ON JUNE 27, 2011, day one of the trial for five of the six defendants who refused to plea, prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein rose and, in trademark fashion, spoke for more than an hour without a single note.
“Shoot first and ask questions later, that’s how this whole case got started,” Bernstein said, jumping instantly to the core of the government’s case. “These five defendants sitting here are current and former NOPD officers, four of whom gunned down, not one, not two, not three, but six innocent people on the Danziger Bridge.
“These defendants, Sergeant Ken Bowen, Sergeant Rob Gisevius, Officer Robert Faulcon, and Officer Anthony Villavaso, drove onto the Danziger Bridge and they opened fire. Without warning, without so much as yelling, ‘Police,’ they opened fire with assault rifles and a shotgun, mowing down an unarmed family as that family huddled behind a concrete barrier, wounded and confused, trying desperately to avoid the shots.
“And then that man, Officer Faulcon, traveled more than half a mile clear to the other side of the bridge, where he raised his shotgun one more time and he shot one more innocent person through the back. When all was said and done, two innocent people lay dead on the Danziger Bridge, four others seriously wounded.
“And as soon as the shooting stopped, these four defendants, guided by the fifth defendant back there, Sergeant Archie Kaufman, started lying to cover it up. They lied because they knew they had committed a crime, because they knew that officers are not allowed to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Meanwhile, seventy-five miles away in Baton Rouge, Andrea Celestine tried every day to hold on to hope. She had evacuated before the storm, but she had been separated from her mother and her little brother, seventeen-year-old James, JJ, Brissette. And every day she hoped would be the day she’d get word from her mom and her brother.”
She continued, “When that shooting finally stopped, young JJ Brissette was lying face down on a pedestrian walkway on the bridge. He had bullets in his feet, in his knee, in his legs, in his arms, and in the back of his head. JJ was dead, and Andrea would never see her brother again.
“When that shooting finally stopped, Susan Bartholomew was lying on the same walkway unable to move her right arm, which had been blasted apart by an assault rifle.
“As Susan laid there wondering what had just happened, she heard the cries of her husband, her daughter, and her nephew, all of whom had been shot around her. When that shooting finally stopped, Ronald Madison was lying in a pool of blood, blasted through the back with a shotgun. As Ronald laid there and died in the street, his older brother Lance, his protector, was arrested and taken to jail. For twenty-five days, Lance Madison would sit in jail accused of something he didn’t do, wondering whether he would ever be free again.
“And when that shooting finally stopped, these four men had a very big problem,” Bernstein said. “And you’re going to hear that they decided to make it go away, and that’s where the fifth defendant, Sergeant Kaufman, comes in.”
The prosecution team backed up Bernstein’s precise words with more than three hundred trial exhibits, from the assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols the officers fired to the shotgun shells and pellets later discovered splayed atop the bridge. The prosecution submitted the NOPD course manual on “Use of Force” to describe how severely off course the police had veered that morning.
The federal exhibits portrayed the human toll of the police shootout. A picture of Jose Holmes, on the surgical table as his life lay in the balance, was entered into evidence. Prosecutors introduced a bullet, held in a plastic jar, recovered from Holmes’s temple and X-rays and photographs depicting the shredded limbs and bloodied skin of Leonard Bartholomew III, Lesha Bartholomew, and Susan Bartholomew.
The sole photograph Sherrel Johnson had to hold onto of JJ, taken when he was nine years old, was another trial exhibit. Another photo showed the young man’s dead body on a walkway. X-rays introduced at trial revealed bullets in JJ’s feet, pelvis, chest, shoulders, knees, elbow, and skull.
Photos of Ronald Madison with one of his dogs, at home in his living room, beaming at graduation, and with brother Lance before Hurricane Katrina were contrasted against photographs taken after the shootout: of Lance in police custody and of Ronald’s limp body, slumped on the ground at the Friendly Inn.
The defense cast an entirely different light on the events of that morning. New Orleans was under water, literally and figuratively, after Katrina, and the officers who stayed behind did so for all the right reasons. When they raced to the bridge, the officers did so thinking a fellow officer was, once again, being gunned down by the enemy.
They knew they would face fire and stood ready to respond.
“These men are not guilty. They are not guilty,” Paul Fleming Jr., Faulcon’s lawyer, said the moment federal prosecutor Bernstein sat down. Speaking directly to jurors, Fleming told them they had to be convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the police officers were guilty, and to come to that conclusion while considering their actions “in the context of the worst domestic disaster in the history of this country, Hurricane Katrina.”
“The other lawyers are going to tell you the personal stories of these five men, but I want you to remember that these five have one thing in common: They stayed. They stayed here and they did their jobs, and they did their jobs the best they could under these horrible, horrible circumstances. They didn’t desert, they didn’t go work other jobs,” Fleming continued.
