Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (22 page)

While police searched for the stolen Chevelle, Mark Essex careened into the parking garage of the Howard Johnson Hotel on Loyola Street and left the car on the fourth level. He ran up the stairwell to a locked fire door on the eighth floor, where he pounded until two black maids came to the door. He told one he wanted to visit a friend who was staying on the eighteenth floor.

She hesitated. She could lose her job if she let a stranger through the fire door.

“Are you a soul sister?” he asked one of them.

She said she was.

“Sister, the revolution is here,” he said. “It’s one for all and two for one.”

But the maid still wouldn’t let him enter, so Essex climbed another flight of stairs to the ninth floor, where he again pounded on the fire door and was again turned away by a maid.

On the eighteenth floor, he found a fire door propped open and went into the hallway, where he encountered two frightened maids and a houseman, all three of whom were black.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you black people,” he reassured them as he hurried past. “I want the whites.”

But before Essex could get to an elevator, a white guest, twenty-seven-year-old Dr. Robert Steagall, saw him with the gun and tried to tackle him. They wrestled desperately for a few seconds before Essex shot the doctor in the chest. When Betty Steagall ran to her husband’s aid, Essex coolly put the muzzle of his carbine against the base of her skull and pulled the trigger. She died embracing her dead husband.

Essex untied the Black Liberation Flag from his gun and threw it near their corpses.

Inside the Steagalls’ room, Essex set the drapes on fire and ran to the nearest stairwell.

Moving quickly through the hotel, he started several fires on various floors by soaking phone books with lighter fluid, then igniting them beneath the draperies. The whole time, he would shoot at any white folks he saw and would set off firecrackers in smoky halls and stairwells to create the illusion that many snipers and arsonists were prowling the hotel’s eighteen floors and killing at random.

On the eleventh floor, he shot the hotel’s assistant manager point-blank in the head, blowing most of it away. On the tenth floor, he mortally wounded the general manager. On the eighth-floor patio, a gut-shot hotel guest floated in the hotel pool for two hours, playing dead.

On the eighth floor, Essex heard sirens outside. From the balcony of one room, he saw a firefighter scrambling up an aerial ladder toward hysterical guests on the floor above. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger, hitting the fireman. He racked another cartridge into the chamber and took aim again, but the gun didn’t fire. He didn’t have time for another shot. Cops on the ground were firing back, so he ducked for cover.

By 11 a.m., less than a half hour after Mark Essex laid siege to the Howard Johnson, police had set up a command center in the lobby, and hundreds of cops surrounded the hotel. Sharpshooters had taken positions atop nearby buildings while other cops tried to keep curious onlookers out of the line of fire.

But it was fruitless. Local TV stations were going live, and their feeds were being picked up by networks for wall-to-wall coverage. Mark Essex’s war was being televised. Worse, word was leaking out that the snipers were militant black revolutionaries, and many angry African Americans were gathering on the street outside the Howard Johnson to yell things like “Right on!” and “Kill the pigs!” every time shots were fired from the balconies above.

From his perch on the eighth floor, Essex began to pick off cops who were scurrying around the streets below. One after another, they were falling wounded and dead.

In the meantime, some cops—led by the NOPD’s second-in-command, Louis Sirgo—began to work their way through the choking black smoke into the bowels of the hotel, searching for what they believed were at least three snipers. In a darkened stairwell just above the sixteenth floor, Essex shot Sirgo in the spine almost point-blank, killing him.

For several hours, police exchanged fire with the phantom shooters, who continued to set fires. A circling police helicopter even took fire from the hotel. Descriptions of the shooters varied so widely that police were convinced they faced a small army of cold-blooded militants who held key strategic positions throughout the hotel. They were everywhere …and nowhere.

At 3:30 p.m., police began securing the hotel, floor-by-floor, hoping ultimately to corner the snipers on the top floor, where fires were burning unabated.

Sometime around 4 p.m., more than five hours after the first shots were fired, police believed they had pushed the snipers onto the hotel’s roof, where they had taken refuge in a concrete cubicle at the top of the stairwell and elevator shaft. It was a nearly impregnable bunker, especially since police were neither close enough nor armed with sufficiently powerful weapons to penetrate its thick walls.

Cops hiding in the stairwells below the cubicle could hear somebody moving around, cursing at sharpshooters on nearby buildings. “Africa! Africa!” he would chant. At odd intervals, a sniper would run out on the graveled roof, fire several shots at police, then scamper back into the safe pillbox.

“Come on up, you honky pigs!” Essex yelled once as he fired down into the stairwell. “You afraid to fight like a black man?”

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” they screamed back. But all they could do was scream.

Even then, nobody knew exactly how many shooters were up on the roof, how they were armed, or how much ammo they had.

A HAIL OF GUNFIRE

One of the many Americans intently watching the violent drama unfold on television was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Pitman, a tough helicopter pilot who’d flown 1,200 combat missions in Vietnam, been shot down seven times, and won four Distinguished Flying Crosses. After the Rault fire, local Marines and Coast Guard chopper crews drew up contingency plans to help local police and fire departments in case of another high-rise fire.
So where is the Coast Guard?
Pitman wondered.

Fog, wind, and low skies made flying too dangerous, a Coast Guard commander told Pitman.

But Pitman knew the cops needed his help. At least seven people were dead and more than a dozen wounded. The snipers had the high ground and the firepower to do even more damage.

“Shit,” Pitman said. “It’s not too bad for me. I can fly up the river.”

Within an hour, Pitman and his crew were inching up the Mississippi River toward the city, sometimes only inches above the water. By 5:30, Pitman and three police marksmen were aloft in a twin-rotor military helicopter, with shoot-to-kill orders. Incredibly, they were about to strafe the roof of a downtown hotel in an American city—but this was a war.

