighboring Orange County, officials were inundated “by thousands” of people calling to register for evacuation assistance, a county spokeswoman said.

Katrina toll: Dead weren’t disproportionately poor, black

John Simerman, Dwight Ott and Ted Mellnik, Knight Ridder Newspapers

- Four months after Hurricane Katrina, analyses of data suggest that some widely reported assumptions about the storm’s victims were incorrect.

For example, a comparison of locations where 874 bodies were recovered with U.S. Census tract data indicates that the victims weren’t disproportionately poor.

Another database, compiled by Knight Ridder of 486 Katrina victims from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, suggests they also weren’t disproportionately African American.

Both sets of data are incomplete; Louisiana state officials have released no comprehensive list of the dead. Still, they provide the most comprehensive information available to date about who paid the ultimate price in the storm.

Click here for more…

Louisiana Man Sentenced for Nooses Targeting ‘Jena Six’ Marchers

- Grace Chung Becker, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Donald W. Washington, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, today announced that Jeremiah Munsen, 19, of Pineville, La., was sentenced to four months in prison for his role in using nooses to threaten marchers who participated in the “Jena Six” civil rights rally. In addition to the four-month prison term, Munsen received one year of supervised release and 125 hours of community service.

On Sept. 20, 2007, in an incident that garnered national media attention, Munsen and another person allegedly attached the nooses to the back of a pickup truck and repeatedly drove slowly and menacingly past a large group of African American individuals who had gathered at a bus depot in Alexandria, La., after attending the civil rights rally in Jena.

The defendant pleaded guilty April 25, 2008, admitting that he displayed two large, life-sized nooses from the back of his pickup truck with the intent to frighten and intimidate the demonstrators. He and the other person with him hung the nooses in a manner so as to be clearly visible to the gathered demonstrators, and Munsen then drove past the group two or three times while the other person glared out the window at the demonstrators. Munsen further admitted that he and the other person had previously discussed the Ku Klux Klan and how they thought the Klan would have responded to the rally in Jena, and he acknowledged that the Jena Six rally followed extensive public discussion regarding, among other things, the history of racial lynchings in the United States and the perception that a noose, when displayed in a racial context, constituted a symbol of racial violence.

“The defendant used a threatening and offensive tactic to intimidate peaceful civil rights marchers who were in Louisiana to rally against racial intolerance,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Grace Chung Becker. “The Civil Rights Division will continue to vigorously pursue racially motivated threats that violate federal law.”

“The defendant committed a federal hate crime by using a powerful symbol of hate to intimidate a group of interstate travelers because of their race,” said U.S Attorney Donald W. Washington. “It is a violation of federal law to intimidate, oppress, injure or threaten people because of their race and because those people are exercising and enjoying rights guaranteed and protected by the laws and Constitution of the United States. Our civil rights laws protect the civil rights of all Americans, and they emphasize the reality that we are all members of one particular race — the human race.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Alexandria Police Department investigated this case, which was prosecuted jointly by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Former La. police officer indicted in Taser death

MICHAEL KUNZELMAN (AP)

- A former police officer accused of repeatedly jolting a handcuffed man with a Taser before he died was indicted on a manslaughter charge Wednesday by a grand jury in central Louisiana.

The Winn Parish grand jury also indicted former Winnfield police officer Scott Nugent on a charge of malfeasance in office stemming from the Jan. 17 death of Baron Pikes, 21.

Pikes was shocked nine times with a 50,000-volt Taser as he was arrested on a drug possession warrant in January, authorities said. Winn Parish District Attorney Chris Nevils said Nugent broke the law when he “unnecessarily” used the Taser on Pikes multiple times and failed to get him medical attention “when it was apparent he needed it.”

“In a civilized society, abuse by those who are given great authority cannot be tolerated,” Nevils said in a statement.

Nugent, who is scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 21, faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted of the manslaughter charge. The malfeasance charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Nugent was fired but is appealing his dismissal. Phillip Terrell, Nugent’s lawyer, has said his client followed department protocols and didn’t use excessive force.

After the panel’s decision, Terrell said the grand jury has only heard prosecutors’ side of the story. “It now comes time for us to be able to present our side of the story,” he said.

Since the grand jury’s decision Wednesday, Terrell said Nugent had surrendered to sheriff’s deputies and was booked on the two charges. He was released from jail after posting $45,000 bond, Terrell said.

The parish’s coroner, Dr. Randolph Williams, ruled in June that Pikes’ death was a homicide. Williams said he consulted with two other coroners, and both agreed that Pikes died of cardiac arrest caused by the Taser shocks.

Terrell disagreed with the coroner’s conclusion but said he hasn’t pinpointed the cause of death. “We haven’t been allowed to see the autopsies yet,” he said.

Carol Powell Lexing, a lawyer for Pikes’ family, called the indictments “just one step toward justice.”

Anger over Pikes’ death has threatened to inflame racial tensions in Winnfield, where the population of roughly 5,800 is evenly divided between black and white residents. Pikes was black; Nugent is white.