“They rescued people. They pulled people off of rooftops, pulled people out of their attics. In fact, you’re going to learn that some of these men were rescued themselves; one off his own rooftop. And right after that, they jump right in and they get to work. They do their jobs. They go out and rescue people. And they do the best they could. They do the best they could without adequate leadership, without adequate food, without adequate shelter, without adequate clothing, without adequate rest, without adequate supplies, and without adequate support. These are the guys that stayed.
“These are the guys that did their job,” the lawyer said, hammering the point that the men sitting at the defendants’ table were, in fact, public servants.
“And that brings us to September 4th, 2005,” Fleming said. “That morning they’re out at the Crystal Palace getting ready to go do some more rescue runs and a call comes over the radio, and it’s the worst call any police officer can ever hear, a 108. And what do they hear? 108, officer needs assistance. 108, shots fired. 108, two officers down.”
In normal times, a 108 call would send the cavalry out—nearly every officer in New Orleans, from every corner possible, would race out to help their fellow officers. But this call came after Katrina, with never-ending duty calling and a patchwork assemblage of officers struggling to make do.
“Two officers dead is what everyone thought. Two officers dead or dying is what these men had in their minds when they raced out there and all piled into the rental truck,” the lawyer said. “Michael Hunter’s driving; Kenny Bowen’s in the passenger seat; Rob Gisevius, Robert Faulcon, Tony Villavaso and others jump into the back. And in the back of the truck, they cannot see what’s going on; in the back of the truck, they don’t know what’s going on.”
The officers had two wishes as the truck raced to the bridge, he said. That the officers under distress were still alive. “And they’re hoping at the end of all of this, they’ll still be alive” too.
Fleming noted that officer Hunter, not among the defendants on trial, was first to fire, from the front driver’s seat. With the gunfire unleashed, the officers packed inside the truck instantly assumed a gunfight was underway. Some officers in back stayed in the truck. But not the defendants, and not his client. They spilled out believing other officers were under fire.
“And they get out of that truck slap dead into the middle of a gunfight. Several people are shot; and some, no doubt, at least some are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that’s unfortunate. And two people are killed that day, and that’s always unfortunate. No matter what the circumstances, that’s unfortunate.”
Fleming’s opening statement was compelling but, prosecutors would note, only part of the truth. There was a gunfight, yes. But atop the Danziger Bridge, only the police were armed.
Frank DeSalvo, Bowen’s attorney, stood next. He said prosecutor Bernstein’s statement that morning sounded “more fitted to a novel.”
Eric Hessler, the lawyer for Robert Gisevius Jr., painted a personal portrait of the sergeant. Gisevius reported for duty with Katrina coming, sending to safety his five-year-old child and seven-month baby boy. “He left his family behind to protect the citizens of this city,” Hessler told jurors.
Some of Gisevius’s relatives bemoan that decision, but say it was just like “Robbie.” “Time and again I ask God why Robbie didn’t flee the city with his family as so many other officers did,” his cousin said. “But I know that his loyalty to New Orleans and its citizens would have made that impossible for him to do.” When a former police academy member took a government job in Afghanistan, Gisevius would send messages seeing what he could do for his family. Gisevius acted like a big brother to a high school classmate, making sure “boys that I dated had the utmost respect for me.” The classmate went on to become a high school theology teacher.
After Hurricane Katrina, the officer was trapped in a hotel by the floodwaters. Gisevius swam out of the building to retrieve a boat that had neither a running motor nor oars.
“So they broke some fence boards down, used those for paddles, and went and rescued other officers so they, too, could procure more boats, and began rescuing citizens. And that’s how this began, with a boat and a piece of wood, and not a whole lot more. And it grew,” Hessler told the courtroom. “This went on for some six days, sunup and sundown. They woke up with the sun and began rescuing people up until the sun went down.”
Sometimes, it was too dangerous to go out. “Gunshots, obstructions in the water that they couldn’t see. You name it, they faced it,” he continued. “There was no electricity in the city, no air conditioning, no place to sleep that provided any level of comfort, very little food, very little water. He stayed through it. A lot of people couldn’t. A lot of people couldn’t handle it.”
Then police heard of rapes in the Superdome, murder in the streets, armed gangs running around. Later, some of the wildest tales, particularly those coming from the Superdome, were proven to be invented stories, spread through hyperbole and fear. “At that time, was it believable? Yeah. Was it believable when the mayor was saying it? Yeah. The chief of police? Yeah,” his lawyer said.
Gisevius learned of a colleague officer’s suicide and another officer who had taken his life.
“Who do you have to lean on? Nobody. Nobody,” Hessler said. “You don’t have anything to distract you. You have other people in the same situation. You have not a whole lot of anything but yourself, the darkness, and your mind. And he wakes up the next day and he goes and saves more people.”
The stresses in the streets became so intense, Hessler said, police began handing out assault rifles to officers.
“And they issued them to anybody that had two hands. You didn’t have to be qualified, you didn’t have to know what you were doing, you just had to, I guess, be either concerned, scared enough, or ordered to pick it up and patrol the streets,” the lawyer said, building a portrait of how the devastation changed the rules, even for police officers. “Now, in normal days, especially in America in New Orleans, we don’t see policemen walking around with automatic weapons. And these weren’t normal days, and you saw plenty of police officers walking around with automatic weapons. And that was condoned and encouraged by the NOPD.”
