* Charmaine Neville, of the famous Neville family, who told a soul-wrenching tale of rape and chaos in New Orleans during the aftermath of Katrina
* Dr. Ben Marble, the Mississippi physician who told Cheney "go fuck yourself, you asshole" to his face.
* Jabbar Gibson, the 18 year-old who hotwired a bus and drove a group of Katrina evacuees to safety only to face criminal charges for "extreme looting"
Three Katrina survivors who grabbed headlines during the crisis. In honor of wmtriallawyer's call for us to commemorate the tragic and infuriating events of last year, I think it is apropos to present an update on these three survivors:
Charmaine Neville fled New Orleans by stealing a bus and ferreting herself and several others to Baton Rouge several days after Katrina hit landfall. Immediately, Neville made her way the local Baton Rouge news station and
memorialized her near unspeakable account of the situation in New Orleans:
We were watching the helicopters go across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us, "Hi," and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food, any water, nothing.
Alligators were eating people. They had all kind of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water. We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old folks' homes. I tried to get the police to help us but I realized we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the district police station.[snip]
I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come [inaudible] the neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men, and they came and they started raping women and [inaudible], and they started killing them. And I don't know who these people were. I'm not going to tell you I know who they were because I don't, but what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened.
Not sure I would have survived that; much less managed to organize and rescue several other people, then had the presence of mind to contact the media to share my story in the hopes of prompting the federal government to get off its ass.
What an amazing woman. Where is she now? As of April 2006:
Neville, who is set to perform at Jazz Fest Friday afternoon, performed at an outdoor concert in Lafayette earlier this month. After that concert, she again spoke with WAFB 9NEWS, and said she stands by the harrowing story she told eight months earlier.
"I have had people come up to me and say, did that really happen?" Neville said, when asked that question, she often replies, "I'm glad you weren't there, but had you been there, you would know."
Neville says, while trying to head to higher ground after the levees broke, she was raped. "I'm not going to say that it has changed me, because one person hurt me, not everybody, but one person," Neville said during the interview earlier this month. "I'm not mad at him, I forgive him," the singer said.
According to her website, Neville spent July touring in Spain. What a blessing this woman is, and what a reminder of real strength, resolve, and ultimately renewal in the face of enormous tragedy and personal pain. God bless you, Charmaine.
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Dr. Ben "go fuck yourself Cheney!" Marble was an emergency room physician in Mississippi who lost his home after Katrina hit landfall. Upon hearing that Cheney was in his neighborhood touring the damage and talking to neighbors, Dr. Marble not only found Cheney and went off, but grabbed a video camera and had a friend tape him going off:
"So we grabbed my Canon digital rebel and my Sony videocamera and started walking down the street," Marble wrote. "And then right in front of the destroyed tennis court I used to play on Dick Cheney was giving a pep rally, talking to the press. The secret service guys patted us down and waved the wands over us, and then let us pass."
As he stood about 10 feet away from Cheney and his friend and some camera operators from CNN and other media filmed the scene, Marble suddenly yelled, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney! Go fuck yourself, you asshole!"
And then Dr. Marble calmly walked back to the wreckage of his house. He was later confronted by what he describes as military police and detained in handcuffs for 20 minutes for cussing out Cheney. Where is he now?
Dr. Marble has since caught the attention of several major magazines, including Rolling Stone and GQ for his cathartic tirade. He maintains several websites in which he shares his music, art, writing and provides extensive pictoral documentation of Katrina's affect on his area of MS as well as resources for those seeking help or seeking to help.
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Jabbar Gibson's story was one of the stories which I found the most enraging. I'll let William Martin, the first DKos diarist to describe this travesty, speak for me:
Rather than die on the streets of New Orleans, a young guy named Jabbor Gibson grabbed on an abandoned bus and drove 7 hours straight to Houston, rescuing complete strangers, including women and children, according to the Houston Chronicle.
I'm sick of hearing people who were completely abandoned and left to fend for themselves described as looters for doing what any of us would do in the same situation. I'm not talking about stealing TVs. I'm talking about taking food, water, shoes, and about taking matters into their own hands when the government had left them for dead.
Again, from the news report:
One 8-day-old infant spent the first days of his life surrounded by chaos. He's one of the many who are homeless and hungry.
This child pooled money together with his friends and purchased gas, food, and diapers for complete strangers as he was driving this busload of people out of New Orleans and into Houston. Please read that diary in its entirety; if you only choose one link to follow, click on that one.
His update is just tragic:
Gibson has picked up more charges since Hurricane Katrina. On January 9, 2006, Gibson was arrested and subsequently indicted on federal charges after being found in possession of cocaine, heroin, and a revolver by New Orleans narcotics detectives and federal agents. He is currently incarcerated in Orleans Parish Prison awaiting trial on his pending cases.
I know after this story began circulating in earnest on the internet, a lot of us expressed a desire to set up a scholarship fund or reward of some kind for this young man. But it seems this impulse was lost in the chaos and tragedy of the overwhelming scope of the Katrina aftermath.
Perhaps we should reinvigorate our efforts to find and reward this young man, or at least ensure that he understands how many of us were moved to tears by his bravery, his resolute and decisive decisions which saved lives; his heroism.
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DKosopedia resources:
Hurricane Katrina blog project
Hurricane Katrina survivor stories
Hurricane Katrina commentary