Two years later, blockade of bridge during Katrina's chaos remains divisive
/From the Newhouse News Service September 4, 2007
By CHRIS KIRKHAM and PAUL PURPURA
Two years later, anger creeps up in Kim Cantwell Sr. when he thinks about the Jefferson Parish deputy who aimed an assault rifle at his 22-year-old son, barring the family with five children in tow from walking across the Crescent City Connection to their Algiers Point home in the days after Hurricane Katrina.
"I wonder to this day what was he thinking about?" Cantwell asked recently. "Did he even care? You bet I'm pissed. I bury it every day, but you bet I'm still pissed."
Three miles away in Gretna, Police Chief Arthur Lawson, one of three law enforcement leaders who sanctioned the blockade, makes no excuses for his actions.
"I don't second-guess this decision. I know I made it for the right reasons," said Lawson, referring to the desire to prevent the looting and crime in New Orleans from spreading across the river. "I go to sleep every night with a clear conscience."
The two men have never met, but they represent opposite ends of one of the most controversial chapters of Katrina's aftermath: the decision to close the bridge to people, mostly African-Americans, trying to flee the chaos and flooding that engulfed New Orleans.
Not only did the blockade spawn state and federal investigations and five lawsuits targeting Gretna, its police force, Lawson, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee and other law enforcement agencies, the episode vaulted the New Orleans area's historical struggle with race and class onto an international stage. It seared images and stirred racial tensions as tales of white shotgun-toting cops and attack dogs keeping desperate African-Americans from entering the suburban West Bank community began circulating in the hectic days after the storm.
But interviews with dozens of those involved, including Gretna officials speaking for the first time, paint a more nuanced picture.
On one side are those who say Lawson, who is white, and other suburban police authorities placed more value on property than human life. On the other are many Gretna residents, black and white, who firmly support law enforcement's decisions.
While they stand by their actions, leaders of the enclave of 17,000 residents 12 percent of whom are African-American, according to the 2000 census say they welcomed many families flooded out of New Orleans since the storm. They are confident the court of law will correct judgments made about their city in the court of public opinion.
"Am I going to be stuck with the `racist' legacy of what happened on the bridge?" asked Gretna Mayor Ronnie Harris, who is white. "Maybe so. Do I think it's fair? It's not. There's another chapter to be told, hopefully."
In the eyes of Gretna police officials, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and other West Bank leaders, Gretna went into lockdown immediately after the storm. Armed officers and junk vehicles blocked major entrances into the city. No one was allowed in without proof of residence, and those who had remained were urged to leave if they could.
But beginning Aug. 31, two days after the storm, a stream of evacuees started appearing at Gretna's city limits. Some had walked across the bridge to the Terry Parkway exit; some were brought in by Regional Transit Authority bus drivers desperately trying to ferry people out of the floodwaters.
Gretna officials said storm victims came to Terry Parkway because New Orleans police officers were blocking the exit ramps to General de Gaulle Drive, the first exit on the West Bank end of the bridge, within the city limits of New Orleans. NOPD spokesman Sgt. Joe Narcisse said officers never blocked the ramps.
As hundreds and eventually thousands of evacuees collected beneath the West Bank Expressway across from the Oakwood Center shopping mall that day, Gretna officials said they had little food or water to offer.
So police and city workers broke into a Jefferson Parish bus barn and hotwired two buses later that afternoon. Another police officer owned a school bus. For more than 12 hours they brought the evacuees across the Huey P. Long Bridge to dry land on the east bank at Causeway Boulevard and Interstate 10 in Metairie, where a makeshift evacuation hub had been established.
Lawson and Harris estimate they evacuated close to 6,000 people, with the help of some Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies. But the crowds continued to grow under the elevated expressway at Whitney Avenue on the West Bank, they said.
"It was getting to the point where we just couldn't physically continue to run the buses 24 hours a day evacuating people," Lawson said. "The more people we would move, the more were coming."
On Aug. 31, Harris said he reached the governor's office and arranged a hasty, 2 a.m. meeting with the governor's husband, Raymond "Coach" Blanco, and Sam Jones, an aide to the governor. Lawson, Harris, Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts and other Gretna police officials were present.
