Katrina: After the Flood Read Online Free

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    Chris Roberts also responded to the call for reinforcements. Roberts was a member of the Gretna City Council, not a sworn peace officer, but he later described himself as eager to help protect his town from looters and other bad elements from New Orleans. “He was this little, short white guy getting into people’s faces,” Brandon Mason, an RTA supervisor, said. “He’s yelling at people, ‘This is my city,’ telling us how it’s martial law and we have no business being in his city.”
    Wilfred Eddington was the first person Roberts encountered at the scene. The police officer had removed himself from the group and was sitting on the curb, smoking a cigar he had secreted away.
    “Who in the hell ordered this?” Eddington heard the man’s high-pitched, loud voice before he saw him. “Who said these people could get off here?” Eddington turned and saw a short white man walking his way, jabbing his finger at him.
    “I’m like, ‘Dude, what are you talking about? I’m just sitting smoking a cigar.’ ”
    “I want to know right now who ordered this.”
    “Who ordered what?” Eddington stood up. He towered over Roberts.
    “Who told you to bring these people over here under this bridge?”
    Eddington asked who was asking, and Roberts identified himself. “Okay, Chris Roberts of the Gretna City Council, you have a few seconds to back off and just get out of my face.”
    “I’m not going anywhere.”
    “Get the hell out of my face,” Eddington yelled, then heard the unmistakable crack of someone racking a shotgun. A Gretna officer, apparently, did not like the manner in which this black cop from New Orleans was talking to an elected official. Roberts kept jabbering at him (“He was this little gnat,” Eddington said of the councilman, “a pain in the ass”), but Eddington was no longer listening. “I mean, I was tunnel vision,looking at this one particular police officer.” He stomped over to confront the cop holding the shotgun. “As I’m walking to him, I’m breaking leather,” Eddington said. “I’m coming out.” He had a police revolver on his right hip. And he was unholstering his weapon.
    Ronnie Harris, the longtime Gretna mayor, arrived and demanded to know who was in charge. All eyes turned to Harris and also to Gerald Robichaux, who was talking on a cell phone, seeing if he could find any buses and drivers to get them out of there. Robichaux had run the transit agency on this side of the bridge before taking the number two job at the RTA. He and Harris knew one another. If Harris had not shown up when he did, Lieutenant Stephens said, “God only knows where it would have went.” The mayor promised a few Porta Potties and ordered someone to get some water for their “guests.” Stephens ordered Eddington to the other side of their group to put distance between him and the shotgun-wielding Gretna cop.
    The Gretna police still didn’t holster their guns. “We had weapons pointed at us the entire time,” Lieutenant Stephens said. The violation of the blue-brotherhood code seemed to aggravate Stephens more than anything else. “I would never have treated a fellow police officer the way they treated us,” he said. “We felt like hostages.”
    Some part of the RTA contingent refused water when it was offered, including Brandon Mason, the RTA supervisor, and Cindy Crayton, Gerald Robichaux’s executive assistant. For Crayton, the declined water was her small protest over how they were treated. “Mr. Robichaux was trying to explain that we were there doing a job and helping the city of New Orleans, not folks coming over to loot,” she said. Yet they were treated as nothing but a mostly black group invading a predominantly white enclave. A pair of older black women, each in a wheelchair, arrived not long after the others. The women had been rescued by boat from the Canal Street barn and transported across the bridge on the back of a flatbed liberated from the agency’s