New Orleans Hurricane Prison Riot Confirmed

First reported by a local ABC affiliate and then discounted as a rumor by a lack of supporting evidence, the story Orleans Parish Prison Riot is starting to slip out in bits and pieces.

"I really didn't think we were going to get out of there alive," 52-year-old Deborah Williams said of her ordeal at the Orleans Parish Prison complex. "It really was a miracle from God." Williams, along with several other guards and the 10- to 17-year-old inmates were moved to an 8-story building at the prison from a less-secure juvenile detention center in the hours before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast because the prison was thought to be safer. By the time they were rescued, the building had flooded up to the fifth floor, a riot had broken out and been put down and most of the other inmates had been evacuated.

While flooding to the fifth floor seems to be a gross exaggeration, the rest of the story seems to match other accounts coming to light. Sadly, Williams' story also provides the first evidence of prisoners dying during the evacuation.

"Sometime Thursday morning, we heard helicopters outside," Williams said. "Then I heard someone calling my name — 'Williams! Deborah Williams!' — and I knew we were saved. We all started hugging each other, and soldiers started coming in from the roof."
Williams and the others were given life jackets and, because of the high water and the fact that many couldn't swim, they were tied together and pulled several blocks through the flooded streets of downtown New Orleans.
"It was horrible," she said. "Two of our kids drowned, and there was nothing we could do to help them. One of them was pregnant. There were bodies floating by, and the soldiers kept telling us to hurry, that it wasn't safe."

An Australian tourist, Ashley McDonald, was arrested for minor offenses and since freed, reported that prisoners were virtually abandoned in the days after Hurricane Katrina struck, and also confirmed both prisoner riots and escapes:

"They basically threw away the key to the jail for four days," he said. McDonald said he and the other prisoners were basically abandoned by authorities in the storm's aftermath. "We had no food, no water, no power, no air-conditioning, no toilets," McDonald said. "A lot of people started breaking out and escaping and that's when attention was brought to the jail."

It was only then that the jail was evacuated and the prisoners shipped out, including many with homemade weapons. McDonald himself was threatened with a screwdriver once he arrived at the prison in Baton Rouge.

Perhaps the most disturbing vision of the scene inside the prison from corrections officer Shantia Barnes:

As Katrina raged Monday outside the prison on Perdido Street, water began seeping into the building where Barnes worked. Toilets began to back up. By Tuesday, the water inside was about 3 feet high and about 320 inmates had to be moved to the second floor, she said.

As water rose 5 feet high that evening, the situation became desperate, she said. About 40 civilians, including family members of prison workers, had also taken refuge at the jail. Word spread among the inmates that the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, where many had family, was underwater. Unfed for days, the inmates began to riot inside their cellblocks, Barnes said.

"We had no phone lines, no electricity," she said. "There was raw gas in the water ... If it wasn't for the deputies, a lot of people would have died."

She believes many drowned anyway, including inmates housed on the first floor of the Templeman 3 building, where Barnes said that in the chaos, some inmates may have remained locked inside.

"We evacuated everybody who was at the jail as far as we know once we got there," said Pam Laborde, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which helped evacuate the prison. Laborde said she could not confirm what may have happened before rescuers from her agency arrived.

Taken together, these accounts seem to paint a picture of scared prisoners rioting in an attempt to get away from rising floodwaters. A skeleton crew of guards was unable to easily put down the uprising, and as a result, inmates may have been trapped and drowned in rising floodwaters.

The media seems unwilling, or unable to present a full picture of the events inside the Orleans Parish prison, with only these fractured accounts from two guards and one inmate presenting a fractured picture of rioting, fear and death that runs counter to official pronouncements of orderly prisoner transfers to other Louisiana prisons.

What once seemed to be a bright spot in the failed evacuation of New Orleans now appears to be just another failure to adequately prepare by Louisiana authorities.

Note: This just kind of confirmed what Dan Riehl reported almost a week ago.

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