Shots on the Bridge

by Ronnie Greene

  “And that brings us to September 4th, 2005,” Fleming said. “That morning they’re out at the Crystal Palace getting ready to go do some more rescue runs and a call comes over the radio, and it’s the worst call any police officer can ever hear, a 108. And what do they hear? 108, officer needs assistance. 108, shots fired. 108, two officers down.”

  In normal times, a 108 call would send the cavalry out—nearly every officer in New Orleans, from every corner possible, would race out to help their fellow officers. But this call came after Katrina, with never-ending duty calling and a patchwork assemblage of officers struggling to make do.

  “Two officers dead is what everyone thought. Two officers dead or dying is what these men had in their minds when they raced out there and all piled into the rental truck,” the lawyer said. “Michael Hunter’s driving; Kenny Bowen’s in the passenger seat; Rob Gisevius, Robert Faulcon, Tony Villavaso and others jump into the back. And in the back of the truck, they cannot see what’s going on; in the back of the truck, they don’t know what’s going on.”

  The officers had two wishes as the truck raced to the bridge, he said. That the officers under distress were still alive. “And they’re hoping at the end of all of this, they’ll still be alive” too.

  Fleming noted that officer Hunter, not among the defendants on trial, was first to fire, from the front driver’s seat. With the gunfire unleashed, the officers packed inside the truck instantly assumed a gunfight was underway. Some officers in back stayed in the truck. But not the defendants, and not his client. They spilled out believing other officers were under fire.

  “And they get out of that truck slap dead into the middle of a gunfight. Several people are shot; and some, no doubt, at least some are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that’s unfortunate. And two people are killed that day, and that’s always unfortunate. No matter what the circumstances, that’s unfortunate.”

  Fleming’s opening statement was compelling but, prosecutors would note, only part of the truth. There was a gunfight, yes. But atop the Danziger Bridge, only the police were armed.

  Frank DeSalvo, Bowen’s attorney, stood next. He said prosecutor Bernstein’s statement that morning sounded “more fitted to a novel.”

  Eric Hessler, the lawyer for Robert Gisevius Jr., painted a personal portrait of the sergeant. Gisevius reported for duty with Katrina coming, sending to safety his five-year-old child and seven-month baby boy. “He left his family behind to protect the citizens of this city,” Hessler told jurors.

  Some of Gisevius’s relatives bemoan that decision, but say it was just like “Robbie.” “Time and again I ask God why Robbie didn’t flee the city with his family as so many other officers did,” his cousin said. “But I know that his loyalty to New Orleans and its citizens would have made that impossible for him to do.” When a former police academy member took a government job in Afghanistan, Gisevius would send messages seeing what he could do for his family. Gisevius acted like a big brother to a high school classmate, making sure “boys that I dated had the utmost respect for me.” The classmate went on to become a high school theology teacher.

  After Hurricane Katrina, the officer was trapped in a hotel by the floodwaters. Gisevius swam out of the building to retrieve a boat that had neither a running motor nor oars.

  “So they broke some fence boards down, used those for paddles, and went and rescued other officers so they, too, could procure more boats, and began rescuing citizens. And that’s how this began, with a boat and a piece of wood, and not a whole lot more. And it grew,” Hessler told the courtroom. “This went on for some six days, sunup and sundown. They woke up with the sun and began rescuing people up until the sun went down.”

  Sometimes, it was too dangerous to go out. “Gunshots, obstructions in the water that they couldn’t see. You name it, they faced it,” he continued. “There was no electricity in the city, no air conditioning, no place to sleep that provided any level of comfort, very little food, very little water. He stayed through it. A lot of people couldn’t. A lot of people couldn’t handle it.”

  Then police heard of rapes in the Superdome, murder in the streets, armed gangs running around. Later, some of the wildest tales, particularly those coming from the Superdome, were proven to be invented stories, spread through hyperbole and fear. “At that time, was it believable? Yeah. Was it believable when the mayor was saying it? Yeah. The chief of police? Yeah,” his lawyer said.

