Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  An autopsy report, written by the Coroner’s Office of the Parish of Orleans and signed in March 2006, said the deceased had arrived clad in black tennis shoes, blue shorts under a pair of gray-black shorts, and wearing a white T-shirt. JJ had a wooden pendant hanging from his neck. “IRIE,” it said, Jamaican patois that means “all right,” to be at peace with yourself. “There are seven gunshot wounds to the left upper arm, right posterior neck, mid posterior neck, left anterior upper arm, right buttock, right upper anterior leg and right elbow,” the report said.

  A subsequent exam of JJ’s X-rays would reveal even more pieces of shrapnel lodged in him. “They broke my heart,” Sherrel said. “In November, he was going to be eighteen. He was going to get his first car. I’ll never get to see the grin on his face when he’s waving his keys.” Katrina ravaged the homes of Sherrel and her daughter, Andrea, and most of their possessions. With JJ in the morgue, the family had one photograph of him left to hold on to. It was taken at Andrea’s wedding. In the picture, James Brissette Jr. is nine years old.

  CHAPTER 12

  VICTIMS SHINE A LEGAL LIGHT

  AS THE CALENDAR TURNED to summer, and Hurricane Katrina’s one year anniversary greeted a city still mired in a painful recovery, the police story stood firm. Lance Madison and Jose Holmes Jr. remained suspects in eight counts of attempted murder, and the public at large viewed the shootings on the bridge as one in a flurry of Katrina tragedies that forever changed their city.

  In May 2006 Sergeants Arthur Kaufman and Gerard Dugue had filed the department’s fifty-four-page report supporting their charges of attempted murder against the two men, and logging the evidence—the Colt .357 Magnum “confiscated” by Kaufman a day after the shootings. The report included interviews with all the officers, who supported the police line.

  The final police report never listed a motive for the shootings. Instead, it cast the spotlight upon the hurricane. “The motive for the attempted murder of several police officers is unknown. It should be noted that after Hurricane Katrina passed, the City of New Orleans was in a state of chaos and confusion. Officers throughout the City of New Orleans were taking fire from pockets of insurgent citizens which remained after evacuations were complete.” These officers were listed as victims:

  • “Deputy” David Ryder, white male, age forty at the time of the shootings

  • Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, white male, thirty-one

  • Sergeant Robert Gisevius, white male, thirty-three

  • Officer Robert Faulcon, black male, forty-one

  • Officer Michael Hunter, white male, twenty-eight

  • Officer Ignatius Hills, black male, twenty-eight

  • Officer Anthony Villavaso, black male, twenty-eight

  • Officer Robert Barrios, black male, twenty-four

  The report said other officers on the scene, including Officer Dupree and police riding with her that morning, were likewise victims. “Let it be known there were relief workers who were being fired upon by the assailants, but fled the area before they could be interviewed,” Kaufman and Dugue reported. “None of the law enforcement officers or relief workers sustained any injury from being fired upon.”

  The officers’ narratives filled the report, one after the other describing their actions as by the book. This report, built from the earlier versions, sharpened the story line to clearly cast the police as responding to an attack.

  “Police!” the report quoted Bowen as shouting that morning. “‘Show me your hands. . . .’ He stated the subjects immediately went for cover, while arming themselves, and fired upon the officers. Sergeant Bowen mentioned he began to shout to the subjects to throw their weapons off the side of the bridge.”

  Bowen saw two men running—the Madison brothers—“who were shooting back at the officers on the bridge,” the narrative continued.

  “Sergeant Bowen stated he exited the truck and cautiously peeked over the cement barrier. He observed two dark colored handguns lying on the cement next to stationary subjects. Sergeant Bowen jumped over the cement barrier and kicked the weapons over the side of the bridge.”

  Other officers told similar tales, each relating how they identified themselves before firing, and each describing how their targets were armed.

  “With the apprehension of Lance Madison, as being one of the subjects shooting at police officers and rescue workers, and the arrest of Jose Holmes being imminent, this case is considered solved.”