At that time, West Bank officials said they were promised that hundreds of buses were coming to evacuate the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
Jones, in a recent interview, said his recollection of the meeting was vague, but he believed buses naturally would have come up.
"There were buses going in from the beginning, but it was a trickle," said Jones, now special assistant to the governor. "We were operating in the environment of a Mad Max movie. You were scrapping for every drop of gasoline, every set of wheels you could get. You sent them where you heard the screaming."
With the knowledge that buses were arriving, Lawson said he met soon afterward with the sheriff, who gave the thumbs up to the decision. On the morning of Sept. 1, Lawson, Sheriff's Office Deputy Chief Craig Taffaro and the Crescent City Connection police blocked the bridge to pedestrians. Vehicles were allowed to cross. Gretna police took the West Bank-bound lanes, the Sheriff's Office the east bank-bound lanes and the bridge police took the commuter lanes.
Around the same time, looters set fire to Oakwood mall.
"Whatever spin anyone puts on it, we do know in our hearts that it was the right thing to do," Taffaro said. "It made no sense to leave one deplorable area to come to another."
Meanwhile, close to 8,000 mostly white evacuees from St. Bernard Parish were being brought to Algiers from the Chalmette ferry landing via boats and barges. Buses were sent to Algiers to evacuate those storm victims, Jones said.
Gretna officials said they knew of that operation but discouraged state officials from directing the evacuees into their city for the same reasons they closed the bridge: They didn't have the resources to provide for them.
Eventually the buses came. But they went to New Orleans, not Gretna, West Bank law enforcement officials said.
The Cantwells, who are white, rode out the storm at a Canal Street hotel, their car trapped in a nearby parking garage. The hotel met their needs, but food and fuel for the generator ran low. They had to make a move, and after hearing a radio report of people walking across the bridge, decided to go to their Delaronde Street home in Algiers Point, where they could get another car to leave the area.
They set out Sept. 1 about noon with their children among them. The youngest was 8 months old.
Carrying gear and pushing two baby strollers as they walked up the Camp Street off-ramp from the Pontchartrain Expressway, they encountered some New Orleans police officers and National Guardsmen, who offered them food and water. None told them they could not cross the bridge, Cantwell said.
Others were walking across the bridge to the West Bank, too, he said; they snapped pictures of themselves, relieved and smiling because they were going to their home.
They got no farther than the toll plaza, where the bridge meets the ground in Algiers. There, the Jefferson Parish deputy immediately called out through his car's loudspeaker, "You're not walking into this parish," Cantwell said, puzzled because they never planned to walk into Jefferson.
His son, Kim Cantwell Jr., then 22, tried to show the deputy his driver's license, with their Delaronde Street address. They pointed toward Algiers. It was for naught.
"Instead of talking to us, he pulled an M-16 and pointed it at my son's face," Cantwell said.
Escorted back to the east bank by the deputy and a Crescent City Connection police officer, the Cantwells later trudged through waist-high water, holding the younger children and their gear above the waterline, as they walked to the Superdome, where they spent a harrowing night.
After standing in line for more than 13 hours, they boarded a bus the next evening that took them to Fort Worth, Texas.
When the blockade was brought to the public's attention, accusations began to fly about shotguns being fired over evacuees' heads and callous police officers turning away families and people in wheelchairs.
Lawson admits that one of his officers, who is black, fired a warning shot over his shoulder when a crowd started to threaten to throw him off the bridge.
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two San Francisco paramedics in the city for a convention, said they were told to cross the bridge by New Orleans police stationed near Harrah's New Orleans Casino. They are white.
"I always think unless there's a compelling reason not to help somebody, that you help somebody in need," Bradshaw said recently. "It's part of the whole American frontier character, and it seemed like Gretna violated that."
The New Orleans Police Department has denied it ever officially directed evacuees over the bridge. However, Mayor Ray Nagin, in an "SOS" statement that was quoted by CNN, said to the thousands of people gathered at the Convention Center that "we are now allowing people to march. They will be marching up to the Crescent City Connection to the (West Bank-bound) expressway to find relief."
In a recent interview, Nagin said the statement was meant to heighten awareness of the problems at the Convention Center, not to encourage people to cross the bridge into Gretna. Even two years later, he referred to police on the bridge using "attack dogs and machine guns," rumors at the time that law enforcement officials vehemently deny.
