New Orleans Counts Its Dead; Police Shoot Gunmen On Bridge

NEW ORLEANS – New Orleans turned much of its attention Sunday to gathering up and counting the dead across a ghastly landscape awash in perhaps thousands of corpses. “It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine,” the nation’s homeland security chief warned.

Late Sunday afternoon, Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six of them, a deputy chief said. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said the shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

Air and boat crews also searched flooded neighborhoods for survivors, and federal officials urged those still left in New Orleans to leave for their own safety. To expedite the rescues, the Coast Guard requested through the media that anyone stranded hang out brightly colored or white linens or something else to draw attention.

But with the electricity out though much of the city, it was not known if the message was being received. With large-scale evacuations completed at the Superdome and Convention Center, the death toll was not known. But bodies were everywhere: floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways and medians and hidden in attics.

“I think it’s evident it’s in the thousands,” Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Sunday on CNN, echoing predictions by city and state officials last week. The U.S. Public Health Service said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.

In the first official count in the New Orleans area, Louisiana emergency medical director Louis Cataldie said authorities had verified 59 deaths ?? 10 of them at the Superdome. “We need to prepare the country for what’s coming,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We are going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood. … It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.”

Chertoff said rescuers have encountered a number of people who said they did not want to evacuate. “That is not a reasonable alternative,” he said. “We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city. … The flooded places, when they’re de-watered, are not going to be sanitary.”

In addition to civilian deaths, New Orleans’ police department has had to deal with suicides in its ranks. Two officers took their lives, including the department spokesman, Paul Accardo, who died Saturday, according to W.J. Riley, police superintendent.

Both shot themselves in the head, Riley said. “I’ve got some firefighters and police officers that have been pretty much traumatized,” Mayor Ray Nagin said. “And we’ve already had a couple of suicides, so I am cycling them out as we speak. … They need physical and psychological evaluations.”

The strain was apparent in other ways. Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, dropped his head and cried on NBC’s “Meet the Press.

“The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, `Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?’ And he said, `And yeah, Momma, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday’ ?? and she drowned Friday night. She drowned on Friday night,” Broussard said. “Nobody’s coming to get her, nobody’s coming to get her. The secretary’s promise, everybody’s promise. They’ve had press conferences ?? I’m sick of the press conferences. For God’s sakes, shut up and send us somebody.”

Hundreds of thousands of people already have been evacuated, seeking safety in Texas, Tennessee and other states. The first group of refugees who will take shelter in Arizona arrived Sunday in Phoenix. With more than 230,000 already in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry ordered emergency officials to begin preparations to airlift some of them to other states that have offered help. What will happen to the refugees in the long term was not known.

Back in New Orleans, walk-up stragglers at the Convention Center were checked by Navy medics before they were evacuated. Lt. Andy Steczo said he treated people for bullet wounds, knife wounds, infections, dehydration and chronic problems such as diabetes. “We’re cleaning them up the best we can and then shipping them out,” Steczo said.

One person he treated was 56-year-old Pedro Martinez, who had a gash on his ankle and cuts on his knuckle and forearm. Martinez said he was injured while helping people onto rescue boats. “I don’t have any medication and it hurts. I’m glad to get out of here,” he said.

In a devastated section on the edge of the French Quarter, people went into a store, whose windows were already shattered, and took out bottles of soda and juice. A corpse of an elderly man lay wrapped in a child’s bedsheet decorated with the cartoon characters Batman, Robin and the Riddler. The body was in a wooden cart on Rampart Street, one shoe on, one shoe off.

Rene Gibson, 42, driving a truck while hunting for water and ice, said people are not going to leave willingly. “People been all their life. They don’t know nothing else,” he said.

Amid the tragedy, about two dozen people gathered in the French Quarter for the Decadence Parade, an annual Labor Day gay celebration. Matt Menold, 23, a street musician wearing a sombrero and a guitar slung over his back, said: “It’s New Orleans, man. We’re going to celebrate.”

In New Orleans’ Garden District, a woman’s body lay at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street ?? a business area with antique shops on the edge of blighted housing. The body had been there since at least Wednesday.

As days passed, people covered the corpse with blankets or plastic. By Sunday, a short wall of bricks had been built around the body, holding down a plastic tarpaulin.

On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and the words, “Here lies Vera. God help us.”

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By ALAN SAYRE, Associated Press Writer

Associated Press reporters Dan Sewell and Robert Tanner contributed to this report.