NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.
Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets.
But nearly three months later -- and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two -- authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.
A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.
The two families -- one from New Orleans East and solidly middle class, the other poorer and rooted in the Lower 9th Ward -- have offered only preliminary information about what they say happened that day. Large gaps remain in the police and civilian accounts of the incident.
News of the Danziger Bridge shootings roared across cable television for a time. But as with many overblown reports of crime and violence immediately after the hurricane, the facts remain elusive.
The final findings seem likely to become a provocative centerpiece in assessments of the New Orleans Police Department's performance in the hurly-burly days after Katrina.
Many officers remained at their posts during and after the storm. Despite losing their patrol cars and running out of ammunition, they improvised to keep assisting in relief efforts. But others abetted the lawlessness -- abandoning their posts or joining in the looting.