"All the neighboring parishes Plaquemines, St. Bernard were bringing their people here. We were kind of the dropping-off point for all these places," Nagin said. "So for another neighboring parish to say `no' was pretty unnerving."
Lawson said he has had no communication with New Orleans officials or the mayor's office since the storm. Harris, the Gretna mayor, had a brief conversation with Nagin about the bridge incident in January 2006 at a Louisiana Conference of Mayors meeting, after several unsuccessful attempts. He explained his reasoning to Nagin, who didn't accuse him or Lawson of racism. They haven't spoken since, Harris said.
In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina tore through stained-glass windows and flooded parts of his Gretna church, the Rev. Orin Grant's cell phone was abuzz with questions from congregants and longtime friends.
There were the usual concerns: How was his family? When would worship services begin? Then there were the news updates: "The power is back on in Gretna" ... "Oh, and did you hear about the people on the bridge?"
Though he was in a Houston hotel, details of the bridge blockade flowed in. From the outset, Grant, who is black, quickly threw his support behind law enforcement.
"If I thought this was a negative racial incident, I would have spoken up," said Grant, pastor of St. Paul's Baptist Church in the city's largely African-American McDonoghville neighborhood. "I don't take sides; I take a stand."
Grant's opinion is not unusual among residents.
In the weeks and months after the storm, hundreds of yard signs supporting Lawson and city workers sprang up across town. The Gretna and Jefferson Parish councils passed resolutions supporting the decision, and Lawson was presented with an award for his services by the Jefferson Parish Martin Luther King Jr. Task Force this year.
"Arthur Lawson is our employee, we are his boss," said Joe Roppolo, a white businessman whose Gretna Sign Works printed up about 600 of the support signs. "No matter what the rest of the world thinks, he did what his constituents wanted him to do. So we should take the heat if anyone does."
Some resentment lingers.
Percy Jupiter Jr., who is black, watched the evacuees stream over the bridge from the Fischer public housing development in Algiers.
"It looked like the New York marathon, except these people were running for their lives," said Jupiter, who now lives in Gretna. "The bottom line is that Gretna and Jefferson Parish thinks everyone across the river is a hoodlum. Gretna did not want them over here."
Others say the issue has largely faded amid more pressing concerns.
Rhonda Royal and her family saw the blockade, heard the warning shots and decided to turn around rather than approach the police on the bridge. Her home in eastern New Orleans was flooded, but she's since moved to Gretna.
"Some people might bring it up, but most are just trying to get on and rebuild what they've got," said Royal, who is black.
The Rev. Jesse Pate, pastor of Harvest Ripe Church in Gretna, comes down on both sides of the debatetrage that persists.
"You can look at it and say, `It would have been chaotic, people would have looted houses.' It was just one of those crazy moments in time, that anything would have been acceptable," said Pate, who is black. "But during that time, (law enforcement) valued property over the lives of those people. And that's where the tragedy is."
With five lawsuits and a criminal investigation in Orleans Parish looming, Gretna has largely borne the brunt of the fallout from the bridge incident.
"Our community has taken it on the chin at a national level," Harris said. "When civil order was breaking down, we did something about it. Yet when we take a common sense approach when buses are coming, we get our heads knocked in a PR battle."
State Attorney General Charles Foti completed an investigation and turned over his findings to both the Orleans Parish district attorney's office and the U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans a year ago.
Foti's office will not release the findings to the public. New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan also declined to make the report public. In August 2006, Jordan's then-spokeswoman told The Times-Picayune that prosecutors were preparing to present the matter to a grand jury. The district attorney's current spokesman said last week nothing has been presented.
The American Civil Liberties Union and The Times-Picayune also have been spurned in their attempts to get the report released to the public. "Because the investigation is still pending, my office is unable to provide you with information at this time," Jordan wrote Aug. 15 in rejecting the newspaper's request under the state's public records law.
The U.S. Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans also received Foti's report and monitored the case. The agencies have not found evidence sufficient to move forward with any criminal charges, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said.
"It's not an active investigation at this time," Letten said.
But attorneys in five civil lawsuits are pressing ahead their query.