  Gisevius learned of a colleague officer’s suicide and another officer who had taken his life.

  “Who do you have to lean on? Nobody. Nobody,” Hessler said. “You don’t have anything to distract you. You have other people in the same situation. You have not a whole lot of anything but yourself, the darkness, and your mind. And he wakes up the next day and he goes and saves more people.”

  The stresses in the streets became so intense, Hessler said, police began handing out assault rifles to officers.

  “And they issued them to anybody that had two hands. You didn’t have to be qualified, you didn’t have to know what you were doing, you just had to, I guess, be either concerned, scared enough, or ordered to pick it up and patrol the streets,” the lawyer said, building a portrait of how the devastation changed the rules, even for police officers. “Now, in normal days, especially in America in New Orleans, we don’t see policemen walking around with automatic weapons. And these weren’t normal days, and you saw plenty of police officers walking around with automatic weapons. And that was condoned and encouraged by the NOPD.”

  That morning, September 4, Gisevius had just returned from another rescue mission when the urgent call went out. He could have kept rescuing people, played it safe. He stepped into the Budget truck and raced to the bridge. He sat in the back, his vision partially obstructed by the officers around him, “traveling to the worst call he could ever get.”

  There’s no time to ask questions. The gunfire had begun. Gisevius spilled from the truck, firearm at the ready.

  “What he does is what his training, what his experience, and what human instinct tells you to do,” Hessler said. “You know, cops aren’t perfect. And just because you become a cop doesn’t mean you’re a tactical expert, or you’ve got some higher sense of danger, or some higher ability to deal with a life-threatening, just scared-to-death situation. They become scared. Cops are human.”

  Gisevius saw a man running up the bridge—it was one of the Madisons—and he heard gunfire around him. “If you perceive a guy on the top of the bridge with a rifle, and you perceive him firing, what are you going to do? You’re going to fire back,” the lawyer explained.

  Timothy Meche, attorney for Anthony Villavaso II, stood next and addressed jurors. “The government said he fired nine times. We don’t dispute that. That’s what happened. We all agree to that,” Meche said.

  More important, he said, was what was in Villavaso’s mind as he, like Gisevius, sat in the back of the truck racing to what police believed was a shootout.

  Villavaso, born in New Orleans and raised in the Catholic faith, was an only child who surprised his parents by finding a connection with the alto saxophone. He became the first in his family to turn to police work. Some relatives were horrified, but Villavaso felt the call to duty, and joined a unit that searched for criminals in a city that often suffered the highest murder rate in the United States. His hair cut short, Villavaso favored a thin moustache that reached down to his beard, giving a Fu Manchu appearance. He became a father of two who told his children to chase their dreams. Before Hurricane Katrina, his police file was bereft of abuse complaints but included only dismissed cases over his failure to attend court hearings for some of his arrests. The department cleared him in those two instances. Trapped by Katrina, he floated to safety with a stranger on a bed mattress—rescuing an elderly woman stuck on a roof before finding harbor himself, his lawyer said. Then came September 4 and the adrenaline-pumping race to the bridge.

  “Things are happening so fast. It�
�s not a video game. It’s not a slow motion movie,” Meche told the courtroom.

  “Things are happening so fast, if you take the time to go out and assess the situation, you could quite likely get your head blown off, or somebody else could get their head blown off,” Villavaso’s lawyer said. “When he got out of the truck and fired his gun, it’s because he thought people were firing back. In his mind, he saw people shooting back at him.”

  The issue, the lawyer told jurors, is “not whether or not they did have guns, the issue is whether these officers reasonably believed they had guns.”

  Inside the federal courtroom, Meche would contend, the legal decks were stacked against the officers. Media coverage after Katrina cited cases of police wrongdoing, and attendees at trial had to pass through three sets of security to get in. “It was a poisonous atmosphere in that courtroom,” the lawyer later said. “It gave the impression to the jury that these were some really dangerous guys.” Villavaso was a good officer two years out of the academy, who grew up in New Orleans and attended an African American high school, he said. Villavaso was not an orchestrator of any cover-up, Meche said, and the lawyer maintains his client’s shots did not strike any victims. He fired from the adrenaline of the moment. “He just got caught up in that,” Meche said.

