Zeitoun (33 page)

After a month, a FEMA pickup truck arrived and dropped off a set of steps, about four feet high. They left no equipment that might attach the steps to the trailer. There was a foot-wide gap between the steps and the door. To get inside, one would have to jump. But the door still couldn’t be opened. They had yet to provide the key.

After another six weeks or so, a FEMA inspector appeared and gave Kathy the key to the trailer. But when he saw the trailer, he noted that because it was leaning, it was unsafe to use. He left, telling Kathy that someone would come to fix it.

Zeitoun and Kathy began to buy houses in their neighborhood. Their next-door neighbor had fled the storm and hadn’t returned. She put the house on the market and the Zeitouns made an offer. It was half the value of the house before the hurricane, but she accepted. This was the most satisfying of all the transactions they made. Before the storm, they’d also bought the house on the other side of their own. Soon they were living in this house, while renovating their original house on Dart, and renting out the other house next door.

Meanwhile, the FEMA trailer was still parked in front of the house on Tita. It had been there eight months, and had never been connected to water or electricity. A practical way to enter the trailer had never
been devised, and now the Zeitouns didn’t need it. It was an eyesore. Zeitoun had repaired all the damage to the Tita house, and they were trying to sell it. But the trailer was blocking the view of the house, and no one would buy a house where an immovable leaning trailer was parked out front.

But FEMA wouldn’t pick it up. Kathy called every week, telling FEMA officials that the trailer had never been used and now was decreasing the value of their property. She was told each time that it would be removed soon enough, and that, besides, thousands of people would love to have such a trailer; why was she trying to get rid of it?

In June 2006, a FEMA representative came to collect the keys. He said they would return to take away the trailer. Months went by. There was no sign of anyone from FEMA. Kathy called again, and FEMA had no record of anyone picking up the keys.

Finally, in April of 2007, Kathy wrote a letter to the
Times-Picayune
detailing the saga of the trailer. At that point, the trailer had sat, unused and unusable, for over fourteen months. On the morning the letter ran, a FEMA official called Kathy.

“What’s your address?” he asked.

They took it away that day.

Kathy’s problems with memory gave way to other difficulties, equally difficult to explain. She began to have stomach problems. She would eat any small thing, a piece of pasta, and her stomach would swell to double its original size. Soon she was choking on anything she tried to eat. Food would not go down some days, and when it did, she would have to gag and fight it down.

She grew clumsier. She knocked over glasses and plates. She broke a lamp. She dropped her phone constantly. Some days, when she walked,
she would feel tipsy, swaying side to side, needing to rest against walls as if struck by vertigo. Some days her hands or feet would grow numb while she was doing normal everyday things like driving or working with the kids on their homework.

“Honey, what’s happening to me?” she asked her husband.

She went in for tests. One doctor suggested she might have multiple sclerosis; so many of her symptoms seemed to indicate some kind of degenerative illness. She was given an endoscopy, an MRI, and a barium swallow to test her gastrointestinal tract. Doctors administered tests of her cognitive skills, and she did poorly on those that measure memory and recognition. Overall the tests pointed to post-traumatic stress syndrome, though she has yet to decide on the strategy to manage it.

Kathy and Zeitoun had no intention of suing anyone over his arrest. They wanted it in the past. But friends and relatives fanned their outrage, and convinced them that those responsible needed to be held accountable. So they hired a lawyer, Louis Koerner, to pursue a civil suit against the city, the state, the prisons, the police department, and a half-dozen other agencies and individuals. They named everyone they could think of—the mayor, Eddie Jordan, and everyone in between. They were told by everyone who knew anything about the New Orleans courts to get in line. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases against the city, the federal government, FEMA, police officers, the Army Corps of Engineers. Three years after the storm, few of the lawsuits had gone anywhere.