Of the lawsuits, filed on behalf of both black and white plaintiffs, one is pending in Orleans Parish Civil District Court. The other four are in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, all allotted to Judge Mary Ann Vial Lemmon, an appointee of President Clinton.
As chairman of the Local and Municipal Affairs Committee, state Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, monitored the progress Foti's office made in its investigation of the blockade, presiding over a November 2005 hearing at which the attorney general testified on his query.
A month later, Fields' Baton Rouge law firm filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of a couple, followed by a second filed Aug. 29, 2006, which seeks class-action status. The federal court cases allege that police violated an array of constitutional rights, including freedom to assemble, freedom from excessive search and seizure and the right to travel.
Most of the cases are still in early stages, although one is scheduled for trial in January.
But one substantive ruling could have reverberations in the other three federal cases.
On March 30, in a victory for Gretna and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, Lemmon dismissed in one case the claim that the police violated the right to travel a claim made in other lawsuits.
She ruled that while people have "a fundamental right" to cross state lines, the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the question of intrastate travel, or that within a state.
Gretna's attorney, Franz Zibilich, said at the time the ruling "gutted" the lawsuit. Fields, representing the plaintiffs in that case, said the intrastate travel argument was "a very small portion of the lawsuits."
The ruling also is expected to affect other cases, said attorney Dane Ciolino, a Loyola University law professor who is not involved in the litigation.
"The basis for the dismissal of the intrastate travel argument should also apply to all cases, given that in all cases the plaintiffs were traveling from one point in Louisiana to another," Ciolino said in an e-mail.
Despite Lemmon's ruling, attorney Julian Baudier of New Orleans has kept the right-to-travel argument alive in representing an Algiers family that was turned back by Gretna police and now is suing them.
"My argument was, how do you know where my people were going?" Baudier said, adding that his clients' interstate travel right could have been violated because they considered fleeing to Texas. They ended up in Baton Rouge, he said.
Of the four cases in federal court, two were brought by Algiers families trying to return to their homes from downtown New Orleans.
"If it brings a little more humanity to a future catastrophe, that wouldn't hurt my feelings," Cantwell said of his lawsuit. "If I don't get a nickel out of this, maybe that cop, he'll think a little better."
They have a general description "a middle-aged guy with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache" but still do not know the deputy's name.
By CHRIS KIRKHAM and PAUL PURPURA
Two years later, anger creeps up in Kim Cantwell Sr. when he thinks about the Jefferson Parish deputy who aimed an assault rifle at his 22-year-old son, barring the family with five children in tow from walking across the Crescent City Connection to their Algiers Point home in the days after Hurricane Katrina.
"I wonder to this day what was he thinking about?" Cantwell asked recently. "Did he even care? You bet I'm pissed. I bury it every day, but you bet I'm still pissed."
Three miles away in Gretna, Police Chief Arthur Lawson, one of three law enforcement leaders who sanctioned the blockade, makes no excuses for his actions.
"I don't second-guess this decision. I know I made it for the right reasons," said Lawson, referring to the desire to prevent the looting and crime in New Orleans from spreading across the river. "I go to sleep every night with a clear conscience."
The two men have never met, but they represent opposite ends of one of the most controversial chapters of Katrina's aftermath: the decision to close the bridge to people, mostly African-Americans, trying to flee the chaos and flooding that engulfed New Orleans.
Not only did the blockade spawn state and federal investigations and five lawsuits targeting Gretna, its police force, Lawson, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee and other law enforcement agencies, the episode vaulted the New Orleans area's historical struggle with race and class onto an international stage. It seared images and stirred racial tensions as tales of white shotgun-toting cops and attack dogs keeping desperate African-Americans from entering the suburban West Bank community began circulating in the hectic days after the storm.
But interviews with dozens of those involved, including Gretna officials speaking for the first time, paint a more nuanced picture.
On one side are those who say Lawson, who is white, and other suburban police authorities placed more value on property than human life. On the other are many Gretna residents, black and white, who firmly support law enforcement's decisions.
While they stand by their actions, leaders of the enclave of 17,000 residents 12 percent of whom are African-American, according to the 2000 census say they welcomed many families flooded out of New Orleans since the storm. They are confident the court of law will correct judgments made about their city in the court of public opinion.
