No Ordinary Heroes:. Demaree Inglese
Prologue: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
It was late afternoon, and I just wanted a few minutes of downtime. For the skeleton medical staff of the New Orleans jail—thirteen buildings that housed the city’s 6,400 criminal inmates—the sixty hours since Hurricane Katrina had hit us had been a nightmare. The ordeals we’d faced made my tour of duty as an air force doctor in Korea seem like summer camp.
Only four days ago my biggest headache as medical director was how to notify the family of an inmate who had died after a long illness. Now I looked across the lobby of the Community Correctional Center, the command center for the jail complex, at the makeshift clinic we’d managed to set up. I wondered how much longer we could hold out. We had handled a stream of life-threatening emergencies that beset the hundreds of deputies and civilians who worked or had taken shelter here. But now hundreds of increasingly rebellious and dangerous inmates had begun to break out of cells on the upper floors. No relief was in sight.
My colleagues were working in the temporary pharmacy that once served as a computer room. In the six years I’d been employed at the jail, I’d never doubted my doctors or nurses, but Katrina had brought out the best in them, a resourcefulness and tenacity I might never have seen otherwise.
All afternoon the cinderblock walls of the building had reverberated with inmates banging and shouting from the floors above, but things seemed quiet for the moment. It was the right time to snatch a few minutes of rest outdoors.
The stench from the restrooms along the back wall made me move faster toward the glass doors that led to the broad, roofed porch. We hadn’t had power for two days, but there was ample light coming into the lobby. Still it was tricky to get around the mass of people and the mounds of disheveled clothes, toys, mattresses, and other stuff that marked the spaces they had claimed as their own. My cargo shorts and T-shirt were damp with sweat that never seemed to dry in the New Orleans humidity, and when I rubbed my chin, I scraped a three-day beard that itched in the heat. A breeze outside would be welcome, I thought as I headed for the porch.
The sound of the heavy security door opening behind me stopped me cold. I looked back as Captain Allen Verret and his deputies rushed out from the stairwell that led up to the inmate floors.
“Out!” Verret ordered. “Everybody out, now!” As acting warden, he had total charge of this building, and his voice was so commanding no one would have thought to disobey.
When the last man cleared the door, Verret shoved it closed and locked it.
Only one thing could have put him in such a panic: inmates on the loose.
Verret began barking orders, and the deputies rushed to carry them out. Everyone working in the nearby control room and around the lobby dropped what they were doing and mustered at the information desk.
“Get the civilians out of here!” Verret yelled. “The inmates are coming down. Move these people out of the building—now!”
Confusion stunned the crowd for a moment, but the deputies didn’t have to urge anyone to leave. People swarmed through the doors onto the porch. The thick walls buffered the sounds of shouts and pounding in the stairwell, but even so, the noise grew louder and rapidly closer. I moved toward the clinic to warn my doctors and nurses.
“Get your staff outside, Doc,” Deputy Skyles called to me. “There’re too many inmates coming down. We won’t be able to hold them off!” His voice was steady, but fear glinted in his eyes.
“I’m getting them now!” I kept moving, but before I reached the clinic area, the doctors and nurses streamed out of the pharmacy. I urged them on through the doors.
“Outside! Hurry!” Skyles shouted as he turned back to help Verret organize the deputies in the lobby.
Outside, other deputies herded the civilians along the porch, which extended along the sides of the building. I stayed where I could see what was going on inside.
Verret and ten deputies all faced the stairwell door with their weapons raised. Several men had guns. Everyone else had batons or improvised clubs. One female deputy gripped a curling iron to use against the rioting inmates when they broke through the door. I marveled at the courage of Verret and his crew. The threat of violence was real, and they confronted it without reservation.
A few medical staff members came back to find me—close friends all. Their faces were grim, similar thoughts on their minds. The one thing we had all dreaded most was happening: inmates from several floors were scrambling down the stairs. Some of these men were being held for capital crimes like murder and rape. Many had been in jail for decades. None had eaten for days. The security door was the last barrier separating them from freedom—and us.
I’d been in dangerous situations many times in the last few days, but this time I thought we could actually die here. I was scared, but the voice in my head wasn’t screaming and I didn’t want to run. Instead, a strange calm settled over me. I knew what I had to do.
I grabbed a mop lying against the front glass window and walked over to the porch railing. Placing the handle between two wrought-iron posts, I pulled—hard. The handle broke in two, and I stood back, eyeing the three-foot wooden club in my right fist. Suddenly, I was struck with an unsettling question: Could I actually crush a man’s skull?
I looked around. The sight of friends and coworkers, children and seniors, and female deputies armed only with batons gave me my answer. Some were crying. Most were helpless. Everyone was terrified. Yes, doctor or not, I would do whatever it took to protect them. As I walked back into the lobby, one of the doctors, an old buddy named Gary, ran after me.
“What are you doing, Dem?”
“Helping,” I answered. “There are eight hundred inmates in this building. They’ve been in the dark without food and water for days. If they get through that door, people are going to die.”
Gary paused, looked at the deputies, at the door, and back at me. Without saying a word, my normally gentle friend lifted a wooden chair and smashed it against the floor. Picking up a leg, he stood by my side.
Another doctor joined us, carrying a wooden leg ripped from a cot. Two other colleagues grabbed the remaining chair legs. Braced for action, I looked behind me. More than half a dozen nurses—all of them holding flashlights, brooms, or anything else that could be used as a weapon—lined the porch, ready to stop the inmates’ advance.
What a way to go. What a crowd to go with, I thought.
Verret’s eyes met mine as I stood among the deputies. Gripping his rifle, he nodded in acknowledgment. I nodded back.
Behind the stairwell door we could hear what sounded like rolling thunder as the inmates barreled down the last flight of stairs to the first floor.
BAM! The steel door shook, battered from the rear. BAM! Another blow struck.
My pulse quickened, and there was a rush of blood in my ears. I gripped the mop handle tighter. “Get ready, Gary. Here they come.”
Gary swallowed hard, his face pale.
As a third blow shook the door, the breath caught in my chest. I raised my club and waited…
Chapter 1
Morning:
Hurricane Katrina is declared a category 5 storm, with winds at 160 mph.
The eye is still 250 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The Superdome opens as a shelter at 8 a.m.
At 10 a.m. Mayor Ray Nagin orders a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.
“He died?” I coughed to clear my throat. The phone call from the jail had awakened me from a deep sleep, and my thoughts were fuzzy. No wonder, I realized with a glance at the clock on my bedside table. It was 6:54 a.m. After a Saturday-night foray to a club on Bourbon Street, I had slept less than four hours.