The Unvanquished: A Cop’s Story

It was almost dawn. Patrick Hartman had not slept well.

Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans, but that’s not what disturbed him. He had slept only fitfully since a traumatic shooting three years earlier -- and so little these days that his mother feared he was clinically depressed.

Weary and sleep-deprived, Hartman got up, ready to get to work. He was a New Orleans police officer. His regular shift wouldn’t begin until 4 p.m., but he planned to leave around noon. He had been told that he would be part of a hurricane cleanup crew that evening, after Katrina had passed.

Patrick Hartman did not make it to work that day. Hurricane Katrina literally washed him away. It washed away everything stable and prosaic in the life of this Irish American cop, an intensely private and sensitive son of New Orleans. Like the city itself, Hartman was forever altered by what happened that day, by the privations he endured in the days that followed and the decisions he and others were forced to make.

The hurricane tested Hartman, 36, and he prevailed, but in a way that left him feeling brittle and unmoored. In many ways, his trials were the trials of an entire city: His home was flooded. He was submerged in fetid floodwaters. He was rescued. He rescued others. He was left bereft and homeless, wearing the same fouled clothing for days.

As a member of a police force shattered by the storm, Hartman lived a parallel life. He was both flood victim and working cop. The police chief said 80% of his officers lost homes to the flood, and a third of the 1,740 officers could not, or would not, report for work after Katrina hit.

Hartman’s police station was flooded. He would have no police cruiser, no radio, no uniform. He and fellow officers hot-wired cars and boats, stole airport shuttle vans and took food and water from looted stores, he said. He was fired on by snipers, even as he rescued people from rooftops. He was involved in the biggest single police action of the flood -- the killing of five alleged snipers in crime-ridden New Orleans East.

After two officers committed suicide the first weekend after the storm, all 100-some officers in Hartman’s district were offered bus rides to Baton Rouge to rest for a day or two before returning. Hartman and seven others volunteered to stay. They piled onto another bus, bound back to the 7th District.

“I watched grown men cry,” Hartman said. “We thought we were going back to die.”

After all this -- after a gashed hand bled all over a stranger’s bedroom, after the skin on his feet cracked and sloughed off, after a desperate gunshot that left his hearing impaired -- Patrick Hartman did an odd thing. He went back to work. But not before he wrote a letter to his 87-year-old grandmother, describing all that had befallen him. And not before he went searching for the police medal he had lost to the storm.

*

He knew what had been forecast, but at 5 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, Hartman thought the rainfall was calm and ordinary. Yet it would not stop. He watched from the doorway of his efficiency apartment, a wood-frame structure attached to the brick home of his vacationing landlord, an FBI agent. As murky brown water began to rise, Hartman counted the bricks on a neighbor’s house to measure the flood’s rise.

Hartman lived alone, divorced, wedded to his job. He spent his entire adult life in the regimented world of the military and law enforcement. He left home at 17, enlisting in the Army with his twin brother. He served four years, another six in the National Guard, and put in nearly nine years with the N.O.P.D.

He rented in Lakeview, a neighborhood of majestic oaks founded by Irish immigrants on the city’s western shoulder, near the 17th Street Canal levee. There were at least 100 cops and firefighters living there, solidly middle class, among pensioners in tidy duplexes. There is a saying in Lakeview during hurricane season: “Fill your bathtub with water and take your ax to the attic.”

Hartman did neither. Although at least half of Lakeview had evacuated by that morning, he stayed put. His truck was in the shop, he said later, but he would have stayed even if he had owned a working vehicle. He had to go to work. A friend would be coming by to give him a ride to the 7th District police station in New Orleans East.

As the waters rose, he called to check on his mother, Cheryl, who lives about 20 miles west in St. Charles Parish. Then his cellphone failed.

He was strapping on his 9-mm pistol and police radio just as a flood surge crashed through the narrow passage between his apartment and the house next door. Hartman didn’t know it, but the levee had ruptured.