That morning, September 4, Gisevius had just returned from another rescue mission when the urgent call went out. He could have kept rescuing people, played it safe. He stepped into the Budget truck and raced to the bridge. He sat in the back, his vision partially obstructed by the officers around him, “traveling to the worst call he could ever get.”
There’s no time to ask questions. The gunfire had begun. Gisevius spilled from the truck, firearm at the ready.
“What he does is what his training, what his experience, and what human instinct tells you to do,” Hessler said. “You know, cops aren’t perfect. And just because you become a cop doesn’t mean you’re a tactical expert, or you’ve got some higher sense of danger, or some higher ability to deal with a life-threatening, just scared-to-death situation. They become scared. Cops are human.”
Gisevius saw a man running up the bridge—it was one of the Madisons—and he heard gunfire around him. “If you perceive a guy on the top of the bridge with a rifle, and you perceive him firing, what are you going to do? You’re going to fire back,” the lawyer explained.
Timothy Meche, attorney for Anthony Villavaso II, stood next and addressed jurors. “The government said he fired nine times. We don’t dispute that. That’s what happened. We all agree to that,” Meche said.
More important, he said, was what was in Villavaso’s mind as he, like Gisevius, sat in the back of the truck racing to what police believed was a shootout.
Villavaso, born in New Orleans and raised in the Catholic faith, was an only child who surprised his parents by finding a connection with the alto saxophone. He became the first in his family to turn to police work. Some relatives were horrified, but Villavaso felt the call to duty, and joined a unit that searched for criminals in a city that often suffered the highest murder rate in the United States. His hair cut short, Villavaso favored a thin moustache that reached down to his beard, giving a Fu Manchu appearance. He became a father of two who told his children to chase their dreams. Before Hurricane Katrina, his police file was bereft of abuse complaints but included only dismissed cases over his failure to attend court hearings for some of his arrests. The department cleared him in those two instances. Trapped by Katrina, he floated to safety with a stranger on a bed mattress—rescuing an elderly woman stuck on a roof before finding harbor himself, his lawyer said. Then came September 4 and the adrenaline-pumping race to the bridge.
“Things are happening so fast. It’s not a video game. It’s not a slow motion movie,” Meche told the courtroom.
“Things are happening so fast, if you take the time to go out and assess the situation, you could quite likely get your head blown off, or somebody else could get their head blown off,” Villavaso’s lawyer said. “When he got out of the truck and fired his gun, it’s because he thought people were firing back. In his mind, he saw people shooting back at him.”
The issue, the lawyer told jurors, is “not whether or not they did have guns, the issue is whether these officers reasonably believed they had guns.”
Inside the federal courtroom, Meche would contend, the legal decks were stacked against the officers. Media coverage after Katrina cited cases of police wrongdoing, and attendees at trial had to pass through three sets of security to get in. “It was a poisonous atmosphere in that courtroom,” the lawyer later said. “It gave the impression to the jury that these were some really dangerous guys.” Villavaso was a good officer two years out of the academy, who grew up in New Orleans and attended an African American high school, he said. Villavaso was not an orchestrator of any cover-up, Meche said, and the lawyer maintains his client’s shots did not strike any victims. He fired from the adrenaline of the moment. “He just got caught up in that,” Meche said.
In court another lawyer for Faulcon stood and, for the defense, had the last word. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a tragedy for everyone involved: Police officers, victims, everyone involved,” said the lawyer, Lindsay Larson III. “It is a horribly regrettable mistake, but it’s not a federal crime.”
THE FIRST WITNESS CALLED to testify was Susan Bartholomew. The bailiff asked her to raise her right arm, put her left hand on the Bible, and swear to tell the truth. Bartholomew, wearing a shawl over her clothes, didn’t respond as requested, and the bailiff asked again. Finally she whispered to the court officer. She had no right arm to raise. It had been shot off on the bridge.
Bartholomew raised her left hand, and then told jurors, the bow-tied federal judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, and a full courtroom of the terror she and her family suffered that striking Sunday morning.
“Before you heard shots, did you ever hear anyone yell?” Cindy Chung, another civil rights prosecutor on the case, asked her.
“No,” she told the jurors.
“Did anyone ever identify themselves to you?”
“No.”
“Did you ever hear anyone give you any commands?”
“No.”
Once the shooting began, Bartholomew said, “It seemed like forever.” In the New Orleans Police reports, Big Leonard was quoted as saying nephew Jose had been shooting at helicopters. Prosecutor Chung read the report aloud for jurors to hear. Lies, Susan Bartholomew said. They were all lies.
Pacing toward the defendants’ table, the prosecutor turned to her witness and asked, “Mrs. Bartholomew, looking at this side of the room, have you ever pointed a gun at any of these people on this side of the room?”
