by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, and Brendan McCarthy, Times-Picayune
Three days after Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a ghost
town, somebody shot Donnell Herrington twice in Algiers Point, ripping a
hole in his throat.
Herrington, who is African-American, says he
was ambushed by a group of armed white men who attacked without warning
or provocation. He barely survived the shooting, which shredded his
internal jugular vein, a key vessel that transports blood from the brain
to the heart. He believes the assault was racially motivated.
No
one has ever been charged in the incident, but now, more than four
years later, at least two figures have come forward with information
implicating a neighborhood man in the attack. These two people linked
Roland Bourgeois Jr. to the shooting in interviews with ProPublica, the
Times-Picayune and PBS’ “Frontline.”
Terri Benjamin, who lived in the area,
said she saw Bourgeois, 47, pledge to shoot anybody with skin “darker
than a brown paper bag” while
clutching a shotgun. At one point, she said, he held up the
blood-drenched baseball cap of a man who’d just been shot.
Bourgeois’
mother, Pam Pitre, said her son did fire his shotgun at an
African-American man that day in Algiers Point, and acknowledged that he
kept the man’s hat. Pitre, who insists her son “is not a racist,” said
Bourgeois was accompanied by another man who also fired shots.
Herrington,
whose story closely tracks with the accounts of Pitre and Benjamin,
lost his navy blue baseball cap when he was shot. After viewing a photo
of Bourgeois, Herrington identified the man as one of his attackers.
Bourgeois, he said, “definitely was one of the guys I saw that day. … I
definitely remember him. He was one of ’em.”
Bourgeois, who has
not been charged with any crime, declined to be interviewed.
The Herrington
shooting is the subject of an
ongoing probe by U.S. Department of Justice attorneys and FBI agents, who
are examining claims that white
residents of Algiers Point attacked African-Americans in a spate of
racially motivated violence in the days after Katrina tore through
Louisiana. Over the past several months, federal prosecutors have
questioned numerous witnesses about the alleged hate crimes in grand
jury proceedings.
At the U.S. Department of Justice, spokesperson
Xochitl Hinojosa said she couldn’t comment on the investigation.
So
far, the hate crimes probe has been overshadowed by a sprawling federal investigation of
the New Orleans Police Department,
an effort that’s snared guilty pleas from three former officers for
crimes committed in the aftermath of the storm. But the accounts of what
transpired in Algiers Point may soon force the city to revisit another
painful episode from those grim days.
‘I thought it was
over’
The floodwaters that spilled over much of New
Orleans didn’t touch Algiers Point.
Still, the catastrophe
prompted the neighborhood’s residents — most of whom are white — to
take action. Within days, a band of 15 to 30 locals had taken up
weapons, barricaded the streets with downed trees and debris, and begun
regular patrols of the area. Residents say they were trying to keep
their homes from being overrun by thieves and outlaws.
“There’s
no black and white issue here,” said Clyde Price III, a white man who
lived next door to Bourgeois for many years.
But others,
including Malik Rahim, the co-founder of the activist group Common
Ground Relief, who was in Algiers Point in the days after the storm,
believe the neighborhood militia carried out a series of hate crimes,
threatening and shooting black people who walked into the area.
Herrington
said that the attack on him occurred on Sept. 1, 2005, as he strode
toward the Algiers Point ferry terminal with his cousin, Marcel
Alexander, and a friend, Chris Collins.
As part
of a rescue mission called Operation Dunkirk, the U.S. Coast Guard had
created a makeshift evacuation center at the terminal. Using an array of
watercraft, sailors transported thousands of flood victims from St.
Bernard Parish and East Bank neighborhoods to the ferry terminal; from
there, they were bused out of town.
Herrington, 33, and his
companions say they were aiming to get on one of those buses.
But
as the trio approached the intersection of Pelican Avenue and Vallette
Street, a white man pointed a shotgun at Herrington and, without saying a
word, squeezed the trigger, according to Herrington. “I thought I was
about to die,” he said. “I thought it was over.”
The first
shotgun blast ripped into his throat, torso and arms. Somehow,
Herrington got to his feet and began running. He remembers two more
armed men joining the first gunman. As he tried to escape, he says, a
second blast struck him in the back.
Both Alexander and Collins
witnessed the shooting — and both also suffered minor gunshot wounds. “I thought Donnell was dead,” recalled Alexander, who backs up his
cousin’s account. “I thought that I would never see Donnell no more.”
Alexander, who was 17, said he and Collins were briefly taken
prisoner by a group of about five armed white men, one of whom
threatened to set them on fire. Eventually, though, the men let
Alexander and Collins go.
Bleeding, Herrington staggered to the
home of an African-American couple who drove him to West Jefferson
Medical Center, where doctors discovered buckshot in his arms, chest,
abdomen and back, X-ray reports show. A cluster of pellets had torn open
the internal jugular vein along the right side of his throat, according
to medical records and one of Herrington’s surgeons, Dr. Charles
Thomas. At 3:43 p.m., he underwent surgery to repair the shredded vein.
Herrington is adamant that he and his companions did nothing to
provoke the incidents. “We were just in the neighborhood for a few
minutes,” he said. “We were just passing through.” The only way to the
ferry terminal from his home, he noted, was through Algiers Point.
Over the course of several interviews,
Herrington remembered one last detail about his ordeal: He’d been
wearing a navy blue baseball cap bearing the logo of either the New York
Yankees or the Detroit Tigers. During the scramble, he said, the hat
must have fallen off his head.