A few months after Zeitoun’s release, Louis Koerner found his arrest report. Kathy was shocked that it even existed, that any records had been made or kept. Finding the names of those who arrested her husband
was satisfying at first, but then it only fueled her rage. She wanted justice. She wanted to see these men, confront them, punish them. The arresting officer was named Donald Lima, and this name, Donald Lima, seared itself into her mind. The other officer named on the report was Ralph Gonzales. Lima was identified as a police officer from New Orleans. Gonzales was a cop from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Out-of-state police could not make arrests, Kathy discovered, so on any arrest, a local officer had to be present along with any Guardsmen or contractors. Kathy and Zeitoun decided to name Donald Lima, the officer on the arrest report, in the lawsuit. The Zeitouns’ lawyer contacted the New Orleans Police Department and found that Lima was no longer employed there. He had resigned in 2005, a few months after the storm. The department had no forwarding address.

Gonzales was easy to find. On the arrest report, he was identified as being an officer from Albuquerque, and he was still with that department in the fall of 2008. When he was reached by phone, he told his side of the story.

Gonzales had been a police officer for twenty-one years when, in August of 2005, his captain suggested that they send a team to New Orleans. The New Orleans Police Department had put out a nationwide request for law enforcement help, so Gonzales agreed to go, along with about thirty other officers from Albuquerque.

The New Mexico team arrived a few days after the storm, were sworn in as deputies, and began to assist with search and rescue operations. Before arriving in New Orleans, Gonzales and his fellow officers had heard a lot about the conditions in the city, and they were tense. They had heard about shootings, rapes, gangs of heavily armed and fearless
men. They saw no such crime, but they saw plenty of death. They were one of the first units to investigate one of the hospitals. Gonzales didn’t remember which one, but they found dozens of bodies. The smell was indescribable.

Conditions worsened every day. He and his fellow cops wouldn’t go out at night. They could hear windows breaking and shots fired after dark. The entire city smelled of death and decay. “Everyone was on guard,” he said of his fellow cops. “We thought we were in a third-world country.”

On September 6, Gonzales was at the Napoleon–St. Charles staging ground. Cops and soldiers and medical personnel gathered there every day to share information and receive assignments. Gonzales got word that there would be a search of a house down the road, occupied by at least four suspects presumed to have been looting and dealing drugs. It could be very dangerous, he was told, and they needed as many cops and soldiers as possible. It was the first law-and-order assignment he’d been part of since he had arrived.

He jumped on the boat wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a pistol and an M-16. He was one of six cops, National Guard soldiers, and soldiers-for-hire on the boat. When they arrived, Gonzales was one of the first to enter. He saw a pile of computer components and stereo equipment on the dining room table, and he saw the four men. There was something in their attitude, he thought, which signaled that “they were up to no good.”

They arrested the four men, brought them to the staging ground, handed them to the authorities there. They were finished with the assignment in fifteen minutes. That was the extent, Gonzales asserted, of their duties. He never went to Camp Greyhound and was only vaguely aware that a jail had been installed there. Neither he nor any part of the
arresting party secured the house or collected any evidence. In fact, none of them returned even once to the house on Claiborne.

The arrest of Zeitoun and the other three men on Claiborne Avenue was one of two arrests Gonzales made while he was in New Orleans. Every other task he performed was related to search and rescue. Ten minutes after bringing the four men to the staging ground, he was on another boat, looking for people in need.

Gonzales was asked how he felt about the fact that Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a middle-aged businessman and father of four, had done a month in maximum-security prison.

Gonzales seemed regretful. “If he was innocent, then I feel very bad,” he said. “Here’s the bottom line: I wouldn’t want something like that to happen to me personally.”

Gonzales talked about how the system is supposed to work: police officers investigate, make arrests, and then hand the process over to the judicial system. Under normal circumstances, if the men were innocent, he maintained, they would have been given a phone call and the opportunity to post bail.

“They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.

Lima was more difficult to track down, but he had not gone far. He had left the New Orleans Police Department in 2005 and was living in Shreveport, Louisiana.

He knew that Zeitoun and the others had spent time in jail. He knew about Zeitoun’s case because he’d been served papers when the lawsuit was undertaken. He didn’t know how long the other men had spent in prison. He was quick to note that their imprisonment wasn’t his doing. He only made the arrest.

