The Danziger Bridge trial is coming to a close. Both sides have finished presenting their closing arguments, and after the judge gives the jury their final instructions today, they’ll start deliberating sometime this afternoon. The prosecution and the defense have spent the last 5 weeks developing two different versions of what happened on the bridge that Sunday morning. Whose version the jury believes will determine whether the five officers on trial end up guilty or not. While the jury deliberates, here’s a look at those two versions, starting with the prosecution’s.
According to the prosecution, this all started on a Sunday morning, September 4th, six days after Hurricane Katrina. Two families, the Madisons (Lance and his mentally retarded brother Ronald) and the Bartholomews (Susan, her husband Leonard III, their two kids Lesha and Leonard IV, their nephew Jose Holmes Jr. and his friend James Brissette) were heading towards the Danziger Bridge. The Madisons were headed back to the Friendly Inn on the Gentilly side of the bridge, while the Bartholomews were headed to Winn-Dixie for medicine and food.
Around this same time, NOPD officer Jennifer Dupree was radioing in a 108 call after a rescue worker posing as a cop and a real NOPD officer ran down the Downman ramp of the I-10 and began chasing four people who were shooting at other rescue workers down by the Industrial Canal. Dupree, who was on the high-rise portion of the I-10 that sits parallel to the Danziger, reported that two officers were down underneath I-10 and needed assistance.
Eleven officers who were about 2 miles away at the Crystal Palace on Chef and Read Blvd heard the call and jumped in a Budget Rental truck then floored it towards the Danziger.
Lance and Ronald were about half way up the bridge when the police arrived and the Bartholomews were at the bottom, near Downman and Chef, a little ways behind them. As the truck pulled up to the scene, Officer Michael Hunter, the driver, called in for a location of the suspects. Dupree pointed out the Bartholomews, saying “that’s them right there.” Seeing them, Hunter whipped out his Glock and started firing “warning shots” out the driver side window, his way of letting them know the truck was full of police officers. The Bartholomews didn’t know who was in the truck, so they did what anybody would do in that situation: they started running. As they did, Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, who was riding shotgun, leaned out the passenger side window and started shooting at them with an AK-47.
Hearing those shots, Lance and Ronald began running up the Danziger. The Bartholomews, for their part, tried to take cover behind a concrete barrier. Neither family had guns or did anything to threaten the police. But as the truck came to a stop, Bowen got out and continued unloading on them anyway. Two more officers, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso, jumped out the back of the truck and joined him on the passenger side, Faulcon with a 12-gauge Mossberg pump and Villavaso with an AK-47.
As they stood there, one of them shot Susan Bartholomew in the ass and blew a whole in Lesha’s calf about size of a shark bite. Jose Holmes was shot in the jaw and left hand, Leonard III in the knee and back of the head. But it was James Brissette who got the worst of it. Brissette took in eleven bullets that spread out over most of his body, the kill shots being two shotgun pellets to the back of the head while he lay face down on the pavement.
While this was going on, another Sergeant, Robert Gisevius, had jumped down from the back and joined Hunter in the front of the truck. The two of them stood there together, Hunter unloading his Glock at the backs of the Madisons while Gisevius did the same with a M4 rifle.
Meanwhile, Susan Bartholomew was on the ground praying to God and Lesha was right next to her begging for the police to stop. But they didn’t. The three officers just kept on shooting, blowing Susan’s arm off at the elbow and doing the same thing to Brissette, who was probably already dead by this time.
Hunter, who had emptied his Glock at this point, ran over to the truck and motioned for them to stop. Apparently, Bowen didn’t agree with that order because he leaned over the barrier and sprayed the Bartholomews at least 10 more times with the AK-47, while Gisevius walked over and did the same.
They then went after the Madisons. Gisevius and Faulcon chased Lance and Ronald up the bridge, with Faulcon reloading and Gisevius shooting at them as they ran down the other side. Back at the truck, Bowen put his now empty AK-47 up and pulled out his Glock. For good measure, he leaned over the barrier once again and shot Jose Holmes 2 more times in the stomach.
Next, Hunter, Gisevius, and Faulcon jumped in a car with a Louisiana State Trooper and chased the Madisons down the Gentilly side of the bridge. Ronald had already been shot in the back and was almost stumbling down the bridge while Lance ran in front of him. As they reached the entrance of the Friendly Inn, Faulcon leaned out the passenger side window and shot Ronald in the right shoulder. The blast threw him against a truck and he collapsed on the pavement.
As he lay there, bleeding and wheezing out his last breaths, Bowen ran down the bridge and asked if was he one of the shooters. When an officer replied that he was, Bowen then proceeded to kick and stomp Ronald Madison with all of his might – until Hunter told him to stop.
Lance Madison, who had disappeared into the Friendly Inn, was arrested about 20 minutes after that. Neither he, nor Leonard Bartholomew IV, who managed to jump off the bridge as the shooting started, were hurt.
The cops then arrested Lance Madison and charged him with 8 counts of attempted murder of a police officer, saying he shot at police and threw his gun into the Industrial canal as he ran over the bridge. Leonard IV, 14 at the time, was brought down to a makeshift police station. The police didn’t charge him with anything, but they put him out in the middle of the night with no shoes and no way to get back home.
In all, these cops fired their guns at least 90 times that morning and never identified themselves as NOPD officers until two people were dead and four others were wounded, severly. Afterwards, they conducted a massive cover-up. To justify the shooting, they claimed that the officers were being shot at and did what they had to do. To back this up, Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, the lead investigator, planted a gun on the scene, since none were initially found, and then, along with other investigators wrote a 54-page report blaming the whole thing on the victims, particularly Lance Madison and Jose Holmes, the two alleged shooters in the incident. The defense has a different version of what went down on the bridge that day. For that story, stay tuned for the next article, which is coming soon.
Comments