Over the next several hours, Pitman played a cat-and-mouse game with the shooters. Time after time, the chopper took fire until it rose over the roof, then …nobody. The airborne police sharpshooters were pouring thousands of rounds into the concrete cubicle, but they couldn’t see anyone. Yet when the helicopter would move away, police observers on nearby buildings saw somebody run out and resume shooting.

Essex was hiding by climbing a water pipe and wedging himself under the bunker’s ceiling. So when the chopper hovered above, police marksmen couldn’t see him and their bullets ricocheted harmlessly all around him.

But once Pitman’s crew figured this out, a simple tactic was employed: While a fire truck on the ground pumped water into the hotel’s system, one of
Pitman’s sharpshooters poured a stream of tracer bullets into the pressurized pipe. It exploded.

Cops on the chopper unleashed a ferocious storm of fire on the cubicle. Forced from his hiding place by a spewing pipe and flying concrete chips, Essex ran from the cubicle holding his rifle and looked straight up at Pitman.

He yelled something nobody heard and raised his fist in one last defiant act before he was slaughtered in a hail of gunfire.

A little before 9 p.m., Mark Essex lay dead on the roof of the Howard Johnson, but the war wasn’t finished. Police kept firing into his body without mercy, and they shot his rifle into bits so none of his accomplices could use it. Throughout the night, police radioed that other snipers were shooting at them, or that they saw gun flashes in the dark or heard taunts from hidden corners of the hotel.

And they watched the corpse of Mark Essex all night. An occasional night breeze would sometimes flutter through the shreds of his fatigues or his black turtleneck sweater and they would swear he was still alive. Somebody would shoot him again, just to be sure.

The next morning, after the sun had risen, cops stormed the roof and found only Mark Essex’s ruined body. It had been hit by more than two hundred bullets and was virtually unrecognizable. One leg was nearly severed. Pieces of him were scattered for yards around, including his jaw and tongue, which had been blasted across the roof. One witnesses said the body was so ravaged that “we nearly had to use a shovel to scoop him up.”

Essex’s racist rampage was among the worst mass shooting in American history, even if it fell out of the public consciousness unusually quickly. Firing more than a hundred shots, Essex had killed nine people and wounded thirteen more. Five of the dead and five of the wounded were police officers. Of Essex’s twenty-two victims, only one was black.

To this day, some cops believe with all their hearts that there were other snipers, but the official police ruling was that Mark Essex had acted alone. Police found no metal casings that matched any other gun but Essex’s .44 Magnum carbine.

Nevertheless, the Rault Center arson fire six weeks before is now generally believed to have been a dry run for Essex’s attack at the Howard Johnson. If true, his death toll would rise to a grim fifteen innocent people.

Black outrage erupted within hours of Essex’s death.

A QUICKLY FORGOTTEN STRUGGLE

Even before Essex’s body had been shipped back to Emporia in a simple wooden crate, black militant leader Stokely Carmichael praised Essex for “carrying our struggle to the next quantitative level, the level of science.”

And within days, columnist Phil Smith of the
Chicago Metro News
, an activist black weekly, eulogized Essex as a “new hero in an old struggle.”

“Essex may not have been in love with white people, but that made him as normal as 30 million other Black people,” Smith wrote.

He suggested Essex was framed by a “sick white racist society” bent on the “systematic extermination of young Black men.” No young black man, he said, would ever “go berserk and kill white people for no reason.

“White people hate the idea that Black people, by virtue of their very existence, force whites to deal with their own dishonesty, deceit and criminal intent …White people truly believe ‘the only good nigger is a dead nigger,’” Smith seethed. “If there was one lesson that [Essex] had learned in his short life, it was that Black men are the most dispensable item in this country.”

Even Essex’s mother, resolute in her conviction that racism had transformed her cheerful little boy into a monster, was almost defiant when she spoke to reporters a week after the rampage.

“I do think Jimmy was driven to this,” she said. “Jimmy was trying to make white America sit up and be aware of what is happening to us.

“I don’t want my son to have died in vain,” Nellie continued. “If this terrible thing will awaken white America to the injustices that blacks suffer, then some good will have come from it.”

Although the Howard Johnson attack swiftly resurrected the ghosts of Charles Whitman’s 1966 Texas Tower massacre (see
chapter 6
), it quickly fell out of the national media spotlight. Many observers believed stories about black rage ran counter to the media’s efforts to portray a nation where African Americans should be seen as innocent, noble, civilized victims of white oppression—more Rosa Parks than Nat Turner, a messianic slave who, inspired by an eclipse of the sun, led the mass-murder of at least fifty white people in 1831.

So black rage neither began nor ended with Mark Essex, but he became one of its most powerful symbols.

In 2002, snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo shot sixteen people, killing ten, in a reign of terror as the “D.C. sniper,” even plotting to kill white police officers in one grand finale. Muhammad was a twelve-year-old boy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the day Mark Essex laid siege to the Howard Johnson, and it seems unlikely that he was not affected somehow by a case that drew stark divisions between whites and blacks.

Nellie Essex buried her son’s bullet-shredded body in Emporia six days after the shooting. There were no military honors. At his funeral, one memorial wreath bore a sash that said “Power to the People.”

The Black Panthers of New York sent a telegram to the family applauding Mark Essex as “a black man, warrior, and revolutionary.”

For many years, Mark Essex’s grave sat unmarked in Emporia’s Maplewood Cemetery, not far from the grave of legendary newspaperman William Allen White. But his family eventually placed a modest granite stone, and local veterans now mark Essex’s grave with a small bronze military medallion.