  In court another lawyer for Faulcon stood and, for the defense, had the last word. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a tragedy for everyone involved: Police officers, victims, everyone involved,” said the lawyer, Lindsay Larson III. “It is a horribly regrettable mistake, but it’s not a federal crime.”

  THE FIRST WITNESS CALLED to testify was Susan Bartholomew. The bailiff asked her to raise her right arm, put her left hand on the Bible, and swear to tell the truth. Bartholomew, wearing a shawl over her clothes, didn’t respond as requested, and the bailiff asked again. Finally she whispered to the court officer. She had no right arm to raise. It had been shot off on the bridge.

  Bartholomew raised her left hand, and then told jurors, the bow-tied federal judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, and a full courtroom of the terror she and her family suffered that striking Sunday morning.

  “Before you heard shots, did you ever hear anyone yell?” Cindy Chung, another civil rights prosecutor on the case, asked her.

  “No,” she told the jurors.

  “Did anyone ever identify themselves to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever hear anyone give you any commands?”

  “No.”

  Once the shooting began, Bartholomew said, “It seemed like forever.” In the New Orleans Police reports, Big Leonard was quoted as saying nephew Jose had been shooting at helicopters. Prosecutor Chung read the report aloud for jurors to hear. Lies, Susan Bartholomew said. They were all lies.

  Pacing toward the defendants’ table, the prosecutor turned to her witness and asked, “Mrs. Bartholomew, looking at this side of the room, have you ever pointed a gun at any of these people on this side of the room?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever fired a gun at any of these people?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever pointed a weapon or fired a weapon in your life?”

  “No,” she answered.

  The battery of defense attorneys had few questions to ask Bartholomew. One even apologized for her suffering. The defense had nowhere to go with this first witness, nothing to impeach. Instead, the team would save its fire for some of the police officers who cut deals, challenging their motives, credibility, and truthfulness.

  Others took the stand for the prosecution. Taj Magee, the officer desperate to find evidence that his colleagues had cause to fire upon residents, testified, as did Jennifer Dupree, the officer who first responded and whose call helped set the events in motion. Dupree told jurors about a curious phone call she received at 1:00 a.m. one morning, as the district attorney was investigating the shootings. The call came from Archie Kaufman, who stirred her from sleep, and asked her to meet him and a lawyer at a bar. She told him no, hung up, then went back to sleep. She didn’t recall the lawyer’s name, just that it wasn’t Steven London, Kaufman’s counsel at the trial. Dupree then told Bernstein several of the statements Kaufman attributed to her in one report were false.

  Morrell Johnson, the witness whose name Lance Madison told himself to remember, was called to the stand too, as was Robert Rickman, the Friendly Inn maintenance man and security guard who snapped photos of Ronald Madison, still sprawled out on the pavement hours after the gunfire. Now those photos were being introduced as evidence, and Rickman spoke of the nightmares that had haunted his dreams since that morning.

  Lance Madison, Jose Holmes, Little Leonard, and Lesha Bartholomew took turns recounting the shooting, recreating that morning in short, direct language.

  On the stand, Lance answered questions from Theodore Carter, another of the federal prosecutors litigating the Danziger case. He said the Madisons were a praying family where everyone looked after another. When Ronald refused to leave his dogs, with Katrina on the horizon, Lance naturally stayed back to look over him.

  After the hurricane and flooding, the brothers spent two days atop Lance’s roof. Lance said his brother’s mental development put him at between six and seven years old.

  “How was he handling all of this, the water, the flood?” the prosecutor asked.

  “He was very frightened, scared. I tried to calm him down. We prayed. And I just tried to talk to him and keep him comforted.”

