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NOLA VIDEO: "Alligators eating people, babies floating, women raped"..a story of survival and escape

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 10 September 2005
10 comments

Edito Catastrophes USA

See Video: http://tinyurl.com/a9gr8

How We Survived the Flood

By CHARMAINE NEVILLE

Charmaine Neville is a member of the third generation of New Orleans’s legendary Neville musical family. She fronts the Charmaine Neville Band.

This is a transcript of an interview Charmaine Neville, of New Orleans’s legendary Neville family, gave to New Orleans media outlets on Monday, September 5.

I was in my house when everything first started. When the hurricane came, it blew all the left side of my house off, and the water was coming in my house in torrents.

I had my neighbor, an elderly man, and myself, in the house with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water. But the water was coming in too fast. So we ended up having to leave the house.

We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door on the roof of the school to help people on the roof.

Later on we found a flat boat, and we went around the neighborhood in a flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school.

We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But then, things started getting really bad.

By the second day, the people that were there, that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food and no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming in our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters going across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us "Hi!" and that would be all. They wouldn’t drop us any food or any water, or nothing.

Alligators were eating people. They had all kinds of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water.

(Photo from inside First Presbyterian Church, Gulfport, Mississippi)

We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people. People that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old-folks homes. I tried to get the police to help us, but I realized they were in the same straits we were. We rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat
from the 5th district police station. The guy who was in the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to different places so they could be saved.

We understood that the police couldn’t help us, but we couldn’t understand why the National Guard and them couldn’t help us, because we kept seeing them but they never would stop and help us.

Finally it got to be too much, I just took all of the people that I could. I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs, that I rowed them from down there in that nightmare to the French Quarters, and I went back and got more people.

There were groups of us, there were about 24 of us, and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarter because we heard that there were phones in the French Quarter, and that there wasn’t any water. And they were right, there were phones, but we couldn’t get through to anyone.

I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys, not from the neighborhood where we were, they were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women and they started killing, and I don’t know who these people were. I’m not gonna tell you I know, because I don’t.

But what I want people to understand is that, if we hadn’t been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn’t have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed in that city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this and, we didn’t have resources to get out, we had no way to leave.

When they gave the evacuation order, if we could’ve left, we would have left.

There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in their homes in the downtown area. When we finally did get into the 9th ward, and not just in my neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods in the 9th ward, there were a lot of people still trapped down there... old people, young people, babies, pregnant women. I mean, nobody’s helping them.

And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so we could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn’t stop. We would make SOS on the flashlights, we’d do everything, and it really did come to a point, where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren’t trying to hit the helicopters, they figured maybe they weren’t seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire they will stop then. But that didn’t help us. Nothing like that helped us.

Finally, I got to Canal St. with all of my people I had saved from back there.

I don’t want them arresting nobody else. I broke the window in an RTA bus. I never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and in everything else into that bus, and we drove and we drove and we drove and millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus, too.

http://www.counterpunch.org/neville09072005.html

Forum posts

  • I’m sick and tired of this ethnical cleansing. U.N. where are you!

  • Check out this link. I just got this in an email today and it is worth considering.

    http://www.halturnershow.com/DiversFindExplosiveResidueOnRupturedLevy.html

  • What else would you expect from a criminal, unelected president?

  • Charmaine,

    Here in Australia we are completely disgusted by the actions of the U.S. government in ignoring the ’useless feeders’ as the Nazis
    would have called unemployed people, the elderly and disabled, and just letting them die.

    I am glad you were there to save some lives. You’re a saint!

    Louise

    • You say you tried to help millions of people get onto buses? I dont even know where to begin saying how unbelievable that sounds. Alligators were not feasting on people, nor were there sharks roaming around in the streets. These are urban legends! Yes, alligators were spotted here and there, but not one mention of an alligator attack was reported. Not 1. They do not hunt for people, we are not on their list. They will however eat a corpse, of course.

      My heart goes out to the victims of katrina. As a national guardsman, i do all i can to try and protect the people of the united states when asked to do so by my governor or president.
      Mass hysteria has swept the media and the gullable masses have bought it.

      Those people who chose to stay in new orleans when they knew well and good that a cat. 5 storm was detined to slam into their city, are fools. next time, instead of ignoring officials, perhaps they will take heed. Ignorance and poverty are the biggest killers in my opinion, not alligators.