The episode also has drawn comparisons to the so-called “Jena Six” case, which thrust a neighboring city in the national spotlight.

Winnfield is about 40 miles northwest of Jena, the site of a massive civil rights protest last year. Thousands of demonstrators gathered there to protest criminal cases against six black teenagers charged with beating a white student at a high school.

State Sen. Gerald Long, a Winnfield native and third cousin of legendary former Gov. Huey Long, expressed confidence that community leaders won’t allow the fallout from Pikes’ death to divide the city along racial lines.

“We pray that it will not become a spectacle comparable to what took place in Jena,” Long said. “Is it an explosive situation that can create a backlash? Sure, but that’s not what I see.”

Lawrence Spikes, a minister who ran unsuccessful campaigns for mayor of Winnfield in 2002 and 2006, said Pikes’ death reinforces his view that abuse of power is a persistent problem in the city.

“This has been going on for a while,” said Spikes, who is black. “It’s not just blacks being abused. It’s whites being abused, too.”

On Monday, the mother of Pikes’ 4-year-old son filed a wrongful-death suit in federal court against city officials, Nugent and Taser International. The suit accuses city officials of civil rights violations in Pikes’ death.

New Orleans cops cleared in bridge shooting during Katrina aftermath

MARY FOSTER (AP)

- A judge threw out murder and attempted murder charges Wednesday against seven New Orleans police officers accused of gunning down two men on a bridge in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In quashing the indictments, District Judge Raymond Bigelow agreed with defense arguments that prosecutors violated state law by divulging secret grand jury testimony to a police officer who was a witness in the case.

“The violation is clear,” Bigelow said in making the ruling.

Survivors of the Sept. 4, 2005, shootings have said the officers fired at unarmed people crossing the Danziger Bridge to get food at a grocery store. Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, and James Brissette, 19, were shot and killed by police; four other people were wounded.

The officers acknowledged shooting at people on the bridge, but said they did so only after taking fire.

Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005. In its aftermath, levees broke, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. Chaos gripped the city, and looting was reported in some areas. Rescuers said they thought gunfire was directed at them.

Later investigation revealed at least some of the shooting was by residents trapped by floodwater trying to attract the attention of rescue parties.

Survivors of the shooting said in civil suits that they were unarmed and ambushed by the officers, who jumped out of the back of a rental truck and started shooting.

Police officials have acknowledged the officers shot people from both sides of the bridge, but said they were shot at first.

Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, Sgt. Robert Gisevius Jr., Officer Anthony Villavaso II and former Officer Robert Faulcon Jr. each faced first-degree murder and attempted murder charges in the case. Bigelow also threw out attempted first-degree murder charges against Officer Mike Hunter Jr. and Officer Robert Barrios and attempted second-degree murder charges against Officer Ignatius Hills.

Faulcon resigned from the police force; the other officers were assigned to desk duty after their indictment.

Bigelow also said Wednesday that prosecutors had wrongly instructed the grand jury, and that grand jury testimony by three of the officers was used against them improperly.

“It bordered on deliberate misuse of the law,” Bigelow said. He gave the district attorney’s office until Sept. 18 to decide if it would appeal.

Assistant District Attorney Robert White said his office would analyze the rulings and consider appealing. The office could also convene another grand jury to consider new charges against the officers.

“The ruling was not a total surprise,” White said.

The officers sat quietly on one side of the court room and did not visibly react to Bigelow’s ruling.

“We are very pleased for all the officers,” said Bruce Whittaker, the attorney for Hills. “Now these men can get back to doing the work they love.”

Madison’s brother said the family hoped the Justice Department would investigate the matter. Keva Landrum-Johnson, the interim district attorney, asked U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey to have his civil rights division investigate case, according to a letter dated Aug. 8 that the family provided reporters.

“Our family today still feels that the ruling just proves again that the justice system here in New Orleans is still flawed,” said Dr. Romell Madison.

A message left after hours seeking comment on the letter wasn’t immediately returned by Justice Department staff in Washington.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten in New Orleans said he hadn’t been formally notified of Bigelow’s ruling and wouldn’t comment on it. Letten said he has told the Madison family that his office would not intervene while the district attorney’s office had an “active case ongoing.”

Bigelow ordered bracelets used to track the officers’ whereabouts removed but did not remove the bail each paid until the district attorney decides what to do.

Police spokesman Bob Young said the officers would return to regular jobs quickly, but he was not sure where they would be placed.

Members of the group Safe Streets, Strong Communities attended the hearing and demonstrated outside the courthouse after the ruling.

“The Danziger case is yet another example of a police department in crisis and a criminal justice system unwilling to keep them in check,” said Norris Henderson, co-director of the group.

The case was the latest in a series of high-profile, emotional criminal prosecutions tied to Katrina that have fizzled.

Last year a grand jury refused to charge a doctor and two nurses in connection with the deaths of four patients at a New Orleans hospital after the storm. A jury also returned a not-guilty verdict against the operators of a St. Bernard Parish nursing home where more than 30 residents died in the storm’s flooding.

Next Page »