New Orleans – On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Superintendent Eddie Compass reported: “We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten.”
Five days later, he told Oprah Winfrey of babies being raped. On the same show, Mayor C. Ray Nagin warned: “They have people standing out there, have been in that … Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”
The ugliest reports – children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement – soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.
The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations, including The Associated Press, carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and later repeated some claims as fact.
But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.
They have no official reports of rape. The state Department of Health and Hospitals count 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center.
Only two of those are believed to have been murdered. One of those victims – found at the Superdome – appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.
“It was a chaotic time for the city. Now that we’ve had a chance to reflect back on that situation, we’re able to say right now that things were not the way they appeared,” said police Capt. Marlon Defillo.
Sally Forman, a spokeswoman for Nagin, said the mayor was relying on others for his information about conditions at the evacuation sites. “He was listening to officials, trusting that information they were providing was accurate,” she said.
Conditions at both sites were chaotic. Water was rising around the Superdome, home to 20,000 evacuees. Toilets were backing up, garbage was rotting, fights were breaking out. Food was in short supply at the convention center, where about 19,000 people took shelter from the rising waters. The temperature was climbing.
Police said they saw muzzle flashes at the convention center, and a National Guard member was shot in the leg when an evacuee tried to take his gun.
Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard said reports of violence at the Superdome and the convention center were overblown. He was head of security at the Superdome and led the 1,000 military police and infantrymen who went in to secure the center on Sept. 2.
“The incidents were highly exaggerated” – the result of fear and hopelessness, he said. “For the amount of the people in the situation, it was a very stable environment.”
Thibodeaux said his guard unit received no reports of rape.
Bill Waldron, a homicide detective from Florida in New Orleans for a murder trial, was stuck in the convention center until Sept. 1. He said he saw a couple of fights between young men, but “no murders, no rapes.” He said that he did see people dying, but that those deaths were most likely a result of the heat and lack of water.
“People were wanting just some type of authority to come in and say, ‘Hey, this is what’s going to happen,”‘ Waldron said.
“People were scared.” New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan said officials at the morgue in St. Gabriel have identified four apparent homicide victims from the city. All were shot and all were adults. Police arrested one person on suspicion of attempted sexual assault but received no official reports of rape.
Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, cautioned that it might be too soon to say whether there really were rapes at the evacuation sites. Because the evacuees and any perpetrators have been scattered across the country by Katrina, and now Hurricane Rita, victims may come forward later, she said.
“It is extremely difficult to get good statistics about rape under normal circumstances, and these are certainly not normal circumstances,” she said.
Bill Ellis, a folklorist at Pennsylvania State University, said rumors in an environment like that at the evacuation centers are to be expected, given the frightening circumstances and paucity of authoritative information.
“Rumors become improvised news. You become your own anchorman,” he said.
The chaos also seemed to affect some reporters and editors, said Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics to journalists at the Poynter Institute, a journalism research and education center in St.
Petersburg, Fla.
“You get so hung up as a reporter on what the big picture is that you use generalizations that become untrue,” McBride said.
