Coastal city took Hurricane Rita's best shot

Indianapolis Star reporter Tom Spalding and photographer Adriane Jaeckle are in Louisiana following Hoosiers responding to Hurricane Rita. 

CAMERON, La. -- A dead cow lay inside the sanctuary of a Baptist church. Entire homes were pulled off their foundations. One resident knelt in rubble and teared up behind sunglasses; his beloved dog was missing.

While some parts of the Gulf Coast are moving closer to normalcy, this city is a stark reminder that other areas still are in crisis. Hurricane Rita seems to have packed a smaller punch than Hurricane Katrina, the damage I've seen here is as bad or worse than anything I witnessed in Mississippi after Katrina.

Officially, the city of 1,965 -- which is about 40 miles south of the I-10/Lake Charles, La., corridor -- is closed because of hazards, like gas leaks and downed power lines. But local officials on Tuesday offered a few reporters and photographers a tour after floodwaters receded enough for some roads to reopen.

As he drove along the coastal Highway 27 that leads into Cameron, Louisiana State Police trooper John Robinson, 34, pointed around at former landmarks he now can identify only by memory.

"I'm speechless," Robinson said. "Some people who were evacuated are going to come home to nothing, to empty slabs. One of the worst-case scenarios that everyone talked about became a reality."

In Cameron, the courthouse is "probably the only thing that is salvageable" among hundreds of damaged homes and businesses, said Scott Trahan, 40, the Cameron police juror, a type of county commissioner.

Bobby Lande, 62, Cameron, arrived by boat then walked through ankle-deep water to try to inspect a family member's house. He recalled Hurricane Audrey, which killed 500 people when it roared ashore in the same Cameron Parish area in 1957.

"As devastating as this is, it's not as bad as Audrey, because I'm not picking up any bodies," Lande said.
John LeBlanc, 42, assistant director of the Cameron Parish office of emergency preparedness, said he hoped federal officials would provide the same relief here as in New Orleans.

"It's small town U.S.A., but we want the same support that New Orleans did," he said.

Hurricane Katrina coverage, 8-30 through 9-8

An historic assignment – and a terrible one, too. Hurricane Katrina was the single largest natural phenomenon of the 21st century. It destroyed the entire southeastern region of the United States.

I had the opportunity to "join up" again with Indiana Task Force 1, which was dispatched to Biloxi, Miss., after a devastating blow by Katrina. I joined a traveling RV with Scott Swan and Scott Allen of WTHR-Channel 13 in Indianapolis, and wrote stories and took photos (with a point and shoot) until the Star wisely dispatched a real photog (Sam Riche).

8-30-05: Hoosier heroes. Task Force One, other groups to mount rescue effort on Mississippi coastline after Hurricane Katrina.
8-31-05: Travel day
9-1-05: Survivors welcome Hoosier rescuers. Indiana Task Force One continues its laborious door-to-door search in hard- hit Biloxi neighborhood.

9-2-05: Rescuers need rescue? Police provide escort and INTF-1 responders confront gun-toting looters -- stealing port-o-potties.
9-3-05: Rotten smell: The stench of devastation. (Also picked up by USA Today.)
9-4-05: Comparing tragedies: Some Indiana rescuers were at the World Trade Center for 9/11 and are here for Katrina. They compare the devastation.
9-4-05: Job done. Task Force finishes its assignment.
9-5-05: A Day In Biloxi: A day like no other includes a church service where a church once stood, as INTF-1 heads back to Indy.
9-5-05: Hanging on: Survivors in Biloxi are down but not out.
9-6-05: Together: Family with Indiana ties reunites after hurricane displacement
9-6-05: Other rescuers here: Indiana National Guard on duty, bringing aid in Mississippi.
9-7-05: In the dark? Disaster disrupts ability to stay on top of outside world.
9-7-05: Sticking together. Hoosiers help other Hoosiers to help the coast.
9-8-05: An unclear future for all. My recap of the week after Hurricane Katrina.

[By Biloxi's famous hard-hit Hard Rock Cafe casino->]

Some light-hearted moments -- a photo montage of our journey.


More memories -- my video tour of our RV.
Scott Swan and Scott Allen of WTHR-Channel 13 with Sam Riche (far right) of the Indy Star.


Photo galleries you might enjoy: A day in Biloxi; Task Force One at work;

Project: Are police chases worth dying for?