  On the report’s cover sheet, an x is typed in next to the words “Cleared By Arrest.” To police, the case was closed.

  From Baton Rouge, lawyer Nathan Fisher and Shannon Fay kept digging for details to prove the police conclusion was an utter fraud and to show that their client Lance Madison was innocent. Reading the fifty-four page police report, they saw “Deputy David Ryder,” of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s office, listed as the first victim of attempted murder by Lance and Jose Holmes Jr. Their investigator plugged Ryder’s name into databases and could find no evidence he was a police officer. Instead, he found the same Marion David Ryder had a police record—arrested in 2002 for battery of a police officer and in 2003 for possession of cocaine and simple battery in St. Landry Parish two and a half hours upstate from New Orleans. He found other criminal cases in Texas. “We were trying to run him down,” Fay said.

  She and Fisher pulled apart other threads from the police story. “‘Oh, we kicked the gun off the bridge,’” she saw, reading Bowen’s account. “Oh,” she wondered, “that’s what you were trained to do?” She added, “We knew it was bad but we had no idea how bad it was until we started seeing the internal investigative reports. When all of a sudden a gun appeared, we’re like, where did this come from?”

  They kept pressing, reaching out for any pictures or video footage that may have captured what happened that morning. This digging hit pay dirt. The lawyers uncovered never-aired footage from an NBC affiliate that helped paint, in broad strokes, what happened on the bridge. The footage was too fuzzy to reveal individual faces, but it showed in a larger sense police officers in pursuit, not retreat. “You can see what’s happening,” said Shannon Fay. “You can’t see who it is, but you can use it as a guide.”

  Fisher and Fay looked for the police’s supposed star witnesses, Lakeisha Smith and James Youngman. “Obviously, we didn’t find them,” Fay said; another big question mark in the police account.

  They kept pushing and meeting with the district attorney, professing Lance’s innocence and seeking his exoneration. “Each day was something new,” she said. “It was also such a blur.”

  As the lawyers pressed for evidence, Lance Madison took care of a small piece of personal business. On September 18, 2006, he sent a fifty-dollar check to Winn-Dixie for the food he took as he and Ronald struggled for survival in Romell’s dental office. “I would like to thank you for your honesty concerning the food you and your brother took during Hurricane Katrina in your time of need,” Joey Medina, a Winn-Dixie regional vice president in New Orleans, wrote him back. The company returned the money, noting that its losses were covered by insurance. “We hope you will use it to continue shopping with us,” Medina wrote. “Again thanks for your honesty.”

  Lance was falling into a difficult depression. He never returned to work at FedEx at the airport, even though the company had kept his job open for him, and began to undergo therapy to try to work through the horrors he and his brother experienced that morning on the Danziger Bridge. His family and lawyers told Lance to keep telling the truth, stressing the greater purpose in his words. “You were able to speak for Ronald.”

  AS FAY AND FISHER worked to clear Lance’s name in criminal court, a second legal front was brewing in civil court.

  Behind the scenes, the Madison family, the Bartholomew family, Jose Holmes, and Sherrel Johnson worked to challenge the police-created perception, laying the groundwork for a series of lawsuits against the city, Mayor Ray Nagin, Superintendent Edwin Compass, other top NOPD brass, and the
police officers who unleashed their weapons. These lawsuits, which were beginning to be filed around the one year anniversary of Katrina, were the first public signal that the police story might not be true.

  Fisher and Fay shared their findings with Mary Howell, a New Orleans–based civil lawyer with a grainy Cajun cadence to her voice and deep history of challenging police misconduct and deadly shootings. Howell had built a name taking on police corruption in her city, and her work was often recognized. She had once chaired the Civil Rights Section of the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association and had many honors on her resume, including the ACLU of Louisiana Benjamin E. Smith Civil Liberties Award.