      Woman were raped? of course they were; But i guarantee that people are raped everyday in new orleans. prior to the storm, the rape count was higher on a daily basis then after the storm. So if anything, the storm stopped women from being raped.

      Mass hysteria, finger pointing and ignorance will get you no where fast.

      PFC. Jayson Hernandez
      United stated army national guard, NY

    • Perhaps she never said "millions." Perhaps, if she did, she was suffering from Acute Traumatic Stress Disorder, as she spoke. Perhaps, in her reality, there were millions. Perhaps an alligator "attack" was never reported because those who were being eaten had already died previously; there were, as you know, plenty of corpses to go around. Perhaps, in all her distress of wading through the foul, bloody, contaminated water, with an "imaginary" alligator or two — not long from the time of her rape — the power of the fear and shock in her mind made her see what she saw. Made images of people in the alligators’ mouths. Made a corpse look alive, in the jaws of a beast. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. BUT, if an experience is so traumatic that reality blurrs during one’s account of what happened exactly, one’s struggle to survive such an experience ought to be respected, at the very least. Furthermore, perhaps there were alligator "attacks" and no one reported them to you. But these are such small details IN COMPARISON TO THE BIGGER PICTURE — so small that even if they were lies, they do not justify the minimization and denial, by soldiers, regarding what DID go wrong. Terribly wrong. Sir, you were never on her side of the waters; you have no true power in defacing her story, or anyone else’s like hers. The most powerful thing you can do now, is tell your own.

      As I say this, National Guardsmen, I realize that there must be some deep-rooted pain from which you speak. Being one who opposes any military structure, myself, I can only imagine that you must feel absolutely unappreciated after reading many postings with regards to Hurricane Katrina. There has been so much talk of how the U.S. government has failed underprivileged people, once again, and I presume that you have taken on much guilt and shame because of this. What you must understand, however, is that what has been spoken out against institutional systems such as; FEMA, the National Guard, etc. are about the power imbalances of such, and are neither attacks on you, nor your honest service, personally. Such a burden should not be yours to bear. Such a burden causes even a good man to spew things he might later regret. I believe, sometimes, it is hard to know exactly where one stands within and between "groups" to which one belongs; when things go "wrong" or unexpected with relation to the larger scales which these groups represent, the external / internal pressure to be acceptible becomes even greater. Yet, this is no reason — no excuse — to become so defensive that offending those outside of our groups, who struggle to find adequate words to explain whatever it was THEY witnessed FROM THIER END, becomes socially permissible. In the end, we are all struggling for the same cause, and that is JUSTICE, EQUALITY, and FREEDOM.

      In all honesty, I must admit, at first, I grew angry because of what you posted. And then I remembered that unaddressed pain and suffering permit fear of being hurt again, and that denial of this fear of being hurt again, permits anger towards the circumstances of one’s vulnerability, and that this anger, unmanaged, permits hatred against those whose stories most contrast ours (as survivors), and that that hatred permits and perpetuates violence (physical or otherwise) as one attempts to demonstrate her or his learned meaning of power and influence. Being who I am, and surviving what I have, I was grieved by your expression of a lack of understanding on several levels of violence and oppression. I could not understand how you could speak so forcibly and casually about the "hearsay" floating through New Orleans after the hurricane. I was afraid of the possibilities lingering behind the words and choices of a man who sought to silence the voices of others. But then, even more, I longed for your emotional healing.

      Bitterness does nothing but destroy this world. You do not show, here, that you understand the painful truth of a certain buried vulnerability in you, which has urged you to speak such intolerance and loose rage against those with less privileges (whatever they may be) than yourself. Those hit hardest by Katrina are the reflection of everything that you do not ever want to be; almost powerless in the intersectionality of "powers," familiar to persons of the United States. From the time of your birth, you were taught images of what you should never become. You were told who you were not supposed to be. Who you were better than. Who you were stronger than. Who you were smarter than. Who you were more powerful than, and superior to. But I have a feeling no one ever told you who you were, and all that you REALLY could be, if you knew. Thus, to do right by those you love, the best way you can, you struggle to find yourself, in one of the most powerful institutions in the United States, and in the world.