In an instant, he was standing in waist-deep water. He realized the wall of water was about to swallow his apartment. He opened the front door and dived into the swirling water. The power of the surge shocked him. He could not touch the ground. He tried to swim but was buffeted by the water. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and a $175 pair of cowboy boots his mother had given him for Christmas.

He washed up to one house, then another. He bashed a window with his fist, trying to force his way inside. He fumbled for his pocketknife. He punched at a window with the knife in his fist. The blade slipped and sliced through his palm. Blood gushed down his arm.

He was swept away again. Near Bragg Street, he recognized a massive oak. When he used to walk down the sidewalk, he often tried -- and failed -- to leap up and touch its lowest branch, about eight feet high. Floating now, he reached out and hooked the branch with his arm and held on.

He was exhausted and tried to rest. He began talking to the tree, and to his late father, trying to calm himself.

He noticed a two-story house with an open window. He let go of the tree and swam toward it. He passed two submerged cars, and it dawned on him how calamitous the flood had become.

Reaching the house, Hartman tried to hoist himself through the window but something made him realize that he was in his bare feet. His cowboy boots had washed away.

He made his way around back and beached himself on a porch. He wanted to break through a pair of French doors but did not want to cut himself again. He drew his waterlogged handgun; he thought it might be able to fire at least once. He squeezed the trigger and a round shattered the glass. But the reverberation ruptured his right eardrum. The gun “stovepiped” -- it failed to retract into firing position and was useless to him now.

Hartman reached inside the opening and felt a deadbolt -- with no key. He had hoped to find a lock with a twist knob.

He fought his way back to the front. After several tries, he managed to hoist himself through the open window. He waded through six inches of water on the ground floor, then slogged upstairs.

There were two telephones, but both were dead. Hartman settled in. He studied family photos on the wall -- a family of four, with a son and a daughter. He was bleeding all over their second floor.

He found a pen and paper and wrote an apology. When he finished, it was streaked with blood. He felt terrible about all the blood, he wrote later in a long letter to his grandmother, but “I asserted that at the time I did not feel like drowning.”

He felt so guilty that after he used the upstairs bathroom, he fetched a pail of floodwater from downstairs to flush it. He did not eat any of the family’s food, he said later.

Soon he lay down on the floor in the boy’s bedroom, trying to sleep. He did not want to make a mess of the bed, but at last he gave in and slipped under the covers. He slept for the rest of the day, his blood soaking the sheets.

He awoke in the dark to the sound of a helicopter overhead. He found a flashlight and waved it frantically through the night, but he remained marooned.

At first light, he saw that the floodwaters had risen to the first-floor ceiling. He decided that staying in the house was untenable. He searched the boy’s bedroom for shoes and found a worn pair of sneakers in his size, 9 1/2 . Then he wrote another bloody note, apologizing again.

He thought the girl’s bedroom would provide his best exit route, but he hesitated. “I did not want to defile a teenage girl’s sanctuary,” he wrote. Finally, spotting a man in a boat outside, he entered her room, broke the window and dropped into the waters below.

Hartman swam a butterfly stroke, trying to conserve energy, and he struggled to reach the boat. The boatman had to drag him aboard, for Hartman was spent. The two barely spoke.

After he rested, Hartman seized one of the many boats bobbing in the water. He floated from house to house, rescuing people stranded on rooftops and porches. He dropped each person on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, then went back for more. He rescued 15 people by nightfall, he said.

“We spent the day stealing boats, rescuing people and creating a mini-flotilla that rescued many people that day,” he wrote his grandmother.

He did not see a single other police officer, he said.

“What I saw was civilians from outside the flooded area helping out, rescuing people, volunteering to take acquired boats to help others, sharing food and water, no violence, only goodwill,” he wrote.

Asked later why he began rescuing others when he himself had barely survived, Hartman said, “It’s easier to save other people than to save yourself.”

*

Still in his soggy T-shirt, jeans and borrowed sneakers, late Tuesday, Aug. 30, Hartman walked and hitched rides to get to the 7th District police station, which was underwater. Officers had taken refuge in a banquet hall on high ground next to the Chef Menteur Highway. They had two working police cruisers, Hartman said.

