Doubts Now Surround Account of Snipers Amid New Orleans Chaos
Los Angeles Times November 24, 2005
By James Rainey, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nosnipers24nov24,0,5443409,full.story
NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane
Katrina, the
news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight
snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the
gun battle
that followed, officers
shot to death five or six of the marauders.
Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their
comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an
account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the
incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets.
But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions
of the
official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to
two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct
what
happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side,
where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are
preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those
told by police.
A teenager critically
wounded that day, speaking about the incident for
the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no
reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he
thought was an
assault rifle. Members of another family said
one of
those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a
rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the
flood.
The two families — one from New Orleans East and solidly
middle class,
the other poorer and rooted in the Lower 9th Ward — have
offered only
preliminary information about what they say happened that day. Large
gaps remain in the police and civilian accounts of the incident.
News of the Danziger Bridge shootings roared across cable television
for a time. But as with many overblown reports of crime and violence
immediately after the hurricane, the facts remain elusive.
The final findings seem likely to become a provocative centerpiece in
assessments of the New Orleans Police Department's performance in the
hurly-burly days after Katrina.
Many officers remained at their posts during and after the storm.
Despite losing their patrol cars and running out of ammunition, they
improvised to keep assisting in relief efforts. But others abetted the
lawlessness — abandoning their posts or joining in the
looting.
As in all officer-involved shootings in New Orleans, the Police
Department has undertaken a review and is expected to turn its findings
over to the district attorney's office in the next few weeks. Police
Department spokesman Marlon Defillo said it was not unusual that the
suspects had given a divergent view of the shootings. But he said
homicide investigators would take all accounts seriously, a position
reiterated by the office of Dist. Atty. Eddie Jordan.
"We are looking at everyone's involvement," said Leatrice Dupre, the
district attorney's spokeswoman. She said the investigation "may find
that the police were unjust in this shooting. Or it may not. We just
don't know."
Today, a late-autumn chill has descended on New Orleans, signaling the
end of hurricane season, at last. The Danziger Bridge stands mostly
quiet, with an occasional car or truck crossing to and from New Orleans
East neighborhoods left in ruins.
On Sept. 4, it was different. The half-mile-long span delivers the Chef
Menteur Highway over the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal and into the
city's east side. As a high and dry ridge in the middle of inundated
neighborhoods, the highway became a magnet for evacuees.
A small dose of order had emerged in parts of New Orleans on that
Sunday morning, with the National Guard deployed in force and
evacuations underway at the teeming Superdome and Convention Center.
But before 9 a.m., the police reported snipers shooting from the
bridge. Initial accounts given to the media by Deputy Police Chief W.J.
Riley had the targets as 14 civilian contractors, part of a convoy that
drove to the area to help with storm repairs.
But in a measure of the confusion and poor communication that
prevailed, another police official gave a different account.
"Five men who were
looting exchanged gunfire with police. The officers
engaged the looters when they were fired upon," killing four,
said
Steven Nichols, the police official, according to the Reuters news
agency.
In the following weeks, the official account would be modified again.
It turned out, police said, that only two of the suspects had been
killed.
Although not disclosed by police, one of the dead was the mentally
retarded man, 40-year-old Ronald Madison, family and friends said. The
other was a 19-year-old man. Four others were injured: Leonard
Bartholomew, 44; his wife, Susan, 39; their daughter, Leisha, 17; and
their nephew, Jose Holmes Jr., 19.
A month after the shootings, the Police Department issued a statement
giving its most complete account. It said that seven officers had
responded to a
call, not from contractors but from two officers "down."
The statement said a sheriff's deputy from a neighboring
parish had
requested backup because of "gunfire from several
persons on the same
bridge" — shots directed at relief workers in boats.
Lance Madison and his brother Ronald walked to the highway that
morning. But family and friends insist that they couldn't be further
from the profile of those who would shoot at police.
Lance Madison, 49, had played football at Southern University, a wide
receiver who had a chance at the pros before settling into a career
with Federal Express, his relatives said. Ronald Madison, nearly a
decade younger, had been mentally disabled since birth. He seldom
ventured beyond the tidy family home on Lafon Drive, where he lived
with his mother, 1 1/2 miles east of the bridge.
Ronald had a childlike demeanor and was best remembered in the
neighborhood of well-kept homes for endlessly walking the family dog,
Bobby, up and down the block. Neighbors said if they needed to borrow
milk or a cup of sugar, Ronald liked to deliver it, usually at a dead
run.
Another brother, Raymond Madison, was also mentally disabled. "They
were very clean and very polite and everything like that," said Louis
Bart, who last week was cleaning out a home across the street from the
Madisons'. "They were grown men but they wouldn't hurt a fly."
A fourth Madison brother, Romell, is a dentist and a prominent
community figure who has served on several state commissions, mostly
involving healthcare. He said that his brothers, after being stranded
for several days on the roof of Lance's apartment building in New
Orleans East, were trying to reach his office on the Chef Menteur
Highway. To get there they had to cross the Danziger Bridge.
But when they were nearing their destination, gun-toting teenagers shot
at the brothers and sent them running, Lance testified at
a September
preliminary hearing.
"We ran for our lives," Lance told a judge at the hearing, where he
faced eight felony counts for the attempted murder of eight police
officers. The brothers escaped only to encounter another group of men
—
assembled at the west end of the bridge.
Police officers in those unsteady days appeared far from standard
issue. Many were out of
uniform, and some carried their own "toys"
—
hunting rifles,
AK-47s, carbines — one officer said in an
earlier
interview. Their police pistols had become useless when they ran out of
ammunition.