  On Sunday September 4, he told the jurors, they set out from brother Romell’s office intending to make it to the family homestead on Lafon Drive. Why to your mother’s house? Carter asked. “To retrieve some bicycles to ride to get as far as we can,” Lance said. “We couldn’t get back there, the water was real high. So we turned back around and came back.”

  That led them back over the bridge, and into the frenzied gunfire.

  “We got about half way up the bridge, and that’s when I heard a whole lot of gunshots, lots of gunshots. And I turned back around. When I turned around, I saw a truck pulled up to the bridge and had people that was coming out [of] the truck and was already out of the truck, shooting at the people that was behind me. And, next thing I know, they was shooting at us.”

  He looked up and saw blood spurting out of Ronald’s shoulder. Lance tried to whisk his brother to safety, still utterly confused by who was shooting and why. He was instantly, fully in survival mode.

  “We started running again, and I was trying to comfort Ronald. He was bleeding very badly,” Lance said. “I grabbed him, put his—got under his shoulder and grabbed him and tried to run with him. He stopped me for a second and told me—And he told me to tell my mother and my brother and sisters that he loved us. And he shook my hand. And I told him, Ronald, I said: We got to go, because these guys, you know, are coming after us. And we started running. I met another guy coming [from] the opposite direction, and I told him turn around. I said: These people are shooting at us.”

  That was Morrell Johnson, the security guard who glimpsed the shooting on the west end of the bridge.

  “When we got down to the bottom of the bridge, I told Ronald: Ronald, I’m going to go get some help. I said: Just be quiet, because you’re hurt real bad. And I’m just trying to calm him down. So, when I took off to try to get some help, that’s where somebody came behind and started shooting again,” Lance said, holding the courtroom in silence.

  “I just dove in the water and stayed in the water until I got to the back of the hotel.”

  He recounted how he eventually reached the state police and was quickly surrounded by NOPD officers. “I ran up to them. Next thing I know, they had arrested me,” he said. “That’s when I was found out it was the police shooting at me.”

  On cross-examination, the defense team pressed Lance Madison about his initial statements just after the shooting, when he thought he saw an object in the hands of the teens—and assumed they had guns. On the stand he said he never knew what it was that he
saw. “I just saw an object, and I couldn’t describe it.” He now knew the truth. Only police were armed.

  “I wanted to see them have justice where they never would be able to do this again,” he said. “They killed innocent people out there.”

  Jose Holmes told jurors how he pieced his life together after the shootings, moving to Georgia, raising a five-month-old son, Jose Holmes III, and landing a job with Kroger grocery store. A year after the shooting, he returned to the West Jefferson Medical Center to visit the doctors and nurses who treated him. “I wanted to thank everybody for helping me get better and to let them see that I was doing better,” he said.

  Turning back to September 4, 2005, prosecutor Bernstein had Holmes stand before the jurors. He lifted his shirt to reveal his stomach scars. He raised his left arm to show another scar, held up his damaged thumb, and raised his right elbow, also scarred.

  “How about your jaw, do you have any scars up there?” Bernstein asked. Holmes jutted his jaw for jurors to see.

  “I heard my auntie and my cousin Lesha, I heard them screaming. I heard my Uncle Leonard, he was screaming too,” Holmes said, recounting those tortuous minutes. “They were screaming out in pain.”

  “What were you thinking at that moment?” Bernstein asked.

  “I was just hoping that we could make it.”

  He described how he tried to lay still, posing no threat. “I kind of figured that if they saw us lying on the ground they wouldn’t shoot us.”

  The officers and supervisors turned government witnesses also appeared: Hunter, Hills, Barrios, Lehrmann, and Lohman. These officers publicly unveiled the fraud that had, for six years, hidden the brutal truth. Barrios was called by the defense, not the prosecution, and told jurors that, after leaving the department, he supported himself by landing part-time work as a banquet waiter at a Marriott Hotel and full-time work driving an eighteen-wheeler truck. He said he was a follower, not a leader, of the cover-up, but admitted to Bernstein, “I was guilty. I lied.”