For the next few days, Hartman split his time between search and rescue operations and forays to secure supplies for the little outpost.

He foraged through flooded and looted convenience stores and supermarkets, collecting canned spaghetti and meats, bottled water and snack food. When the military began dropping boxes of MREs (meals ready to eat) to stranded evacuees, Hartman said, the police kept some for themselves.

With few working radios, little communication with police command, and chaos all around them, the officers set up a rogue operation to carry out their jobs.

They commandeered boats from among the hundreds tossed about by the storm, he said, and used them to pull people off rooftops. If they encountered motorists driving cars without proof of registration or ownership, he said, they confiscated the vehicles for police use. They broke into and hot-wired SUVs and sedans parked on high ground. They siphoned gasoline from abandoned vehicles, he said.

“We stole stuff, sure,” Hartman said later. “We took what we needed -- we did what we had to do. We were scamming what we could scam. But we didn’t steal TV sets like the crackheads were doing. We were just trying to survive.”

He felt abandoned by the 500-some officers who had failed to report for duty. Some may have died in the flood and others were probably evacuating their families, according to police Capt. Marlon A. Defillo. But many simply deserted, police Supt. Eddie Compass said. Calling them cowards, Compass warned that an investigation into disciplinary action was underway. Four hundred are still unaccounted for, Compass said Thursday.

Hartman was noncommittal when asked about the deserters. But when he was told that none had been disciplined, he muttered, “Not yet.”

Weary and filthy after several nights of sleeping on chairs outside the banquet hall, Hartman rode with a homicide detective to his mother’s home west of the city on Friday, Sept. 2.

Cheryl Hartman, a tiny, energetic woman with short-cropped hair, had not heard from her son since the day of the storm. She had survived Katrina, holed up in her solid brick home with her cat, OJ. She feared that he had perished.

“I thought he was dead, I really did,” she said later. “He has a phobia about water. I was afraid he’d get into an impossible situation and just give up and kill himself.”

When he showed up, dirty and disheveled, she felt a rush of relief and gratitude. He stayed barely 15 minutes, grabbing a pair of military fatigue pants and a change off clothes before rushing back to New Orleans East.

Cheryl marked her kitchen calendar with a two stars and the words, “Pat’s Alive!”

On the night of Sunday, Sept. 4, Hartman said he was summoned to back up officers confronting at least seven snipers in a motel near the Danziger Bridge. Police later said the gunmen had been firing on contractors traveling under police escort to repair a levee break. Hartman said they also shot at rescuers launching boats from a flooded roadway.

With police-issued weapons and ammunition in short supply, Hartman said, some officers fired guns and ammunition brought from home.

“Everybody brought along their own toys -- AK-47s, SKSs [carbines], hunting rifles,” he said.

After a long shootout, four snipers lay dead and a fifth was mortally wounded, police said. “Bunch of crackheads,” Hartman said later.

Four days later, on Thursday, Sept. 8, a flotilla of Marines arrived at the makeshift police station in amphibious vehicles designed for flood and hurricane rescue. When they asked for police volunteers to guide them through the eastern wards, Hartman climbed aboard.

“I was fed up with the lack of cohesiveness on the force,” he said later. “It’s going to be a long time before this force recovers.”

For the next two days, he crawled over balcony railings and crept along windowsills, trying to get inside flooded homes to search for survivors or corpses. He found himself smashing windows again -- this time with a police club.

Chugging at rooftop level and crunching over submerged cars, the crews checked hundreds of homes resting in six to eight feet of foul water with an oily blue sheen. Hartman’s fair face was sunburned a bright pink, his red hair plastered against his forehead, a wad of Skoal bulging from his lip.

He and the Marines rescued several residents, two parakeets and a terrified cockatiel that fluttered madly inside a flooded apartment until Hartman corralled him and set him free.

