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| Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated |
| 2005-09-26 |
| NEW ORLEANS â After five days managing near riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA â Beron doesn't remember his name â came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies. "I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalled the doctor saying. The real total? Six, Beron said. Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been murdered inside the stadium. At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials. That the nation's frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city's top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees â mass murders, rapes and beatings â have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know. "I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong â bad things happened. But I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything ... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved." Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports. Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina â making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. "I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism." As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises. In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people" inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies "we couldn't count." The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state." Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened. "The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the information, Compass said he didn't remember. Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center â and may never. "I'm having a hard time getting a good body count," he said. Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist. Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees â about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center â overwhelmed their security personnel. The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence. "Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them â then that became 18." Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified â and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant. Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt's attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun â he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said. Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on about six occasions. Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on Friday. It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said. One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted the review. Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities â many allegedly involving small children â may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, will be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites. While numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular the rape of two young girls in the Superdome ladies' room and the killing of one of them, police and military officials say they know nothing of such an incident. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #8 As I recall, good Mormon housewives are supposed to keep a year's supplies of staples on hand at all times (flour, salt, sugar, not coffee, etc). If there actually are troubled times, the Saints may well become the majority of the U.S. population as a result. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-09-26 19:49 |
| #7 Ship - Salt Lake City is way too far inland for a hurricane, but the city did get hit by a large, particularly nasty tornado a couple of years ago. And yes, your conjecture is just about right. :-D |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-09-26 18:50 |
| #6 Can't wait till a major hurricane hits Salt Lake City. I expect the tabernacle to be cleaner and the food stocks increased after the emergency. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-09-26 18:02 |
| #5 I didn't see all the rape reports, but I had friends in the Super Dome who said that they were scared for their lives from hoodlum gangs that were terrorizing everyone. Whites in particular were targeted by many of these groups, and my friends took their chances with the water rather than stay in the hellhole that the superdome became. That's fact, not conjecture. However, while they said the terror from these gangs was ever present they didn't give any super-extreme reports like the ones I read in the above article. MSM bullshit no doubt. EP |
| Posted by: Whailing Omolump1436 2005-09-26 14:25 |
| #4 How should the left react when confronted with facts that don't support their narrative? 1. Say the right-wing spin-machine is continuing to play the âBlame-gameâ while now callously down playing the atrocities. 2. Say the racist media was all along attempting to portray the poor masses as less then human. 3. Claim the reports were impossible to document at the time and because the victims are now spread out the truth may never be completely verified. 4. Spin this as another âsilver-liningâ story similar to the reaction when confronted with the lower then speculated 10K body count. 5. Insist on an âindependentâ dog-n-pony show as the only way to completely find the truth and keep the grand standing circus alive. 6. Refuse to accept the facts and continue to exploit this tragedy as a way to push ahead a more Socialist agenda. |
| Posted by: DepotGuy 2005-09-26 13:58 |
| #3 Its long past the 'screaming fire in a croweded theater' moment. Its time for Congressional hearings, not to abridge free speech, but to protect its integrity which appearently is something the commercial distributers are not concerned with. Its like 'debasing' the currancy. Keep on sneaking base metal in for the coin's original gold or silver till it no longer had value. The same goes with commerical entertainment rags and broadcast which represent their product as something it is not. Interesting how movies and televison programs always insert that little disclosure that 'while the events portrayed in the program are based upon real events, the dialogue and characters are fictional.' Now why do they do that? Surely the system can accommodate a similar requirement at the beginning of any 'entertainment' programming or publication. Those who do not insert said statement must be able to uphold any challenge of 'truth' in the execution of their product. Remember the free press right was established in colonial America by the case of the Royal Governor of New York versus Peter Zenger which established TRUTH as a defense. |
| Posted by: Charong Speath5297 2005-09-26 11:29 |
| #2 There is no doubt that the situations in the Super Dome and the Convention Center were not pleasant. But I doubt that even if there had been adequate supplies stockpiled by the City, Parish or State governments it would of been a pleasant place to be. But as bad as Katrina was it pales in comparision to a simple heat wave in dare I say France |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2005-09-26 10:56 |
| #1 Now we can't let facts get in the way of perception can we? I mean all this has to be blamed on Bush and the Neocons. The MSM is creeping ever so closely to the old Pravda and current KCNA model of reporting: 99% heresay and 1% fact. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2005-09-26 10:11 |