Judge quashes murder charges against New Orleans police in Katrina shootings

CBCNews

The district attorney's office in New Orleans is considering whether to appeal a judge's decision to toss out murder and attempted murder charges against seven police officers for a shooting in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In quashing the indictments Wednesday, District Judge Raymond Bigelow agreed with defence arguments that prosecutors violated state law by divulging secret grand jury testimony to a police officer who was a witness in the case.

Survivors of the Sept. 4, 2005, shootings have said the officers fired at unarmed people crossing the Danziger Bridge to get food at a grocery store.
Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, and James Brissette, 19, were killed and four other people were wounded.
The officers admitted to shooting at people on the bridge, but said they were fired upon first.

Family Felt Like 'Lab Rats' In FEMA Trailer

SunHerald

It was when the sight of a bloody child became routine that Lindsay Huckabee broke down and cried. She and her husband, Steve, had spent months dealing with "two, three, four nosebleeds a week," in their FEMA mobile home, she said. When it wasn't a nosebleed, one child or another had burning eyes, coughing, congestion and "colds" that wouldn't go away.

The Huckabees have become icons for a Sierra Club movement that believes formaldehyde fumes in FEMA trailers have caused widespread poisoning of hurricane victims. The organization tested the formaldehyde levels of 69 FEMA trailers. Based on an industrial standard, most tested high, as did the Huckabees'. The Sierra Club is now campaigning for stringent standards on formaldehyde levels in building products, where it is used in glues, resins, particle board and sometimes insulation.

New Orleans Homeless rate swells to 1 in 25

USA Today

An estimated 12,000 homeless accounts for 4% of New Orleans' estimated population of 302,000, according to the homeless advocacy group UNITY of Greater New Orleans. The number is nearly double the pre-Katrina homeless count, the group says.

Many of the homeless are Katrina evacuees who returned to unaffordable rents or who slipped through the cracks of the federal system designed to provide temporary housing after the storm, said Mike Miller, UNITY's director of supportive housing placement. There are also out-of-state workers who came for the post-Katrina rebuilding boom but lost their jobs, and mentally ill residents in need of services and medication, he said. Many of the city's outreach homeless centers and public mental health services have been closed since Katrina.