“No.”
“Have you ever fired a gun at any of these people?”
“No.”
“Have you ever pointed a weapon or fired a weapon in your life?”
“No,” she answered.
The battery of defense attorneys had few questions to ask Bartholomew. One even apologized for her suffering. The defense had nowhere to go with this first witness, nothing to impeach. Instead, the team would save its fire for some of the police officers who cut deals, challenging their motives, credibility, and truthfulness.
Others took the stand for the prosecution. Taj Magee, the officer desperate to find evidence that his colleagues had cause to fire upon residents, testified, as did Jennifer Dupree, the officer who first responded and whose call helped set the events in motion. Dupree told jurors about a curious phone call she received at 1:00 a.m. one morning, as the district attorney was investigating the shootings. The call came from Archie Kaufman, who stirred her from sleep, and asked her to meet him and a lawyer at a bar. She told him no, hung up, then went back to sleep. She didn’t recall the lawyer’s name, just that it wasn’t Steven London, Kaufman’s counsel at the trial. Dupree then told Bernstein several of the statements Kaufman attributed to her in one report were false.
Morrell Johnson, the witness whose name Lance Madison told himself to remember, was called to the stand too, as was Robert Rickman, the Friendly Inn maintenance man and security guard who snapped photos of Ronald Madison, still sprawled out on the pavement hours after the gunfire. Now those photos were being introduced as evidence, and Rickman spoke of the nightmares that had haunted his dreams since that morning.
Lance Madison, Jose Holmes, Little Leonard, and Lesha Bartholomew took turns recounting the shooting, recreating that morning in short, direct language.
On the stand, Lance answered questions from Theodore Carter, another of the federal prosecutors litigating the Danziger case. He said the Madisons were a praying family where everyone looked after another. When Ronald refused to leave his dogs, with Katrina on the horizon, Lance naturally stayed back to look over him.
After the hurricane and flooding, the brothers spent two days atop Lance’s roof. Lance said his brother’s mental development put him at between six and seven years old.
“How was he handling all of this, the water, the flood?” the prosecutor asked.
“He was very frightened, scared. I tried to calm him down. We prayed. And I just tried to talk to him and keep him comforted.”
On Sunday September 4, he told the jurors, they set out from brother Romell’s office intending to make it to the family homestead on Lafon Drive. Why to your mother’s house? Carter asked. “To retrieve some bicycles to ride to get as far as we can,” Lance said. “We couldn’t get back there, the water was real high. So we turned back around and came back.”
That led them back over the bridge, and into the frenzied gunfire.
“We got about half way up the bridge, and that’s when I heard a whole lot of gunshots, lots of gunshots. And I turned back around. When I turned around, I saw a truck pulled up to the bridge and had people that was coming out [of] the truck and was already out of the truck, shooting at the people that was behind me. And, next thing I know, they was shooting at us.”
He looked up and saw blood spurting out of Ronald’s shoulder. Lance tried to whisk his brother to safety, still utterly confused by who was shooting and why. He was instantly, fully in survival mode.
“We started running again, and I was trying to comfort Ronald. He was bleeding very badly,” Lance said. “I grabbed him, put his—got under his shoulder and grabbed him and tried to run with him. He stopped me for a second and told me—And he told me to tell my mother and my brother and sisters that he loved us. And he shook my hand. And I told him, Ronald, I said: We got to go, because these guys, you know, are coming after us. And we started running. I met another guy coming [from] the opposite direction, and I told him turn around. I said: These people are shooting at us.”
That was Morrell Johnson, the security guard who glimpsed the shooting on the west end of the bridge.
“When we got down to the bottom of the bridge, I told Ronald: Ronald, I’m going to go get some help. I said: Just be quiet, because you’re hurt real bad. And I’m just trying to calm him down. So, when I took off to try to get some help, that’s where somebody came behind and started shooting again,” Lance said, holding the courtroom in silence.
“I just dove in the water and stayed in the water until I got to the back of the hotel.”
He recounted how he eventually reached the state police and was quickly surrounded by NOPD officers. “I ran up to them. Next thing I know, they had arrested me,” he said. “That’s when I was found out it was the police shooting at me.”
On cross-examination, the defense team pressed Lance Madison about his initial statements just after the shooting, when he thought he saw an object in the hands of the teens—and assumed they had guns. On the stand he said he never knew what it was that he saw. “I just saw an object, and I couldn’t describe it.” He now knew the truth. Only police were armed.
“I wanted to see them have justice where they never would be able to do this again,” he said. “They killed innocent people out there.”
Jose Holmes told jurors how he pieced his life together after the shootings, moving to Georgia, raising a five-month-old son, Jose Holmes III, and landing a job with Kroger grocery store. A year after the shooting, he returned to the West Jefferson Medical Center to visit the doctors and nurses who treated him. “I wanted to thank everybody for helping me get better and to let them see that I was doing better,” he said.