"Am I going to be stuck with the `racist' legacy of what happened on the bridge?" asked Gretna Mayor Ronnie Harris, who is white. "Maybe so. Do I think it's fair? It's not. There's another chapter to be told, hopefully."
In the eyes of Gretna police officials, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and other West Bank leaders, Gretna went into lockdown immediately after the storm. Armed officers and junk vehicles blocked major entrances into the city. No one was allowed in without proof of residence, and those who had remained were urged to leave if they could.
But beginning Aug. 31, two days after the storm, a stream of evacuees started appearing at Gretna's city limits. Some had walked across the bridge to the Terry Parkway exit; some were brought in by Regional Transit Authority bus drivers desperately trying to ferry people out of the floodwaters.
Gretna officials said storm victims came to Terry Parkway because New Orleans police officers were blocking the exit ramps to General de Gaulle Drive, the first exit on the West Bank end of the bridge, within the city limits of New Orleans. NOPD spokesman Sgt. Joe Narcisse said officers never blocked the ramps.
As hundreds and eventually thousands of evacuees collected beneath the West Bank Expressway across from the Oakwood Center shopping mall that day, Gretna officials said they had little food or water to offer.
So police and city workers broke into a Jefferson Parish bus barn and hotwired two buses later that afternoon. Another police officer owned a school bus. For more than 12 hours they brought the evacuees across the Huey P. Long Bridge to dry land on the east bank at Causeway Boulevard and Interstate 10 in Metairie, where a makeshift evacuation hub had been established.
Lawson and Harris estimate they evacuated close to 6,000 people, with the help of some Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies. But the crowds continued to grow under the elevated expressway at Whitney Avenue on the West Bank, they said.
"It was getting to the point where we just couldn't physically continue to run the buses 24 hours a day evacuating people," Lawson said. "The more people we would move, the more were coming."
On Aug. 31, Harris said he reached the governor's office and arranged a hasty, 2 a.m. meeting with the governor's husband, Raymond "Coach" Blanco, and Sam Jones, an aide to the governor. Lawson, Harris, Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts and other Gretna police officials were present.
At that time, West Bank officials said they were promised that hundreds of buses were coming to evacuate the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
Jones, in a recent interview, said his recollection of the meeting was vague, but he believed buses naturally would have come up.
"There were buses going in from the beginning, but it was a trickle," said Jones, now special assistant to the governor. "We were operating in the environment of a Mad Max movie. You were scrapping for every drop of gasoline, every set of wheels you could get. You sent them where you heard the screaming."
With the knowledge that buses were arriving, Lawson said he met soon afterward with the sheriff, who gave the thumbs up to the decision. On the morning of Sept. 1, Lawson, Sheriff's Office Deputy Chief Craig Taffaro and the Crescent City Connection police blocked the bridge to pedestrians. Vehicles were allowed to cross. Gretna police took the West Bank-bound lanes, the Sheriff's Office the east bank-bound lanes and the bridge police took the commuter lanes.
Around the same time, looters set fire to Oakwood mall.
"Whatever spin anyone puts on it, we do know in our hearts that it was the right thing to do," Taffaro said. "It made no sense to leave one deplorable area to come to another."
Meanwhile, close to 8,000 mostly white evacuees from St. Bernard Parish were being brought to Algiers from the Chalmette ferry landing via boats and barges. Buses were sent to Algiers to evacuate those storm victims, Jones said.
Gretna officials said they knew of that operation but discouraged state officials from directing the evacuees into their city for the same reasons they closed the bridge: They didn't have the resources to provide for them.
Eventually the buses came. But they went to New Orleans, not Gretna, West Bank law enforcement officials said.
The Cantwells, who are white, rode out the storm at a Canal Street hotel, their car trapped in a nearby parking garage. The hotel met their needs, but food and fuel for the generator ran low. They had to make a move, and after hearing a radio report of people walking across the bridge, decided to go to their Delaronde Street home in Algiers Point, where they could get another car to leave the area.
They set out Sept. 1 about noon with their children among them. The youngest was 8 months old.
Carrying gear and pushing two baby strollers as they walked up the Camp Street off-ramp from the Pontchartrain Expressway, they encountered some New Orleans police officers and National Guardsmen, who offered them food and water. None told them they could not cross the bridge, Cantwell said.
