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'It Was as if All of Us Were Already Pronounced Dead'
On Sept. 3, a family encountered a covered body in front of the convention center while walking to buses for evacuation.
(By Eric Gay -- Associated Press)
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By the time Doby -- with the crate and the two daughters -- arrived Tuesday, he found himself gazing into thousands of bewildered faces. Gripping his daughters, he walked fast -- exactly where he was going, he did not know -- but he passed an elderly lady who seemed to be listing in a wheelchair.
"I went down the hall," he said. "By the time I was back, she was already gone."
Doby would spend four days at the center. All he had for himself and two girls during that time was a sandwich and two bottles of water that a stranger had given him.
Linda Cash, 26, arrived with her two children, Clarence, 6, and Cyrin, 2. "Soon as I got there," Cash recalled, "I saw fighting. I saw people throwing chairs. People pulling guns out, right in front of little children."
Near where Cash had hunkered down Monday night, she noticed a little boy having difficulty breathing. She figured he was having an asthma attack or an anxiety attack. She and others nearby spotted a too-seldom-seen police officer. The officer came over, his gun drawn. Cash said she pointed to the young boy. "The officer checked the boy," Cash remembered, "then turned to us and said there was nothing he could do."
The officer vanished. The boy was dead -- a death confirmed by three others interviewed for this article.
Another officer soon appeared, and Cash and the others figured he would remove the dead child. "But that officer told us he had come over to our area to check on some gunshots he heard near us," she said. The body stayed there.
By Tuesday, the center's population had exploded to nearly 20,000. "The lights never came on, for some reason, all the way," Cash said.
And among those thousands were gangsters, though maybe not members of gangs. Community activists for years had been warning the city's leadership about the folly of mixing youths from one housing project with youths from another.
"You declare martial law," said Jazz Washington, a community activist, "and to these gangsters that just means, 'We can kill you and keep on moving.' "
A gang broke into the locked alcohol storage areas and suddenly had 50 cases of hard liquor and 200 cases of beer. And before long, there were scenes of gangsters, drunk, groping after young girls -- and those scenes not far from the ones of women in corners, balled up, praying all frozen with a Hobson's choice: the gangsters, or the floodwaters.
"They took so much, they couldn't drink it all," said George Lancie, manager of the center's food-service company, who had been at Fore's side.