Turning back to September 4, 2005, prosecutor Bernstein had Holmes stand before the jurors. He lifted his shirt to reveal his stomach scars. He raised his left arm to show another scar, held up his damaged thumb, and raised his right elbow, also scarred.
“How about your jaw, do you have any scars up there?” Bernstein asked. Holmes jutted his jaw for jurors to see.
“I heard my auntie and my cousin Lesha, I heard them screaming. I heard my Uncle Leonard, he was screaming too,” Holmes said, recounting those tortuous minutes. “They were screaming out in pain.”
“What were you thinking at that moment?” Bernstein asked.
“I was just hoping that we could make it.”
He described how he tried to lay still, posing no threat. “I kind of figured that if they saw us lying on the ground they wouldn’t shoot us.”
The officers and supervisors turned government witnesses also appeared: Hunter, Hills, Barrios, Lehrmann, and Lohman. These officers publicly unveiled the fraud that had, for six years, hidden the brutal truth. Barrios was called by the defense, not the prosecution, and told jurors that, after leaving the department, he supported himself by landing part-time work as a banquet waiter at a Marriott Hotel and full-time work driving an eighteen-wheeler truck. He said he was a follower, not a leader, of the cover-up, but admitted to Bernstein, “I was guilty. I lied.”
The other NOPD witnesses described how the officers who fired guns that day took part in writing the police reports about the shootings, all huddling around a supervisor’s laptop to make sure the stories held tight. They described how when Sergeant Kaufman, the supervisor on trial, went out to the scene to investigate, he failed to collect a single piece of evidence and instantly decided the police shootings would be ruled justified. Lehrmann recounted that meeting, of shooters and supervisors, at the gutted-out police quarters.
“And what the meeting was, it was, basically, ‘Okay, this is the story, everybody read the report, everybody know what you’re going to say, so we can put it on tape and take the statements,’” he told jurors.
“Tell us about collection of evidence that day at the scene,” prosecutor Chung asked him.
“There was none.”
“How was that going to be explained?”
“Hurricane.”
“Who decided that?”
“Archie.”
In its bid to craft a believable cover-up, Lehrmann said, the department changed its story so often he lost count.
“It happened all the time,” he said. “I mean, the lies changed whenever we needed to change them.”
“Did it matter what really happened?” Chung asked.
“No, ma’am,” Lehrmann said.
“Why not?”
“Because from the outset, we were going to cover up to make sure the officers were okay,” he replied.
Defense attorneys grilled these witnesses. Timothy Meche, representing accused officer Villavaso, drilled into an early police report on the shootings listing only black officers, including his client, as striking victims with bullets.
“Officer Faulcon is gone. He is in Houston. Officers Villavaso and Barrios are from the 5th District. So here, isn’t what you’re doing, you’re blaming it on the other guys, the outsiders?” Meche asked Lehrmann.
“Archie wrote that section. You gotta ask him,” the witness said.
“That’s not my question. Isn’t what’s going on here you’re blaming it on the outsiders?”
“I can’t speak to that. I didn’t write that.”
HUNTER, THE OFFICER TOTING his own personal AK-47 in the days after Katrina, took the stand. Prosecutor Bernstein had Hunter step out of the witness box and demonstrate for the judge, jury, and courtroom how Bowen stomped on a wheezing Ronald Madison after the gunfire. Hunter stepped outside the box, looked down at the courtroom floor, and raised his right leg. He stomped down hard with his heel. Bernstein showed jurors a picture of Ronald Madison, lifeless, a boot print on his back.
Bernstein asked Hunter about the rally, organized by the police union, days after the officers were charged with murder in state court. Supporters hoisted signs that day. “Heroes,” they said.
“Were you a hero, Mr. Hunter?” Bernstein asked.
“No,” he replied.
“Why are you not a hero?”
“There’s nothing heroic about shooting unarmed people that are running away.”
Prosecutor Carter asked Officer Ignatius Hills the same question. Were you a hero? “No,” the officer said. Why not? “There wasn’t anything heroic about what transpired on the bridge that day to be declared a hero,” he told the courtroom.
FBI agent Bezak contributed the back story of the federal inquiry—describing how the government, at just the right moment, wanted it known the investigation was in full bloom. Bezak rarely telephoned the subjects in his sights, choosing instead to show up at their homes unannounced.
“So by popping in they can’t avoid you, they’re forced to talk to you. And also, if they did have something to hide, I thought by popping in it wouldn’t give them the chance to talk to anybody else to try and get their stories straight,” he said.
“Pressure is a good thing.”
A firearms specialist with the Louisiana State Police Crime Laboratory in Baton Rouge told jurors that, after comparing the cache of weapons used by officers on the bridge with spent casings and shotgun shells, he was able to link bullets to specific weapons. Nine casings matched Villavaso’s AK-47. Another nine matched the AK-47 Bowen used, and two other casings matched Bowen’s Glock pistol. Four shotgun shells matched the Mossberg shotgun Faulcon used, forensic scientist Patrick Lane concluded. Another five casings could have come from an M4, the type of weapon Gisevius used that morning—but never turned in to NOPD investigators who collected guns. At least three weapons matched bullets lodged into James Brissette’s body: Bowen’s AK-47, a shotgun like the one used by Faulcon, and an M4 assault rifle, Lane testified.