Others were walking across the bridge to the West Bank, too, he said; they snapped pictures of themselves, relieved and smiling because they were going to their home.
They got no farther than the toll plaza, where the bridge meets the ground in Algiers. There, the Jefferson Parish deputy immediately called out through his car's loudspeaker, "You're not walking into this parish," Cantwell said, puzzled because they never planned to walk into Jefferson.
His son, Kim Cantwell Jr., then 22, tried to show the deputy his driver's license, with their Delaronde Street address. They pointed toward Algiers. It was for naught.
"Instead of talking to us, he pulled an M-16 and pointed it at my son's face," Cantwell said.
Escorted back to the east bank by the deputy and a Crescent City Connection police officer, the Cantwells later trudged through waist-high water, holding the younger children and their gear above the waterline, as they walked to the Superdome, where they spent a harrowing night.
After standing in line for more than 13 hours, they boarded a bus the next evening that took them to Fort Worth, Texas.
When the blockade was brought to the public's attention, accusations began to fly about shotguns being fired over evacuees' heads and callous police officers turning away families and people in wheelchairs.
Lawson admits that one of his officers, who is black, fired a warning shot over his shoulder when a crowd started to threaten to throw him off the bridge.
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two San Francisco paramedics in the city for a convention, said they were told to cross the bridge by New Orleans police stationed near Harrah's New Orleans Casino. They are white.
"I always think unless there's a compelling reason not to help somebody, that you help somebody in need," Bradshaw said recently. "It's part of the whole American frontier character, and it seemed like Gretna violated that."
The New Orleans Police Department has denied it ever officially directed evacuees over the bridge. However, Mayor Ray Nagin, in an "SOS" statement that was quoted by CNN, said to the thousands of people gathered at the Convention Center that "we are now allowing people to march. They will be marching up to the Crescent City Connection to the (West Bank-bound) expressway to find relief."
In a recent interview, Nagin said the statement was meant to heighten awareness of the problems at the Convention Center, not to encourage people to cross the bridge into Gretna. Even two years later, he referred to police on the bridge using "attack dogs and machine guns," rumors at the time that law enforcement officials vehemently deny.
"All the neighboring parishes Plaquemines, St. Bernard were bringing their people here. We were kind of the dropping-off point for all these places," Nagin said. "So for another neighboring parish to say `no' was pretty unnerving."
Lawson said he has had no communication with New Orleans officials or the mayor's office since the storm. Harris, the Gretna mayor, had a brief conversation with Nagin about the bridge incident in January 2006 at a Louisiana Conference of Mayors meeting, after several unsuccessful attempts. He explained his reasoning to Nagin, who didn't accuse him or Lawson of racism. They haven't spoken since, Harris said.
In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina tore through stained-glass windows and flooded parts of his Gretna church, the Rev. Orin Grant's cell phone was abuzz with questions from congregants and longtime friends.
There were the usual concerns: How was his family? When would worship services begin? Then there were the news updates: "The power is back on in Gretna" ... "Oh, and did you hear about the people on the bridge?"
Though he was in a Houston hotel, details of the bridge blockade flowed in. From the outset, Grant, who is black, quickly threw his support behind law enforcement.
"If I thought this was a negative racial incident, I would have spoken up," said Grant, pastor of St. Paul's Baptist Church in the city's largely African-American McDonoghville neighborhood. "I don't take sides; I take a stand."
Grant's opinion is not unusual among residents.
In the weeks and months after the storm, hundreds of yard signs supporting Lawson and city workers sprang up across town. The Gretna and Jefferson Parish councils passed resolutions supporting the decision, and Lawson was presented with an award for his services by the Jefferson Parish Martin Luther King Jr. Task Force this year.
"Arthur Lawson is our employee, we are his boss," said Joe Roppolo, a white businessman whose Gretna Sign Works printed up about 600 of the support signs. "No matter what the rest of the world thinks, he did what his constituents wanted him to do. So we should take the heat if anyone does."
Some resentment lingers.
Percy Jupiter Jr., who is black, watched the evacuees stream over the bridge from the Fischer public housing development in Algiers.
"It looked like the New York marathon, except these people were running for their lives," said Jupiter, who now lives in Gretna. "The bottom line is that Gretna and Jefferson Parish thinks everyone across the river is a hoodlum. Gretna did not want them over here."
