Bruce Weatherford worried about the time as he maneuvered his car onto an exit ramp of the Interstate-10 expressway in New Orleans. It was New Year’s Eve, the traffic was snaking along bumper to bumper, and Weatherford began to wish that he had left his parents’ home near the city’s lakefront earlier. As midnight neared, their two-story duplex had begun filling up with relatives noisily awaiting the arrival of 1973, and Weather ford had lingered to make another pass at his mother’s richly laden buffet table. Now, after driving his fiancée home, he was hurrying to make the eleven-o’clock roll call at Central Lock up, and he knew that even a few minutes’ tardiness would be duly noted in his work report. In over a year as a police cadet, that had never happened, and he was proud of his perfect attendance record on the long, monotonous graveyard shift that ended at seven in the morning.
As he pulled onto Tulane Avenue, Weatherford rechecked his watch and happily discovered that he still had ten minutes to relieve his friend Alfred Harrell in the lockup’s gatehouse. Both cadets were nineteen years old. Their nightly duty involved sitting behind a half-inch-thick plate of bulletproof glass, from which vantage they raised and lowered steel-mesh gates at both ends of a short tunnel called the sally port. From the sally port, prisoners were transferred into the booking room for fingerprinting, mugshots, and lockup. Despite the boredom, Weatherford didn’t mind the hours. As a cadet trying to enter the Police Academy, he was required to take a full load of courses at Loyola University, where he was working for a degree in criminology, and the gatehouse detail gave him more than enough time to study for his heavy schedule of classes.
Weatherford turned at Dupre and passed behind Police Head quarters and the adjoining building which housed Central Lockup. The complex covered a city block. Squad cars, motorcycles, and paddy wagons — all painted blue and white— were parked tightly on both sides of the narrow street. It was almost time for the watches to change, and patrols from NO the Eighth District (the station house was located inside headquarters) were checking in for roll call.
The lockup was to his left, a windowless ten-story structure of gray concrete to the rear of the modern steel-and-glass headquarters. Clusters of police, silhouetted in the bright light of the street lamps, stood talking inside the lockup’s open gates. Weatherford stopped to let a squad car pull in front of him and then turned onto Perdido Street, looking for a place to park. He drove past a sally-port gate and found a space across the street near a small cottage.
Glancing again at his watch, he saw that he was out of danger. He had a full five minutes left, and so he lingered in the car to listen to the closing seconds of the Sugar Bowl football game which was being played uptown at Tulane Stadium. After learning that Oklahoma had beaten Penn State, Weather ford got out and locked the door. When he turned toward the gatehouse, he could see Harrell sitting behind the green-tinted glass.
What Weatherford didn’t know as he crossed the street was that at that same moment, hidden behind him in the darkness, a young black man barely older than himself, was crouched with a rifle braced to fire, the sights aimed at Weatherford’s head.
The charge that was to explode that New Year’s Eve, one hour and five minutes before midnight, had been set almost two years earlier and half a continent away.