      Still, your posting reveals a great weakness in you, which is, perhaps, your greatest; you have not faced your own issues of pain and suffering, and moreso, the fear of such (Why else would a man join the National Guard?). You struggle to have compassion for yourself, in the face of all that you were told you were supposed to be. You reach for the standards of other men’s expectations of you, bearing no mercy on your own soul. How then, can you productively address the distored faces of trauma, and all the desparation which they scream? How then, can you empathize with such a magnitude of pain as that experienced by victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina?

      Just before the storm, hit, I watched as a man in a wheelchair (paralyzed from the waist, down), who had no place to go, spoke of how he could not leave. He is probably dead now. In your weakness of denial, you have improperly burried him and those like him, under a thick wave of assumption which demands that "all the folks who didn’t leave were just ignorant." Not only is this notion in direct opposition to professional statistical reference to such a situation, but IT IS ALSO ABSOLUTELY NOT FAIR AND JUST PLAIN UNACCEPTABLE. As a civil U.S. American citizen who truly advocates with standards of "Liberty and Justice for All," I am quite obligated to say so. Unlike the family who was able to afford a $3,000.00+ limosine ride to Chicago, from New Orleans, as they comfortably escaped the "natural" disaster, there were people who did not have adequate resources to do anything even remotely as such. They were NOT all just ignorant.

      Moreover, posed in question to you, I add briefly, my regards of those persons who could have actually left, but chose not to leave when they were forewarned; do you know what it’s like to live your whole life never feeling fully "Worthy," on the basis of "Black," "Fat," "Ugly," "Loner,"
      "Nerd," "Woman," "Stupid," "Ignorant," "Homosexual," "Disabled," or whatever else — until you have something you own, to show for it — and then to face the risk of losing all you know and own, which is the only social proof that you too can have a slice of the "American Dream?" Can you phathom that it might not be EASY to just walk away from everything in one’s family’s name, into the unknown of being a stranger vagabond in someone else’s town? The same reasoning behind why Hurricane Katrina victims and survivors stayed, evolves from the same reasoning which causes you to judge them as harshly as you do. AMERICAN PRIDE. How dare you act as though you see from a superior perspective? The only persons who would rattle their tongues against Hurricane Katrina victims and survivors of any kind are those who sit seemingly safely within the socio-economic boundaries of their own acquired (possibly recycled) privilege.

      But not so fast! Being a National Guardsman does not necessarily grant you exemption from making choices which may cause you to appear foolish to others — for some reason or another — as well. You are no better than anyone else. You are simply a person in a disguise, taking orders, and submitting to those more powerful than you — just like the rest of us. And just like the rest of us, you have the right to choose what to do with those orders, and the consequences you may suffer. Regardless, I will be one person in this world to know that better that to berate you, demean you, and hate you should I someday see you on the television acting out of a choice I conclude to be rather thoughtless.

      Given your identity from external powers, you seem so quick to fight. So quick to add your input without giving much well-roundd thought. So quick to speak and act without critically analyzing. So defensive to the point of offense. So reflexive, and without reflection. Are you really being all that you can be?

      A man who carries a true badge of honor does not outwardly slander those he inwardly deems ignorant and / or "inferior" to himself; instead, he seeks to understand the deepest depth of the source of their ignorance and "inferiority." A coward simply hides behind rants and raves, defending his own manifestation of confusion with regards to what is entirely too big for he, himself, to control.

      Keturah
      www.donewithsilence.org

    • Keturah 
      Face the facts. The tragedies of Hurricane Katrina were predicted. EVERYONE knew it was coming!! If you chose to stay, you dealt with the consequences. If you COULD NOT leave for whatever reason: whether you’re poor, handicapped, etc, that is ALSO YOUR PROBLEM!! Move to a place that doesn’t have hurricanes flying in every year! Common sense! Why do so many people lack it?? And let’s also face facts about the rescue missions: the fucking gangbangers and thugs that were doing all the raping and looting DID NOT WANT ANY RESCUERS TO COME IN!!! That’s why they were shooting at the fucking rescuers!!!! Do you really expect these National Guardsmen and others to fly into what was basically a hostile war zone with these fools actually shooting at them???? Hell no!!! I wouldn’t expect anyone to do that to save me either if I was in some type of situation similar to New Orleans. The Neville family, you, and everyone that thinks like you need to redirect your anger at the pieces of shit gangbangers that PREVENTED any type of rescue missions!!!!!

