Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (20 page)

Except Tim Ursin. He had trained on Truck Eight and knew how to deploy its life-saving, hundred-foot (30 meter) ladder.

He leaped up to the console on the back of the truck and began to maneuver the ladder into position, swinging it around toward the burning hotel, then extending it slowly to just below a ninth-floor balcony where he saw people yelling and waving hysterically. Some already had their legs over the railings, ready to jump. The whole operation might have taken four minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime to Tim.

Once the ladder was in place, he looked around. Firefighters were dashing everywhere but none was ready to go up.

“I can’t wait around,” he shouted to a cop nearby. “I’m going up. Gimme that washout line.”

Tim stuck his right arm through the coiled inch-and-a-half (4 centimeter) line—a sixty-pound (27 kilogram) hose that he could plug into a standpipe in the hotel’s internal fire suppression system—and stepped onto the ladder.

“Here’s your belt,” a passing firefighter said, tossing up the safety strap commonly used in ladder rescues. Tim would be more than eighty feet (24 meters) up, standing on the wet, narrow steps of a flexing ladder, wrestling with panic-stricken people.

“Ain’t gonna use it,” Tim said as he started up. “I’m going straight up and not stopping.” As he climbed, the washout hose’s five-pound (2 kilogram) brass nozzle slapped against the back of his knee, slowing him down. He paused at the seventh floor and told the people on the balcony twenty feet (6 meters) above to calm down. Steadying himself with his left hand on the rung at eye level, he reached behind his leg with his right hand and grabbed the dangling nozzle, which he tucked between his chin and left shoulder.

IF YOU FALL, YOU DIE

A loud bang erupted somewhere off to Tim’s left. The shock jolted his left arm as he reached up the hand rail, and he felt a soft rush of heat ripple across his face.

Somebody up there is tossing cherry bombs
, he thought.
These people could die, and they’re playing with fireworks?

Then his left arm began to burn, just a little at first. He looked down at the heavy sleeve of his fire coat to see lumpy gore spilling out, as if someone had opened a bloody faucet.

FIREFIGHTERS AND COPS RESCUED LIEUTENANT TIM URSIN (LYING ON THE GROUND) FROM THE AERIAL LADDER WHERE A BULLET FROM SNIPER MARK ESSEX’S .44 MAGNUM CARBINE NEARLY TORE OFF HIS LEFT ARM.
Associated Press

Tim pivoted, turning his back to the ladder. He tried to gather his wits, but he could literally feel his blood pressure dropping. He didn’t know what had happened, but he could tell from the thick flow of blood and the searing pain that he’d been hurt badly, and he wasn’t sure he’d make it to the ground alive.

Stay awake!
he commanded himself.
If you fall, you die
.

He started down the ladder on his heels, steadying himself with his good hand.

He began to shout, to firefighters below, to the people above, to God …to anybody who could hear his act of contrition.

My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart
…

His left arm seemed to be on fire, as if someone had jammed a white-hot poker up his sleeve into the soft flesh of his forearm.

…
in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good
…

He saw cops with rifles and handguns below, shooting up toward him. He realized he was caught in some kind of crossfire.

…
I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things
…

Could anyone hear? He wanted people to know he’d confessed his sins before he died up there.

…
I firmly intend, with your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin
…

Growing woozy, Tim saw his friend Huey Brown, a beefy tillerman on the ladder truck, hurrying up the ladder.

“I’m coming up to get you!” Brown yelled.

“No, get down!” Tim yelled back. “He’s gonna shoot you, too.”

Brown kept coming. “Fuck it!” he shouted.

Brown reached Tim and wedged his brawny shoulders under the wounded fireman’s legs. Slowly, rung by rung, he eased Tim the last twenty feet (6 meters) down the precarious ladder, knowing somebody was above them with a gun. Tim’s gushing blood streamed over Brown’s helmet, his shoulders, his face, and hands as he lowered his comrade to safety.

A New Orleans cop met Brown at the bottom of the ladder, while another officer covered them with a shotgun. They lowered Tim’s body off the fire truck’s rear turntable to a safe spot on the pavement behind Engine Fourteen, out of the line of fire.

A fireman cut off Tim’s heavy coat, exposing a gaping wound that looked like it was inflicted by a dull pickax on the meaty part of his left forearm. The bullet had passed completely through, shattering bone and nearly sawing his arm off completely. The fireman wrapped Tim’s black leather, NOFD-issue belt with a shiny silver buckle around Tim’s upper arm to stanch the bleeding before they loaded him in an ambulance.

LAST RITES

At Charity Hospital’s emergency room, nurses pushed Tim’s gurney against the wall as more shooting victims rolled in behind him. The place was pandemonium. The wounded were crying and moaning as overwhelmed doctors and nurses rushed around. Cops and firefighters scurried among them all, confused and in shock. Blood stained everything.

Tim fought the worsening pain. He begged for painkillers, but nobody was listening. They couldn’t give him anything until they knew the precise extent of his wounds.

Orderlies finally rolled Tim into an examination room, where he was transferred onto the cold, bare stainless-steel table beneath a bright light. He was fading fast. Except for the blinding light over him, the rest of the room appeared to be dark. Ghostly figures worked all around him, removed his clothes, searched for more wounds, probed his butchered arm, emptied blood from his boots, and murmured in uneasy tones words he couldn’t understand.

The bullet had blown away a biscuit-sized chunk of Tim’s arm flesh and smashed his radius, one of the two bones in his forearm. It severed his radial nerve and ruptured both arteries in his left arm. He had already lost more than three pints of blood, about one-third of his life fluid.

As he floated at the brink of consciousness, a prayer rose above the pain. Then a hand from the darkness daubed his forehead, eyes, and lips with oil, and made the sign of the cross over him.