‘Big-game hunting’
As Terri Benjamin and her aunt, Eudith Rodney, walked along Pelican
Avenue that day, the reverberating boom of gunfire echoed through the
thick, humid air.
Fearful, the women began running toward the
safety of Benjamin’s home. As they neared Vallette Street, they
encountered a group of armed white men, Benjamin said in an interview.
Among the men, Benjamin recalled, was Roland Bourgeois Jr., who
lived just two doors down on Vallette Street. Bourgeois was gripping a
shotgun and celebrating.
“My neighbor was jumping up and down,
hootin’ and hollerin’ like he was big-game hunting and he got the big
one,” she said. “All of his friends were rallying him on, and they were
cheering.”
A beefy character with a shaved head, Bourgeois
screamed “I got one!” and boasted that he’d shot a “looter,” said
Benjamin, who shared her story with a federal grand jury on March 25.
Before long, she said, another armed man — someone Benjamin didn’t
recognize — showed up with news: The person Bourgeois had shot was
wounded but alive a few blocks away.
According to Benjamin,
Bourgeois said, “I’m gonna kill that nigger,” and ran, barefoot and
shirtless, down the street before turning and jogging out of view.
Benjamin
heard another gunshot.
Bourgeois ran back to join the group of
gun-equipped men standing in the street, she said. “He came back with a
baseball cap that had blood on it. And I knew there was blood on the cap
because it ran onto his arm. And he brandished the cap for all of his
friends,” Benjamin said. “Everybody cheered. They were happy for him.”
Benjamin, who is ethnically mixed — white, Latino and
African-American — was waiting for an uncle and cousin, both of whom
are African-American, to come to her house. She feared Bourgeois and the
other men would attack her relatives.
“I went to him and asked
him to spare their lives,” Benjamin remembered. “He said, ‘Darlin’, anything
coming up that street darker than a brown paper bag is gettin’ shot.’”
Traumatized,
Benjamin moved out of the state after Katrina, but just weeks ago, she
made two trips to the neighborhood, accompanied by a federal prosecutor
and an FBI agent who asked her to retrace her steps.
The
investigators, she said, were interested in Bourgeois. “They asked me
specifically about him,” Benjamin said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Forrest
Christian also questioned her about a “sidekick” of Bourgeois, she said.
‘Like gang members’
Bourgeois may be guilty
of poor judgment, but he didn’t commit a hate crime, according to his
mother, Pam Pitre.
In a recent interview, she explained her
understanding of the shooting her son participated in. Pitre said she’s
discussed the shooting in detail with Bourgeois, and testified before
the grand jury about it.
In Pitre’s telling, Bourgeois
encountered three dangerous and “arrogant” African-American males who’d
been trying to break into parked cars, Pitre said. “He said they looked
like gang members to him,” she recalled.
After the trio of black
men tried to move one of the barricades blocking the street, Bourgeois
and another man began shooting at them, said Pitre. “Both men had guns.
Both fired,” she said, adding that she didn’t know the name of the other
shooter.
According to Pitre, the shots were meant to “scare,”
not to kill.
When the gunfire stopped, Bourgeois “picked up the
baseball cap” that had fallen from the head of one of the shooting
victims, according Pitre, who said her son kept the hat until she
convinced him to get rid of it.
Pitre says the shooting had
nothing to do with skin color. “If they want to say it was a bad
decision — yes, it was. But it wasn’t a hate crime,” she said. “He is
not a racist — and that’s what bothers me more than anything else.”
Bourgeois
was terrified by the lawlessness that followed the storm and flooding,
she said. He was threatened by a group of African-Americans, she said,
and “pelted with bottles” in the days before the shooting occurred.
The
only reason the matter came to the attention of federal authorities,
Pitre maintained, is that “this man Roland shot survived and is telling
his tale.”
Bourgeois’ family has owned property in Algiers Point
for decades, and around the neighborhood he’s known as a dog lover.
Aside from a 1992 arrest for possession of marijuana, he has no criminal
record in Orleans Parish.
Civil court records show Bourgeois has
at least two children. He is now residing with his mother in
Mississippi.
Price, his former neighbor, said Bourgeois has been
unfairly tarred as a racist. “Everyone paints a bad picture of him
because he’s a big, white bald dude and a gun fanatic,” said Price. “They think it was all racism. But it wasn’t.’
Still, Price
acknowledged, Bourgeois has a habit of referring to African-Americans as “niggers.”
‘A racial statement’
Over the
past year, FBI agents have interviewed Herrington numerous times and
have canvassed the neighborhood, going door-to-door in an effort to
locate witnesses to the shooting. One local who was questioned by agents
said they were seeking information about approximately 30 Algiers Point
residents.
At this point, however, it’s unclear whether the
probe will lead to criminal indictments.
Herrington continues to
feel anger about what happened to him.
“To me, it was a hate
crime,” he said. “It was a racial statement.” He thinks if his skin was a
different hue — if he’d been a “white guy” striding through the
neighborhood, en route to the ferry terminal — “it wouldn’t have
happened to me.”
Editor’s note: The Roland
Bourgeois Jr. in this story should not be confused with the Metairie,
La., physician of the same name.
FRONTLINE Producer
Oriana Zill de Granados contributed to this report.
(Photo of the Algiers Point neighborhood by Muffuletta via Wikipedia.)