  • I was looking for the person who claimed that people were eating babies during Katrina and instead this false-hood presented itself. Though this may be an older article; it is still available. After reading this, I found some inconsistencies and some other things of concern. Several times you mentioned how much you did and all these amazing things YOU were doing. I began to feel as though I was to remember how great you are or something to that effect. That coupled with the description about how your family is "legendary" (also mentioned twice) leads me to believe that you are about popularity and receiving acclaim. The thought that you would fabricate a story such as this to be hailed and deceive people is rather disturbing but becoming more believable than the story itself. I’ll admit that this may not flow quite nicely, however, I will address what I find to be problematic as best I can.

    After reading it, the picture of the gator with blood around its mouth does a nice job of creating the mental image of alligators eating people...but that’s the problem. Looking closer you’ll see no poor, half-eaten soul or bits of flesh in the picture. So where did the blood in the gator’s mouth come from? Simple. He has been killed and is bleeding out. This leads me to believe that you are intentionally trying to get me to visualize something that isn’t there. Maybe not a problem for some but, given I don’t believe this happened, it stands out to me. You state that you walked over "hundreds of bodies and there were "millions" of people wanting help. Also, that "No one", "Nobody", "never" and so forth. These are exaggerations. You said no one was helping but then say that many people were helping. Contradictory.

    There were many stories, that later turned out to be false, that came out of this disaster. Unfortunate as it is, people will try to cash in on a tragedy in some form. As I stated, at first, I was looking for the person who made up the story about cannibalism of children. It takes a cold heart to dismiss everything they read or hear about the event. It takes a fool to believe all of it though. I’ve lived on this planet a mere twenty-five years and in that time have learned that people lie about almost anything. Perhaps, there is some truth to this story. I feel in my heart though that many parts of this have been exaggerated or fabricated. If I’m wrong then I apologize sincerely. If not, then you really should be ashamed of yourself.

    Keturah, I have a few issues with you as well. In your comment you said to the National Guardsman "How dare you act as though you see from a superior perspective." Isn’t that what correcting someone or telling them your way is about? If you did not see that your line of thinking was more correct than his, I doubt you would have stated it. Therefore, you see that you are superior (whether or not you take joy from it is not important in this context) in your thinking. Stating "How dare you..." is another form of implying superior thinking. It is impossible not to think that way unless you feel inferior to everyone. Also, you state that the soldier had no other reason for joining the National Guard than having "not faced your own issues of pain and suffering, and moreso, the fear of such." Are you free to make assumptions based on his letter but he is not allowed the same for what he read? Another hypocrisy (one I think you should be ashamed of; being someone who was at least well spoken in most instances in your comment) was in your telling the NG that he wasn’t there so he couldn’t make comments that were (as you see them) slanderous towards her story. Staying true to this reasoning...you weren’t with this woman either so therefore have no right to add merit to it.

    When talking about the bigger picture you took things out of context. Yes, I’m sure there are those who do not believe things that did happen and deny them but that has no place here. He was commenting that he did not think SHE was honest. That could imply that you have pain that wasn’t dealt with as well. Perhaps, there are those who have discounted your stories as well. Maybe this hit a personal nerve for you. Alas, according to you, I’m not in your shoes and cannot make that presumption. "So quick to add your input without giving much well-roundd thought. So quick to speak and act without critically analyzing." These are your words and I imagine a form of creed. Yet, I can point out where you have fallen short of it. "Perhaps she never said "millions."" but she did here "I don’t want them arresting nobody else. I broke the window in an RTA bus. I never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and in everything else into that bus, and we drove and we drove and we drove and millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus, too." (this makes it sound quite unbelievable by the way).

    The biggest issue, to me, is that you believe that this woman should be allowed to tell a story that could, in your own words, have stemmed from ATSD (though it could be PTSD). If this was an inaccurate telling then it shouldn’t be published. Period. You’re encouraging a false-hood, whether there is intent to mislead or not, which leads to praise that isn’t deserved and people having resentment for something that never occurred. You allotted for so many possibilities as to what COULD have taken place while denouncing this man for his own take on it. Those in glass houses should never...