“…may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed …”

He knew the voice. It was Father Pete Rogers, the fire department’s chaplain. He was giving last rites.

“…I grant you a plenary indulgence for the remission of all your sins, and I bless you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit …”

It was the last thing that Tim wanted to hear. He wasn’t even thirty. He had three kids and a wife. He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t ready.

He didn’t know that God or destiny or maybe just dumb luck had already intervened to save his life. The 240-grain, .44 Magnum bullet that mangled his left arm had passed completely through the thick sleeve of his fire coat and lodged in the annoying brass hose nozzle he had just tucked under his chin. It had stopped the slug from tearing into his neck.

And he didn’t know that the sniper took aim at him a second time, but maybe by the same trick of providence or fluke, his gun didn’t fire.

Tim drifted into unconsciousness on the table. The next thing he remembered was waking up in a dark hospital room. He heard moaning and solemn voices he didn’t recognize. In a few hours, he learned there were three gravely
wounded cops with him there in the dark: Officer Skeets Palmisano had been shot in the back and the arm as he ran across a grassy mall in front of the hotel. Patrolman Chuck Arnold had been shot in the face as he stood in the window of an office building across from the hotel, and although his jaw was nearly gone, he had walked a few blocks to the nearest hospital. Officer Ken Solis was trying to keep onlookers back when a single bullet blew a massive hole in his right shoulder and his belly.

Tim could hear something else. Not in the room but somewhere outside in the night. Distant but chilling.

He could hear gunfire.

AN INVADING ENEMY

The first shots were fired a week earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1972, although some would argue later that this war began centuries before.

A phantom gunman lay in wait in a vacant lot across from New Orleans’s Central Lockup on Perdido Street—where prisoners are booked, fingerprinted, and photographed—just before the jail’s 11 p.m. shift change. When two police recruits came into view, he cut loose with seven shots from a high-powered rifle, killing nineteen-year-old unarmed police cadet Alfred Harrell and wounding a lieutenant.

Police searching the empty lot found a dropped .38 caliber blue-steel Colt revolver, spent .44 Magnum shell casings, footprints, several strings of firecrackers, and other evidence left behind, but the shooter had melted into the night.

But eighteen minutes later, another cop, thirty-year-old K-9 officer Ed Hosli, was mortally wounded while investigating a burglar alarm less than a quarter mile (half a kilometer) from the jail at a warehouse in Gert Town, a poor, black neighborhood where crime and hatred of cops flourished. Spent casings and other evidence at the scene—including a leather bag containing two cans of lighter fluid and some firecrackers—pointed to the same assailant who shot up the city lockup.

The next day, when police flooded Gert Town looking for the assailant, they were treated as an invading enemy. Armed black men shadowed the cops. NOPD switchboards were swamped with callers reporting dozens of fake sniper sightings. After nightfall, some locals shot out streetlights, making the investigation harder and adding an element of menace.

Even before the New Year’s Eve shootings, tensions between New Orleans cops and the city’s poor blacks had been high. In the past year, Police Superintendent Clarence Giarrusso had created the Felony Action Squad, an elite unit assigned to target violence in the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Announcing the squad’s formation in 1972, Giarrusso proudly told reporters that if any of the unit’s twelve undercover agents encountered armed robbers, rapists, or murderers, they could “shoot to kill.”

A series of armed conflicts with Black Panthers and several other black revolutionary organizations in New Orleans’s Desire public housing projects only made matters worse.

Louisiana was smoldering with racial friction. The previous January, two Black Muslim militants had been shot to death by police at a Baton Rouge race riot in which two white deputies also died; among the thirty-one wounded, fourteen were cops. And on November 16, 1972, two black student protesters had been shot and killed at Southern University in Baton Rouge, but their killer (allegedly a police officer) was never identified.

So when the Gert Town sweep wrapped up, the NOPD had precious few clues as to their sniper’s identity or whereabouts. It was clear that the same shooter (or shooters) shot three cops on New Year’s Eve, probably with the same .44 Magnum rifle. They also knew he had wounded himself while trying to break into the warehouse because he left a trail of bloody handprints and spatters.

The investigation wasn’t dead by a long shot. One bit of evidence looked like a promising piece of the puzzle.

A young, slightly built black man had broken into a black Baptist church in Gert Town the night of the shootings. When he was surprised by the pastor the next day, he fled, leaving a satchel of bullets, bloodstains all around the sanctuary, and an apology: “I am sorry for breaking the lock on your church door, but pastor at two o’clock I felt I had to get right with the Lord. You see I was a sinner then, walking past your church …I was drinking …I then broke the door and fell on my knees in prayer. Now I have managed to get it together. I will send you the money for a new lock. God bless you.”

And some potential clues were never fully investigated or simply missed.

Two days after the shootings, a local grocer named Joe Perniciaro told police a young black man with a bloody bandage on his left hand had come into his store just a couple blocks from the warehouse where Hosli was shot. The kid wore a dark jacket and Army fatigues, and Perniciaro feared he might rob the place, but he left without incident after buying a razor.

On Perdido Street, just two blocks from Central Lockup, patrolmen found an abandoned two-door, blue 1963 Chevrolet with Kansas plates and the keys still in the ignition. When they ran the license number, LYE 1367, it came back to a Mark James Robert Essex, age twenty-three, of 902 Cottonwood Street in Emporia, Kansas. With no priors and no warrants, the kid checked out, so police wrote it off as a stalled vehicle and cleared young Essex.

But before the New Year’s Eve sniper investigation could unfold fully, before New Orleans could rest easier, even before the coming week was finished …a bloody, one-man race war would erupt in the worst carnage the city had seen since the War of 1812.