  Howell worked from a small blue-colored office on South Dorgenois Street near the courthouse, a cozy setting with hardwood floors, colorful rugs, and aged, handsome cabinets. From this quaint office Mary Howell had taken on some of the biggest police abuse cases in New Orleans history, representing the families victimized by the department’s overreaching.

  Now, exploring the shootings and the cover-up, she put her experience and expertise into action. On September 1, 2006, she filed a thirty-seven-page civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Lance Madison and his mother, Fuki.

  “This case involves a terrible tragedy which unfolded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” the lawsuit begins. “It involves two brothers, life-long residents of the city, who were first victims of the storm and then victims of the City of New Orleans, its failed leadership and its collapsed police department.

  “This tragic incident resulted in the death of Ronald Madison, an innocent, mentally retarded, unarmed man who was seeking safety and shelter at his brother’s dental office on Chef Menteur Highway and who was repeatedly shot in the back by officers of the New Orleans Police Department and left to die.

  “As if the incident itself was not sufficiently terrible, the NOPD officers and supervisors involved in this incident embarked upon a desperate plan to attempt to cover-up their misconduct, by lying and fabricating evidence and attempting to frame an innocent man whose brother they had just killed,” she wrote, “an attempted cover-up which continues to this date.”

  The lawsuit detailed how the police-driven truck “suddenly, without warning,” pulled to the foot of the bridge, and how police piled out and started unleashing gunfire. “Prior to opening fire on the Madison brothers, the shooters made no announcements, gave no warnings, and issued no verbal instructions.”

  The lawsuit said the seven shooting officers hatched a cover-up, and it called out David Ryder’s lies. He was no officer, but a convicted criminal.

  The suit blamed Mayor Nagin, police superintendent Compass, and NOPD brass for systematically allowing the command structure to collapse. “They were aware that many officers were mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted and on the verge of collapse,” the lawsuit said. “Yet they failed to conduct any screening or evaluation of officers to determine their fitness for duty and instead permitted officers, including those who were not fit, to obtain and use non-departmental approved weapons.”

  Nagin, a black man, had handpicked Compass for the job in 2002, elevating a black officer from the ranks of the NOPD into its top role. In so doing, Nagin departed from his predecessor, former mayor Marc Morial, who had hired his police chief from outside the department and quickly introduced the new superintendent to FBI agents investigating corruption festering inside the NOPD. Morial’s chief, a police executive from Washington, DC, named Richard Pennington, did not want to be friends with his officers. “Pennington had ice water in his veins when it came to discipline,” said Morial, who focused on cleaning up the department, and purposely chose an outsider not tied to the force. Nagin’s path, hiring a friend and local football star he had known since grade school, sent a different signal. Compass was a police brother, a man who would embrace fellow officers with a bear hug and exclaim, “Give me some love!” He was known for backing his brethren, white, black, or Hispanic.

  Nagin had won the mayor’s seat in 2002 by edging the same Richard Pennington in a race that drew fifteen candidates, among them a funeral home operator, a onetime actor, a plumber, a gardener, and a pastor. Nagin, a cable company executive running on a pro-business platform, won the support of the local Times-Picayune’s editorial pages. He became the first New Orleans mayor in fifty years elected to run the city without prior political experience. Among his first acts was to tap a police insider to run a force with a history of civilian abuse cases stretching back decades. Morial said Nagin instantly shuttered the reform programs put in place by his mayoral opponent, former chief Pennington.

  Nagin’s chief did not last long after Katrina. Superintendent Edwin P. Compass III, battered by criticism that he and Mayor Nagin overstated the degree of chaos and crime in the Superdome, had resigned September 27, 2005. “I served this department for twenty-six years and have taken it through some of the toughest times of its history,” Compass told reporters at a news conference. “Every man in a leadership position must know when it’s time to hand over the reins. I’ll be going on in another direction that God has for me.”

  The Nagin era ushered in a culture where officers felt empowered to patrol their turf as they saw fit, without looking over their shoulder at the FBI, police department watchdogs say. “Compass wanted to be loved,” Mary Howell told me. The reforms of the Morial administration “all got undone.” The lawsuit now in court was unmasking the dark side of that police culture.