Prosecutors brought the courtroom behind the scenes of their investigation, playing a series of conversations that had been secretly tape-recorded in 2009 between Lehrmann and Gisevius, including snippets from the three-hour session at Lucy’s Retired Surfers Bar & Restaurant in downtown New Orleans.
Someone’s talking, Gisevius told the detective, wearing a wire.
“Who the fuck do you think the leak is?” Gisevius asked.
Lehrmann suggested it could be Kaufman. Gisevius wasn’t buying it. “He would not sink his own ship,” he said, in a statement now played for all, including Kaufman, to hear.
On July 21, 2011, three weeks into trial, the government called its last witness, Lesha Bartholomew. Like their nephew Jose Holmes, the Bartholomew family fled New Orleans after the shootings on the bridge and moved to Georgia.
As they lay on the ground cowering, Lesha could see her mother’s right arm being held together by skin. “And you moved closer to protect her?”
“Yes.”
“With your body?”
“Yes.”
“To prevent her from being shot again?”
“Yes.”
“What happened as you laid there trying to protect your mother?”
“I kept hearing shots. I felt a shot in my butt.”
“Did anyone say, ‘Police’?”
“No.”
“Did anyone say, ‘Show me your hands’?”
“No.”
Reading another police report justifying the shootings, a prosecutor asked Lesha whether it was the truth. “It’s a lie,” she said.
With those words, Bernstein turned toward the judge. “Your Honor, at this point the government rests.”
On July 26, 2011, a month into the trial, jurors stepped out of the courtroom for a visit to the crime scene, the Danziger Bridge, walking over the ground that six years earlier had been covered with bullets, bodies, and bloodshed. State police and federal officials closed off the bridge from traffic, allowing jurors to walk up and over the overpass, retracing the steps of the police pursuit and the residents under fire. One juror stood at the base of the bridge, where Little Leonard Bartholomew had sprinted to escape the gunfire, and peered up to the overpass. Prosecutors Bobbi Bernstein and Cindy Chung watched the jurors retrace those steps, taking mental notes as defense attorneys also took in the scene. Judge Engelhardt stood back from the fray, watching the scene unfold, donning sunglasses, a beige summer jacket, a powder blue shirt, and his trademark bow tie instead of his judicial robes.
The defendants sat in the courtroom, day after day, and heard their crimes recounted in precise detail. Only one would take the stand.
Instead, the defense zeroed in on the police turned witnesses, particularly Hunter. Defense attorneys seized on his record of police insubordination, his early discharge from the marines, and his history of lying—even to his bosses—to protect himself. The NOPD had twice suspended him, police files show, once for a lack of “truthfulness.”
“There was a time that I would have lied to just about anybody,” Hunter admitted under drilling by attorneys for the defense.
“That’s apparent,” defense attorney Hessler shot back.
Other strategies crumbled on the stand. As part of their defense, attorneys hired a private investigator who, indeed, found a Lakeisha Smith who lived just near the bridge in 2005. The PI even took the stand and showed a copy of Lakeisha’s driver’s license. Bernstein ripped the theory to shreds, putting the woman on the stand. Yes, her name was Lakeisha Smith. But, no, she was not in New Orleans during Katrina—and she never spoke to a police officer about the shootings. She was in Mississippi at the time. The fictitious eye witness remained just that.
Finally Faulcon took the witness stand, presenting the morning through his own eyes over several hours of testimony.
“It’s a call that you never want to hear,” he said of the 108 dispatch that sent them barreling to the bridge.
Racing to the Danziger, he said he heard gunshots being fired even before the truck came to a halt. And, he swore under oath, he saw two men up ahead with guns. He never named them, but the figures he described were Jose Holmes and JJ Brissette.
“I’m human, I have feelings too. So my heart goes out to the people that were hurt. My heart goes out to the families of the victims,” he told his lawyer from the stand. “But at that time when I saw guns, I just thought my actions were justified based on what I saw in that split second. I feel horrible because of the fact, you know, in that split second when I saw guns, I might have been right or I might have been wrong; but if I had known that those civilians were unarmed, I would have never fired my weapon at unarmed civilians.”
Under Bernstein’s questioning, Faulcon acknowledged many of the statements attributed to him were not, in fact, the truth.
“Do you agree that all of these reports are false?” the prosecutor asked.
“Based on what I read pertaining to my actions, yes.”
“Do you agree that there was a cover-up in this case?”
“Based on what I learned now, yes.”
From the witness box, Faulcon was forced to admit he shot a weaponless Ronald Madison in the back as the man ran away.
“You also agree that you shot and killed that innocent man?” Bernstein asked.
“Yes,” Faulcon answered. “At the point when I felt that I was threatened for my life, when I felt he was a threat.”