At the time of Katrina, he was living in a five-thousand-square-foot
house on Napoleon. During and after the storm, he stayed in the city with members of his family, guarding his house. He had two generators and enough food and water for three weeks. He also had over forty pistols and automatic rifles. During the day he traveled the city with other police officers and National Guard troops, making rescues. Each day he met with other law-enforcement personnel, and they would map out a plan of action. They divided up tasks and territory.

The National Guardsmen in the city had plenty of gasoline but were low on other supplies. In exchange for gasoline, Lima and other New Orleans police officers broke into convenience stores and took cigarettes and chewing tobacco. A majority of the National Guardsmen, Lima said, chewed tobacco and smoked Marlboros, so this arrangement kept both sides well supplied. Lima considered the looting a necessary part of the mission. The gasoline, he said, helped them make the rescues they did. He also needed it to power his home generators. When he couldn’t find Guardsmen who had gas, Lima siphoned fuel from cars and trucks. His throat was sore from all the gas-siphoning he did after the storm, he said.

“The whole place was anarchy,” he said.

While making his rounds on a motorboat one day, Lima observed four men leaving a Walgreens carrying stolen goods. They left the Walgreens and put the goods into a blue-and-white motorboat. Lima had two rescuees with him, so he couldn’t pursue the thieves at the time, but he made a mental note. He continued to make rounds, seeing dead bodies and being confronted by angry residents, many of them armed.

“My state of mind was rattled,” he said.

Two days later he passed a house on Claiborne and saw the same blue-and-white boat tethered to the porch. He raced to the Napoleon–St. Charles staging ground and gathered a crew of police and military personnel. They were “heavily armed” with sidearms and M-16s. He
didn’t know the other four men or the one woman who joined in the mission. Together they took a flatboat to the house. Lima was the lead cop on the arrest.

When they entered, they saw what they thought were stolen goods on the dining room table. They found four men inside, and something about them and the scene seemed amiss. Lima was sure that these were the same four men he had seen leaving the Walgreens, so they arrested them and brought them to the staging ground.

“It was a fairly routine arrest,” he said. “All four of the guys were very quiet.”

They handed the men over to National Guardsmen, and the Guardsmen put them in the white van. Lima filled out paperwork about the arrest and gave it to the Guardsmen, and they drove the arrestees to Camp Greyhound. Later, Lima went to Greyhound, where he saw the men’s property laid out on a table. He saw Todd’s maps, Nasser’s cash, and the memory chips. “They’d been up to something,” he said.

Lima was not sure what goods he had seen the four men stealing. And he did not see any goods customarily sold by Walgreens in the house on Claiborne. He did not secure the house on Claiborne as a crime scene. No stolen goods were recovered. But he was certain the men in the house were guilty of something, though the extraordinary circumstances of post-storm New Orleans did not allow for the same degree of thoroughness as he would have liked.

Nor was the post-arrest procedure standard or fair, he said. In a normal situation, Lima said, they would have been arraigned properly, given a phone call and an attorney, and would have been out on bail within days. When he was a cop, he was frustrated by the revolving-door nature of the justice system. He would arrest someone in the morning and they would be out on the street in the afternoon. It was
maddening for a police officer, but he admitted that this element of checks and balances would have been useful in this case.

“They should have gotten a phone call,” he said.

Lima quit the NOPD in November 2005, and moved with his wife and daughter to Shreveport. He was a police officer in Shreveport for a time, but was treated, he said, “like a second-class citizen.” The officers there assume that all cops from New Orleans are corrupt, he said. So he quit, and now he’s looking for a new career. Before joining the force, he was a stockbroker, and he was considering going back to that.

The Zeitouns were conflicted about what they heard about Lima and Gonzales. On the one hand, knowing that these two police officers had not purposely hunted and arrested a man because he was Middle Eastern gave them some comfort. But knowing that Zeitoun’s ordeal was caused instead by systemic ignorance and malfunction—and perhaps long-festering paranoia on the part of the National Guard and whatever other agencies were involved—was unsettling. It said, quite clearly, that this wasn’t a case of a bad apple or two in the barrel. The barrel itself was rotten.