  Nagin and Compass contributed to the atmosphere of lawlessness, the lawsuit said, “by urging, encouraging and pushing NOPD officers to ‘take back’ the city by any means necessary, including the use of excessive and unlawful force, if needed.”

  Amid the chaos of Katrina, the mayor, chief, and other top officials communicated that the protections of the US Constitution no longer applied to the police, Howell asserted. “Officers were authorized to ‘shoot to kill’ individuals in circumstances and under conditions and standards which were constitutionally deficient.”

  The lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, sought damages for Ronald Madison’s “pre-death terror and death” and for the loss of his love to his mother and brother. Lance Madison has “suffered extreme mental anguish over witnessing the death of his brother, Ronald.” Among other damages, the suit sought an order that the city pay for Ronald’s funeral.

  The Madison legal salvo was joined by others. The day Madison v. City of New Orleans, et al., was filed, Jose Holmes Jr. had brought suit in the same federal court, filed by New Orleans lawyer Gary W. Bizal. The lawsuit echoed many of the key points in the Madison case, similarly citing the state of collapse at the New Orleans Police Department.

  “As Jose Holmes Jr. [lay] on the ground defenseless, he was shot multiple times by this group of armed men,” the suit said. “At no time was Jose Holmes Jr. or anyone in his group armed with any type of weapon or any object that could have been perceived as a weapon.” The multiple surgeries required to keep Jose alive left him permanently injured, the lawsuit said, and will reduce his life expectancy.

  The Bartholomew family filed suit in August 2006, listing the officers as John Doe and seeking more than $29 million in damages from the city. After the other suits were filed by Jose Holmes and the Madison family, lawyer Edwin M. Shorty Jr. amended the Bartholomew case to include the names of the seven New Orleans police officers.

  While each case sought millions in damages, the larger losses—of family members killed, loved ones permanently disfigured, and of police casting the victims as criminals—carried a more lasting toll. Lesha Bartholomew, who lay atop her mother on the bridge to shield her from more gunfire, later put this larger pain into words.

  “Why is this happening to us?” Lesha wrote. “This is one of the many questions I asked as I lay on the ground, shot multiple times. This incident has had a major impact on me and my family. I never thought that I would get shot, let alone the shooters being the people whose job it is to protect me
. Our lives have completely changed since that day. We now have scars and injuries we have to deal with and look at every day. The scars that I incurred as a result of the gunshot wounds have been very damaging to my self-esteem. I am constantly reminded of that day every time I undress, wear certain clothing, or people stare as I walk.

  “My mom has suffered more than anyone,” Lesha continued. “I know because she hasn’t been out of pain since the day of the shooting. She faces quite a challenge daily. Her right arm was blown off so she is now disabled and in no way has the ability to do things as she once did before. The phantom pain she suffers becomes unbearable at times. It hurts me to see my mom in so much pain. There are days that I can still hear my dad’s scream for help as we laid on the side of the bridge waiting for the ambulance. Sometimes it honestly feels like a bad dream and I just want to wake up.”

  The lawsuits filed by the Madisons, Jose Holmes, and the Bartholomews pointedly challenged the police department’s contention that the families were criminals. For the first time, the public was hearing a different story about the shootings on the bridge the first Sunday after Katrina.

  In a story published September 14, 2006, headlined “Lawsuits Dispute Fatal Shooting,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune cited this turn of events.

  A police shooting six days after Hurricane Katrina that authorities initially portrayed as a response to sniper fire on the Danziger Bridge has spawned three federal lawsuits claiming that police killed two unarmed men and wounded four others in a hail of unprovoked gunfire.

  In the lawsuits, filed this month against the city, the families of the wounded and the dead, including a 19-year-old man and a 40-year-old mentally disabled man who refused to leave his dogs during the storm, offer accounts of the incident that contradict the police account. The incident remains under investigation by the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office.