“You agree that you shot him in the back?” Bernstein came back.
“Yes. Again, when I felt, at that point, where my life was in danger, and I presumed him to be a threat.”
“You agree that you never saw Ronald Madison with a gun?”
“Yes.”
“You agree that you never saw Lance Madison with a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Do you agree that you can only use deadly force if you perceive that your life or the life of another person is in imminent danger?”
“Yes.”
A few moments later, she asked, “Every time you fire your weapon you have to have a reason to fire, correct?”
“Yeah,” Faulcon replied. “I mean, your life would have to be in danger, correct?”
“So you agree that you cannot fire your weapon simply because you presume there is a threat?”
“Well, no, not presume. But if I believe that that is a threat and it’s imminent, you know, my life is in danger or others, and given the totality of the circumstances, also, has a lot to take into consideration.”
Bernstein shifted from the Madison shootings to the initial shots Faulcon fired from the other side of the bridge, where the Bartholomew family cowered for their lives.
“And then you pumped that shotgun, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you fired again?”
“Yes.”
“And you pumped it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you fired again?”
“Yes.”
“And you pumped it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you fired again?”
“Yes. Now, I don’t know how many times I fired. I’m just—I didn’t know at that time.”
The prosecutor then asked Faulcon if he had talked to the other shooters also standing trial—Bowen, Villavaso, and Gisevius—from the time of the shootings until nine months later, when Faulcon gave a statement to Kaufman.
“No, I don’t think I did,” Faulcon said. “I didn’t even have their telephone numbers.”
Bernstein promptly unfurled phone records showing that Faulcon spoke to Bowen eight times on a single day a month after the shootings. They talked for more than half an hour a month later. The same month, he talked to Villavaso for eight minutes, and then he spoke to Bowen twice more in December and January. He talked to Gisevius that December as well.
On January 25, 2006, the day many officers provided formal statements about the shootings, Bernstein’s records showed that Faulcon spoke to Bowen and Villavaso, and that he had a follow up conversation with Villavaso a day later.
Faulcon had taken the stand to save himself, but in the end, he cemented the very issues the government aimed to drive home. Officers had no legal basis to fire on the families on the bridge, and they engaged in a whitewash to conceal the truth.
On August 2, 2011, with the testimony finished, prosecutors and defense attorneys provided dueling arguments about the law and the events of that morning.
“The government’s case is built on the accomplices,” Eric Hessler, the attorney for Gisevius, told jurors. “Lohman, Lehrmann, Hills, Hunter, Barrios. Sounds like a law firm.”
Defense attorney Frank DeSalvo ripped into Hunter’s testimony recounting the horrors he attributed to DeSalvo’s client, Bowen. They were lies, DeSalvo said.
“Michael Hunter came in and said all those bad things about Sergeant Bowen. And they went for that bait like a trout, and swallowed it hook, line and sinker, because that’s what they wanted to hear,” he said of the prosecution team. “But the facts and the physical evidence tell you another story. And he was an outlier because he saw things that no one else saw, both on the east side of the bridge and on the west side, where Ronald Madison lay dead. He was the only one who said that Kenneth Bowen leaned over that barrier and fired at those people as they lay on that walkway. He was the only one that said Kenneth Bowen went up and started stomping Ronald Madison.”
The mark on Madison’s back was not from a boot, DeSalvo told jurors, but was a smudge mark from the fender of a nearby Chevy van he must have brushed up against as he fell to the ground. The lawyer said physical evidence contradicted Hunter’s contention that Bowen sprayed gunfire at residents.
As DeSalvo sat down, Bernstein rose from her seat and turned toward jurors. “Everything Bowen says is a lie,” she said. The sergeant, she said, fired repeatedly at “unarmed defenseless people on the walkway.” The officers “assumed that everybody out on that bridge was going to be a bad guy, when in fact it was two good families,” she said. “Two good families, minding their own business.” Bernstein’s final words returned jurors’ attention to the two families on the bridge. “All of those victims who told you what happened to them that day. Remember them, remember what they said.”
On August 3, 2011, following more than five weeks of trial testimony, jurors stepped out of the federal courtroom and began deliberating the evidence they had absorbed. At 2:00 p.m. the next afternoon, jurors were clearly debating the most serious question—whether the officers, in particular Faulcon in his shooting of Ronald Madison, committed murder. “Could the judge please come in and explain ‘murder’ to the jury. We are having difficulty in understanding the definition,” the jury foreman asked, pointing to the charge specifically against Faulcon. Judge Engelhardt referred jurors to his legal instructions, already provided.
JUST BEFORE NOON ON AUGUST 5, 2011, six years to the month after Katrina recast the history of New Orleans, jurors returned with a verdict.
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. The officers were convicted of violating the civil rights of every victim on the bridge, including the two men killed and the two men falsely charged; of unlawfully unloading their weapons; of making false statements in their reports; and of obstruction of justice by launching a cover-up to mask the truth.
The prosecutors won on most counts, but not every single one.
Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon, and Villavaso were found guilty of violating James Brissette’s civil rights, and jurors decreed that the violation resulted in the teenager’s death. Yet jurors said the four “Did Not” cause the death of James Brissette—a mixed verdict that haunts JJ’s mother, Sherrel Johnson.
“I just sat there frozen in my seat,” she later said. “He’s dead because they had weapons. He’s dead because he was shot. But their actions did not cause his death? It just doesn’t make sense. And if it doesn’t make sense, it’s not true.”
“My child is dead and you’re going to say your actions did not cause his death?” she continued. “You don’t have to put a name on the bullet. You’ve got five. Pick one.”
Sherrel will never recover from the loss of her son, or come to understand how the police officers could do what they did that Sunday morning. “You robbed my child of his life in broad daylight. He had nothing to hurt you with.”
The jurors ruled that Robert Faulcon “Did” cause the death of Ronald Madison. But they did not agree the shooting constituted murder. That split verdict could well spare Faulcon life in prison.
On every other of the twenty-five counts brought to trial, jurors marked a big X by “Guilty.” They convicted the officers for falsely prosecuting Lance Madison and Jose Holmes Jr., and jurors ruled that Kenneth Bowen violated Ronald Madison’s civil rights by kicking his limp body.
For the families who had so long pushed for justice, the August verdict shone like a beam. Outside the courtroom, prosecutor Bernstein clasped her hands together in a quiet moment of reflection and put her head down, her eyes shaded with dark sunglasses. To her right, Lance Madison embraced prosecutor Cindy Chung, savoring the moment the family had worried might never arrive. Bernstein, the face and leader of the federal government’s team, put both arms around Lance Madison’s neck; Lance embraced the civil rights prosecutor, his eyes closed, the six years of pain washing over him and turning, finally, to relief. Romell Madison stepped into the bright August day and was instantly surrounded by friends and supporters stretching their arms to take him in.
Sherrel Johnson wiped her tears with a white handkerchief as Jim Letten, the local US attorney, spoke about the verdict just rendered. Supporters put their hands on her back, a literal support beam, as officials held a press conference to discuss the historic verdict just announced.
The Bartholomews had “laid their hearts open” during their testimony on the stand. Now, they held faith the justice system would right the wrong. “They were hopeful,” said their lawyer, Edwin Shorty. “They could see or feel a light at the end of the tunnel.”
One supporter, draped in dark clothing and wearing a black beret on his head, raised his right fist to the sky, signaling that cries for justice had just been answered. Other residents embraced one another at the foot of the federal courthouse, some wearing placards of police protest around their necks.
Federal jurors had, with their guilty verdicts, officially damned the shootings and the cover-up. For perhaps the first time since the gunfire, the victims and survivors could breathe relief, and savor vindication.
“Jury Gives NOPD Another Strike,” the Times-Picayune’s front page screamed. “Prosecutors garner nearly a clean sweep on charges against 5 Danziger defendants.”
For years, the NOPD’s internal affairs unit, the Public Integrity Bureau (PIB), often closed cases against officers, including cases against several of those standing trial in this case, without bringing discipline. Most of the time, the PIB said evidence supporting punishment did not exist. But following the guilty verdicts, the Public Integrity Bureau would sustain a string of internal charges against Bowen, Gisevius, and Villavaso, three officers still technically on the force. The bureau said evidence existed to sustain charges against other officers who had recently resigned: Hunter, Barrios, Hills, Lohman, Kaufman, and Gerard Dugue, the sergeant who had yet to face trial.
“Clear and convincing evidence existed, based on the FBI and Department of Justice investigation, that the accused officers violated criminal and departmental polices,” the office wrote in a report authored by Sergeant Omar M. Diaz. The top brass, including superintendent of police Ronal W. Serpas, tapped from the Nashville police force to replace the retiring Riley in 2010, signed off on the report.
The PIB case was not a criminal inquiry and drew scant attention, but the battery of sustained charges sent a message. The actions of the officers on the bridge was so untoward, the department itself was brandishing it with a black eye. Two months after the guilty verdicts, the Louisiana Supreme Court suspended the law license of Sergeant Kenneth Bowen.
With his own innocence reaffirmed along with the guilty verdicts for the officers, Lance Madison spoke outside the courthouse, with Bernstein, the lead prosecutor, behind him and the family’s civil lawyer, Mary Howell, to his side. Dressed in coat and tie, he spoke for thirty seconds, reading from paper steadied in place atop a FedEx envelope.
“I am thankful for having some closure after six long years of struggling for justice,” Lance said. “Without the support and hard work of my family, I might still be in prison for false charges and the truth about what happened on the Danziger Bridge might never have been known. We will never be completely healed because we will never have Ronald Madison back.”
As he said his brother’s name, Bernstein nodded her head. Then Lance caught his breath and was finished.
As Bobbi Bernstein stepped into the city’s streets in the days after the trial that had consumed her for three years, more than one resident pulled her aside. Thank you, they told her.