As a cops beat reporter for the Star, I had written about numerous police chases that had ended in tragedy -- including the case of Marian W. Woempner, 78, who was driving to church with her husband, Robert, 82, when a Indianapolis Housing Agency police car, joining a chase as it was ending, sped through a red light at Emerson and Edgewood avenues and hit the Woempners' car, killing the woman.

Coworkers Eunice Trotter and I embarked on a project in which we pored through thousands of pages of police IA records to look at crash reports. Our two-day series published by The Indianapolis Star of 947 police pursuits in Indiana from 2003 and 2004 showed police were virtually unrestricted when they chase suspects. They pursue fleeing vehicles at high speeds and usually for traffic infractions, according to The Star's examination of reports from the Indianapolis Police Department, the Marion County Sheriff's Department and the Indiana State Police. At least 86 people -- bystanders, suspects and law enforcement officers -- died as the result of police pursuits in Indiana from 1993 through 2003, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Twenty-five of them were bystanders not involved in the chase. Nationally, 3,877 were killed during the same period, 1,251 of them not a part of the pursuit.

The series included a graphic about average speeds by police in pursuits, had PDFs of actual pursuit policies nationally.

We also looked at cities in the U.S. that abandoned police pursuits because of safety concerns.

I also discovered that due to maintenance problems, IPD had helicopters in the air (to assist with chases) far less often than they had projected when they beefed up that unit.

It was profiled in IRE's Extra Extra for May 2005. Neill Borowski, who edited the series, also wrote about it in the American Editor. AP in Indiana gave it first-place in the 2006 competition.

Chronicling a mini-marathon, 1st-person

I wrote a first-person account of the 2005 Indianapolis mini-marathon -- to see if I could cull a decent time while gathering a story or anecdote per mile for 13.1 miles. Here is the electronic snapshot of that effort, which I thought was pretty funny.



[With pals Jon Murray, Brendan O'Shaughnessy and Matt Tully, from the 2006 race.]

Bark, bark

I wrote a story about the dogs that went to 9-11. The lede went something like this: The search-and-rescue dogs of Indiana Task Force 1 do some impressive stuff -- they even fly for free. But it's their owners in need of a ride.

Breaking news: Pacers-Pistons Brawl

I turned from spectator into reporter while watching the Pacers-Detroit game the night of Nov. 20, 2004, when Indiana had a shot at an NBA title before a season-killing brawl at the Palace. On a cold, cold night, I took my wife to the scene and gathered information for a fan-reaction story for USA Today due to the national interest.

And I couldn't find the printout of my online-only work from that era, but I did shoot some video of a very bizarre incident -- an incident that will rank among the most bizarre of my career. Brawl-meister Ron Artest, after he'd been suspended, gave an interview to the Today show to explain his side of things.



He did it at the offices of Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications, where outside fans had gathered. And a radio station at the time had dressed one of its personalities as Piston Ben Wallace and put him in a dunk tank for Artest to try and sink. It's 16 seconds and truly strange.

2004 rampage left police officer dead

It was not yet 2 a.m. on Aug. 18, 2004 when the 911 calls started coming in from the Southside. First, Indianapolis police were dispatched to a home on Dietz Street where they found 66-year-old Alice Marie Anderson shot to death. Then callers said a man was stalking the neighborhood with a machine gun, firing indiscriminately. It was Alice Anderson's son Kenneth, who had history of mental problems and owned a lot of guns.

StarFiles: The shooting

As the squad cars began to arrive, he met them with a barrage of automatic weapons fire, shattering windshields. In the darkness, the officers saw muzzle flashes but couldn't tell how many weapons they faced because of the volume of gunfire.

Patrolman Tim Conley was shot in the stomach and leg as he slammed his car into reverse. In another cruiser, Officer Timothy "Jake" Laird was fatally wounded when a round hit him high in the chest just above his protective vest.

Anderson was moving through the neighborhood on foot. At the corner of Tindall Street and Gimber he spotted two more squad cars, took a position behind a jeep and began firing. One of the officers, Peter Koe, was a SWAT team member but had been working a regular shift, so his assault rifle was in the trunk of his cruiser. Already bleeding from the head from the flying glass, Koe managed to get to his gun and was loading it when he was shot in the leg. Koe took cover, then advanced on Anderson's position, both men firing. And both ran out of ammunition at about that point.

Koe was well-trained and knew he had a one-second opportunity. He rushed at Anderson, striking him with the empty rifle as the gunman tried to go for his pistol. Koe had a handgun also, and he was quicker. He fired and Anderson went down, dead, 16 minutes after it all began.