Last weekend, Hartman was ordered to take five days off. He caught a ride to his mother’s house, where he downed five cans of carbonated lemonade and several Miller Lites. He looked awful, his mother thought. He was thin and haggard, with a crusty slab of brown tissue forming on the wound in his palm.

“His feet look like he’s got jungle rot from Vietnam,” Cheryl said. She made him soak them in Epsom salts; they burned so badly that he pounded his fists on the kitchen table.

His first night back, Patrick took out a laptop at 3 a.m. and wrote the letter to his grandmother, Virginia Lawson, who had asked him about the flood. “I wrote it so I wouldn’t have to talk about it,” he said.

Even though “he’s not much of a talker,” his mother said, her son made of point of stopping and chatting with residents on his beat in the 7th District, which is heavily African American. He built particularly strong bonds with young boys and elderly women, he said. “And crazy people,” she said. “He tends to get along with crazy people.”

Officer Stephen McGee, who has worked with Hartman in the 7th, said Hartman lived for police work. “Pat doesn’t say much, but he gets the job done right,” McGee said.

Hartman said he was profoundly affected by the 1,000 funerals he attended at Arlington National Cemetery during his service with a military honor guard. But what really drove him deeply within himself, his mother said, was an incident in New Orleans East in December 2002: He shot a mentally deranged paraplegic, Gerald Mason, who had opened fire on him.

Hartman said he had befriended Mason and his family, and had answered previous police calls whenever Mason acted erratically. When a report came in that a man in a wheelchair was firing a TEC-9 machine gun, Hartman responded.

Mason shot several rounds at his police cruiser, Hartman said, and he returned fire, hitting him five times. Mason survived. “Like a roach,” Hartman said.

The department gave Hartman its second-highest award, a medal of merit, for his courage under fire. Two things he treasured -- the medal and photographs of his son, Ryan, 5, who lives with his ex-wife in Iowa -- disappeared when his apartment was swallowed by floodwaters.

As he recuperated from the storm, Cheryl begged her son to see a psychiatrist provided by the police department, but he balked.

“I hate shrinks,” Patrick said. “They ask too many questions.” And he has refused, too, to get a physical checkup despite spending hours with an open wound in contaminated floodwaters.

Still, he enjoyed jousting with his mother as she nagged him to get medical help. When Cheryl mentioned that she had feared he had died in the flood, he cracked: “Missed out on the insurance policy, huh?”

*

Last week, on Wednesday, Hartman strapped his service pistol over a pair of shorts, clipped his badge to his belt and made his way to a flooded overpass next to the 17th Street Levee in his Lakeview neighborhood.

He wanted his medal back.

After failing to convince anyone else to give him a lift to his flooded house, Hartman caught a ride with a city firefighter, Timothy Hughes, who had borrowed a boat to check on the homes of his two ex-wives. Guided by street signs that protruded from the water’s surface, they made their way into Lakeview. Hartman sliced his knee as he struggled to help launch the boat in the shallows. When at last he reached the door of his apartment on West End Avenue, Hartman found his furniture upended, floating.

But above the oil-slicked water, on top of the refrigerator, he found his medal -- wet and tarnished. He found a pair of rusty handcuffs, too, and a silver crucifix given to him by an ex-girlfriend. He also spotted his leather police jacket, soaked with grime, and hauled it out.

When the firefighter’s boat reappeared at dusk, Hartman was clutching the medal in his fist. He was soaked to the waist in the greasy, green floodwater and exhausted -- every bit as weary as the day Katrina first hit him 16 days earlier.

When he got off the boat, he crouched down at the edge of the receding floodwaters. His cut knee was throbbing. He knew his mother would douse it later with hydrogen peroxide and hound him about seeing a doctor.

But any other thoughts or feelings that burdened him at that moment were cloaked in silence.

On this day, at the searing close of a personal and trying ordeal, Patrick Hartman wasn’t talking. He squatted there for a very long time as the dull, orange sun dipped below the ruptured levee, and darkness descended on what remained of Lakeview.

*

Times photographer Rob Gauthier contributed to this report.