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Rescuers: Katrina Death Toll Boosted by Violence
Rescue and recovery workers returning from New Orleans say they've found a shocking number of victims who died - not from Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters - but from gunshot wounds and other forms of violence apparently inflicted by gangs who terrorized the city after the storm struck. After patrolling the city's mean streets the Monday morning after the floods hit, New Orleans fire and rescue worker Gary Hatch said the first bodies he recovered died of either gunshot wounds or had their throats slit. "It's hard to believe people could turn against one another like that," he told an Arizona newspaper. "We're seeing stuff you don't ever expect to see." Maine emergency worker Dan Wiltshire echoed Hatch's account, telling his hometown newspaper, "I have seen a few gunshot wounds . . . Given that New Orleans is known to be a violent city, I can’t believe that the National Guard wasn’t called in earlier.”
Story Continues Below "Everywhere I went, I saw people with guns in their hands," said one survivor, describing the mayhem at the New Orleans Convention Center to the Washington Post. "They were putting guns to people's heads." 10 to 12 people died in the Superdome alone, city officials said. "It was horrendous," recalled Sgt. Tony Small, a major crimes cold-case investigator for the New Orleans Police Department. Small told the New Orleans Times-Picayune he had confirmed that at least four rapes occurred in the Dome. One of victims was a 2-year-old girl. As death toll figures in New Orleans rapidly approach the 500 mark, it's still too early to tell what percentage died from violence and other non-hurricane related factors. But in a city with a murder rate ten times the national average, officials are beginning to warn that the number of non-storm deaths may be significant. Dr. Louis Cataldie, medical director of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said deaths from other causes make it difficult to assess Katrina's true impact. "If you're a dialysis patient and can't get to a dialysis machine, that's a hurricane-related death," Cataldie told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "A gunshot-victim, no, he's not a hurricane-related death." Don Moreau, spokesman with the East Baton Rouge Coroner's Office, echoed Cataldie, saying, "A lot of those people didn't die as result of the hurricane. They died from whatever they died of." Speaking at a symposium in New York last week, Arthur Jones, chief of disaster recovery for Louisiana's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, told the Associated Press that his agency he was caught off guard by the tidal wave of violence. No disaster planner, he said, predicted that people would loot gun stores after the storm and shoot at police, rescue officials and helicopters.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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