Others say the issue has largely faded amid more pressing concerns.
Rhonda Royal and her family saw the blockade, heard the warning shots and decided to turn around rather than approach the police on the bridge. Her home in eastern New Orleans was flooded, but she's since moved to Gretna.
"Some people might bring it up, but most are just trying to get on and rebuild what they've got," said Royal, who is black.
The Rev. Jesse Pate, pastor of Harvest Ripe Church in Gretna, comes down on both sides of the debatetrage that persists.
"You can look at it and say, `It would have been chaotic, people would have looted houses.' It was just one of those crazy moments in time, that anything would have been acceptable," said Pate, who is black. "But during that time, (law enforcement) valued property over the lives of those people. And that's where the tragedy is."
With five lawsuits and a criminal investigation in Orleans Parish looming, Gretna has largely borne the brunt of the fallout from the bridge incident.
"Our community has taken it on the chin at a national level," Harris said. "When civil order was breaking down, we did something about it. Yet when we take a common sense approach when buses are coming, we get our heads knocked in a PR battle."
State Attorney General Charles Foti completed an investigation and turned over his findings to both the Orleans Parish district attorney's office and the U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans a year ago.
Foti's office will not release the findings to the public. New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan also declined to make the report public. In August 2006, Jordan's then-spokeswoman told The Times-Picayune that prosecutors were preparing to present the matter to a grand jury. The district attorney's current spokesman said last week nothing has been presented.
The American Civil Liberties Union and The Times-Picayune also have been spurned in their attempts to get the report released to the public. "Because the investigation is still pending, my office is unable to provide you with information at this time," Jordan wrote Aug. 15 in rejecting the newspaper's request under the state's public records law.
The U.S. Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans also received Foti's report and monitored the case. The agencies have not found evidence sufficient to move forward with any criminal charges, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said.
"It's not an active investigation at this time," Letten said.
But attorneys in five civil lawsuits are pressing ahead their query.
Of the lawsuits, filed on behalf of both black and white plaintiffs, one is pending in Orleans Parish Civil District Court. The other four are in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, all allotted to Judge Mary Ann Vial Lemmon, an appointee of President Clinton.
As chairman of the Local and Municipal Affairs Committee, state Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, monitored the progress Foti's office made in its investigation of the blockade, presiding over a November 2005 hearing at which the attorney general testified on his query.
A month later, Fields' Baton Rouge law firm filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of a couple, followed by a second filed Aug. 29, 2006, which seeks class-action status. The federal court cases allege that police violated an array of constitutional rights, including freedom to assemble, freedom from excessive search and seizure and the right to travel.
Most of the cases are still in early stages, although one is scheduled for trial in January.
But one substantive ruling could have reverberations in the other three federal cases.
On March 30, in a victory for Gretna and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, Lemmon dismissed in one case the claim that the police violated the right to travel a claim made in other lawsuits.
She ruled that while people have "a fundamental right" to cross state lines, the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on the question of intrastate travel, or that within a state.
Gretna's attorney, Franz Zibilich, said at the time the ruling "gutted" the lawsuit. Fields, representing the plaintiffs in that case, said the intrastate travel argument was "a very small portion of the lawsuits."
The ruling also is expected to affect other cases, said attorney Dane Ciolino, a Loyola University law professor who is not involved in the litigation.
"The basis for the dismissal of the intrastate travel argument should also apply to all cases, given that in all cases the plaintiffs were traveling from one point in Louisiana to another," Ciolino said in an e-mail.
Despite Lemmon's ruling, attorney Julian Baudier of New Orleans has kept the right-to-travel argument alive in representing an Algiers family that was turned back by Gretna police and now is suing them.
"My argument was, how do you know where my people were going?" Baudier said, adding that his clients' interstate travel right could have been violated because they considered fleeing to Texas. They ended up in Baton Rouge, he said.
Of the four cases in federal court, two were brought by Algiers families trying to return to their homes from downtown New Orleans.
"If it brings a little more humanity to a future catastrophe, that wouldn't hurt my feelings," Cantwell said of his lawsuit. "If I don't get a nickel out of this, maybe that cop, he'll think a little better."
They have a general description "a middle-aged guy with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache" but still do not know the deputy's name.