The police said Lance Madison had fired on officers then fled, heaving
his gun into the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, known locally as the
Industrial Canal, which connects the Mississippi River and Lake
Pontchartrain.
Chief Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Gerard Hansen, who presided at
the preliminary hearing, said he found it "hard to believe" that
Madison would have been shooting at anyone that day.
In the police statement on the incident, Ronald is not named. It says
only that the "suspect" accompanying Lance fled to a motel about a
block from the west end of the bridge. "The suspect reached into his
waist and turned toward the officer," the statement said, "who fired
one shot fatally wounding him."
Despite the judge's skepticism, he did not dismiss charges against
Lance Madison, who still faces attempted murder charges — one
count for
each of the seven New Orleans police and one for the sheriff's deputy
on the scene. He is free on bail but is not speaking about the case, on
advice from his lawyer, Nathan Fisher.
Dressed in his green dentist's scrubs at the end of one recent workday,
Romell Madison said his family was anxious to tell the full story
— once the lawyer gives the OK.
"It will be worth a movie," he said. "The truth will come out at the
end of this."
Members of the Bartholomew family, driven out of the Lower 9th Ward by
the flooding, also arrived at the bridge that morning. They had
evacuated to the higher ground of the Chef Menteur Highway and found
two rooms at a Family Inns of America motel.
Instead of refuge, however, the 10 relatives found themselves packed
into the motel with drug addicts, prostitutes and criminals. Gunfire
rang out regularly, they said.
"A lot of people were running past us with guns and robbing people in
the hotel and stuff," said Jontae Holmes, 16, a niece of the
Bartholomews. "Then the generators got messed up and the lights started
going off. It was scary."
Six days after the storm hit, Jontae said, her aunt and uncle crossed
the bridge to retrieve a wallet they had left at home. Susan and
Leonard Bartholomew hoped to catch a rescue boat to navigate the
still-flooded streets, the teenager said.
The Bartholomews' nephew, Jose Holmes Jr., 19, went along, as did one
of his friends, another 19-year-old, who planned to search for his
missing mother, Holmes said. Several other family members remained at
the motel.
Police said Jose
Holmes and his friend were among a group of "at least
four suspects" near the east end of the bridge who began
shooting at
officers. When police returned fire, they said, the shooters jumped
over a concrete barrier to a pedestrian walkway along the north side of
the span. The suspects continued firing from behind the barrier, the
police said.
On the day he was released from the West Jefferson Medical Center last
week, Jose Holmes Jr. insisted that was not how it happened. Speaking
haltingly, just above a whisper and nodding to answer some questions,
the 108-pound teenager continued to move slowly after 10 weeks in the
hospital.
The teenager said he was "just walking" with his family and his friend
when gunfire erupted behind them.
"It was loud, real loud. After we heard the gunshots, we just started
running," said Holmes, who displayed wounds to his arm, neck, chin and
stomach. "Then we hopped over into a little walkway."
Holmes said he was down and badly wounded when one of the men
approached, put an assault rifle to his stomach and pulled the trigger.
He said he didn't get a good look at the shooters.
"They came up real close, real close," Holmes said, adding that he was
too terrified to look up. "They was trying to kill us."
A colostomy bag now drains Holmes' bowels. His left forefinger and
thumb are frozen. Doctors told him the hand had nerve damage.
Leonard, Susan and Leisha Bartholomew were also wounded by the police.
Susan lost an arm to what the family believed was a shotgun
blast.
Relatives said all three — who evacuated to Texas after their
hospital stays — were too traumatized to talk about the
incident.
The preliminary
conclusion of the investigation is that none of the
three Bartholomews was carrying a gun that day, said police spokesmanDefillo.
But their nephew, Jose Holmes, who has moved into his father's
Georgia home, is suspected of targeting the police. He will be charged
with attempted murder and possibly other crimes "imminently," Defillo
said.
The police spokesman said the snipers' weapons were found at the scene,
although he said he did not know what type of guns they were.
Authorities have not identified the other man killed by police that
day. But Holmes said it was his friend.
"Out of anger, frustration, no leadership, the police just went
berserk," said Jose Holmes Sr. on the day he brought his son home from
the hospital.
Defillo said police would investigate claims by both sides. He rejected
earlier accounts that officers had celebrated the bloody outcome.
"I was there and I didn't hear anybody cheering," Defillo said. "No one
was in the mood to be cheering about anything. We were rescuing people,
dealing with the loss of two police officers who committed suicide and
[coping] with 85% of our police officers being homeless. I didn't see
joy then. I still haven't seen it."
*
New Orleans police say they shot and killed two snipers who fired from
the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 4. The Bartholomew and Madison families
say they did nothing to threaten police and were looking for relief and
refuge after Hurricane Katrina when the police opened fire.
*
Bartholomew family's version: The Bartholomews walked from a Family
Inns of America motel to the bridge. When they were about 100 yards
onto the bridge, police began shooting. They dove over a concrete
barrier to a pedestrian walkway for protection.
New Orleans police version: Police accuse Jose Holmes Jr., 19, a
Bartholomew nephew, of being one of the snipers. Police say the
shooters used the concrete barrier for protection and continued firing.
A friend of Holmes, also 19, was killed.
*
Madison family's version: Lance Madison said he and his brother Ronald,
who was mentally disabled, were crossing the bridge to reach the safety
of a dental office owned by their brother Romell. Family and friends
said Ronald Madison posed no threat to police.
New Orleans police version: Police say Lance Madison shot at them and
then dumped his gun into the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. Police say
they chased Ronald Madison, shooting and killing him when he made a
threatening motion in a motel parking lot near the west end of the
bridge.
