Vol. 74/No. 31      August 16, 2010

On July 15, Roland Bourgeois Jr. was indicted on five felony counts by a federal grand jury for attempting to kill the men with a deadly weapon because they were Black, intimidating witnesses, and making false statements to the FBI. Bourgeois faces a possible life sentence if convicted.

The charges were announced by Jim Letten, U.S. attorney for eastern Louisiana; Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; and David Welker, special agent in charge of the FBI in New Orleans. They came three days after Letten announced the indictment of five current and one former New Orleans police officers for shooting six unarmed civilians, killing two, and covering up the crime in the aftermath of Katrina.

According to an investigative report by A.C. Thompson that was published in The Nation in 2008, the “experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least 11 people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.” None of the cases were ever investigated by the New Orleans Police Department.

Bourgeois is alleged to be one of a group of 15-30 vigilantes that formed in the white enclave of Algiers Point after the hurricane. They set up barricades, stockpiled weapons, and patrolled the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. Cox News Service released a story on the group Sept. 12, 2005, with the headline, “Armed militia protects its New Orleans neighborhood.”

Donnell Herrington, along with his cousin and a friend, were walking through Algiers Point to a ferry terminal in hopes of making it to an evacuation bus. Herrington says they were attacked without warning and fired upon by three white men who yelled, “Get that nigger!”

Herrington was struck in the torso and neck with buckshot, suffering a hole in his jugular vein. A Black couple drove him to the hospital where the doctor said if he hadn’t gotten there he would have died. His cousin and friend were also shot and held briefly by the men before being let go on the condition they stay clear of the neighborhood.

After his release from the hospital, Herrington went to the police station to report the incident, but the cops never filed a report or investigated the shooting. “If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there real quick,” Herrington told reporter Thompson.

Herrington has given numerous interviews and spoken out about what happened. He was featured in the Spike Lee documentary When the Levees Broke.

One of Bourgeois’s neighbors, Terri Benjamin, testified she heard him scream “I got one!” and boast to a group of men that he’d shot a “looter.” Later Bourgeois pledged while holding a shotgun to shoot anyone with skin “darker than a brown paper bag.” Benjamin says she was so traumatized by the events she moved out of the state, only coming back to help in the federal government’s case.

Pam Pitre, Bourgeois’s mother, said her son did shoot a Black man in Algiers Point, but claimed he “is not a racist.”

Videos detailing militia members’ accounts of shooting people were turned over to the FBI in 2009. In one, Nathan Roper says the cops knew about the militia. “The police said, ‘If they’re breaking in your property, do what you gotta do and leave them [the bodies] on the side of the road.’”  
 
 
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