The Homicides You Didn't Hear About in Hurricane Katrina

By Rebecca Solnit, Tomdispatch.com. Posted December 22, 2008.

Rahim's count seems high, 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 Murdered

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 neck 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 Requiem 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 guy: 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."

See more stories tagged with: racism, hurricane katrina, vigilantism

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 a much 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.

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