Fascinating read, and there's much more to the article than the first few paragraphs, above.The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.
It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.
The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.
Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"
The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."
The thrust of the article is that there's a neighborhood of good ol' boys who murdered a few black folks who had the audacity to walk by, on their way to an evacuation point.
It doesn't really surprise me. I imagine that chaos ruled in the aftermath of Katrina, when the police were either nowhere to be found, partaking in the looting themselves, or confiscating handguns from little old ladies.
I'm have no doubt that a few white rednecks might take protecting their property from looters way too far. I'm equally sure that there was considerable black-on-black violence and that property owners (of any color) protected themselves from looters (of any color) using deadly force.
But what is really odd is that to this day there is no one officially investigating any of the deaths that happened during that time period. Not the police, not the DA. And the murderers themselves don't think anything will happen to them - they are supposedly on video admitting to what they did.
I suppose it's just a testament to the incompetence and corruption of the New Orleans city government.
