Storm’s Chaos, Not Its Rain, Claims 5 in Texas

Billy Coleman tried to play by the rules.

As Hurricane Rita lumbered toward Texas, he heeded calls to evacuate and fled to Mississippi in a three-car convoy -- 14 men, women, children, stepchildren, boyfriends, girlfriends, cousins. They planned to stay away from Beaumont, in the southeast corner of the state, until authorities gave the all-clear.

But things went wrong in a hurry.

Unable to find a public shelter, they had to sleep in their cars the first night. They finally found a hotel in Marion, Miss., near the Alabama line. But it charged more than $100 a night, and they were running out of money fast. So on Sunday, they turned around and went home.

By Monday morning, Coleman, another adult and three children were dead, asphyxiated by fumes from the generator he had brought into the apartment to power a table fan.

Rita itself does not appear to have killed anyone in Beaumont, although the city shouldered the initial brunt of the storm. But there is no power, no sanitation, not even enough water pressure to fill firefighters’ hoses.

Still, thousands of people have converged outside town in an attempt to get back to their homes, even as authorities try to evacuate those who refused to leave in the first place.

“They keep saying that we didn’t go anywhere for the storm,” Quaneshia Haynes, Coleman’s 25-year-old daughter, said Monday, tears streaming down her face. “We left. But we had to come back, and we didn’t have any choice.

“Let me tell you what they don’t tell you about evacuating. They don’t tell you that if you’re poor, you’re on your own. They don’t tell you that people will charge $100 for a hotel that has dirty sheets, where the toilet doesn’t even work. We didn’t want to come back here, to live with no lights and no water. But we had no help up there. Nothing.”

Beaumont Police Lt. Charles Tyler said the biggest mistake Coleman made was running the gas generator indoors, even if it was in a downstairs laundry room. He acknowledged, however, that the group had been in a fix.

As the storm approached on Thursday, Coleman, 47, and his extended family -- more than 30 people in all -- decided that there were too many of them to travel together. So they split into two groups. One headed to Mississippi, the other to Dallas.

Both caravans had problems finding a place to stay that night. While the Mississippi group ended up sleeping in their cars, the Dallas convoy, which included Haynes, was told by the Red Cross that the closest shelter was in Kansas. Running low on gas, they stopped at a hotel frequented by prostitutes, where they were charged by the hour. It was the only place they could find.

After Rita hit the Texas-Louisiana coastline Saturday morning and moved on, Coleman and the others began filtering back to Beaumont.

On Sunday evening, he worked his way into the city without encountering any roadblocks. He decided to stay at the apartment of his girlfriend, Irene Bean, 29.

The heat was oppressive, so Coleman, a construction worker, drove across town to his house to get his generator to operate a fan in the living room, where five children were sleeping.

Officials said the fan apparently sucked carbon monoxide emitted by the generator up the stairs and into the living area of the apartment, where three adults also had turned in for the night.

Monday morning, Haynes and her boyfriend, Kevin Hall, drove through the iron gates of the Pine Club apartments. Outside No. 1705, they honked the horn. Nothing. They honked several more times. Finally, the door opened. Haynes’ 12-year-old sister, Kenya Coleman, staggered out the front door.

“She was stumbling around and throwing up,” Hall said. “She kept saying, ‘They won’t wake up.’ I ran toward the house and opened the door, and the fumes just hit me. You couldn’t breathe in there at all.”

Hall ran back outside and screamed for help. He called 911, then took a deep breath and ran inside again. At first, he managed only to turn off the generator, he said. Then he went upstairs to get people out.

The adults were in the bedrooms toward the back of the second floor. The children were lined up on the floor of the living room, lying on sheets and blankets, their heads on pillows.

“I grabbed the kids first,” Hall said. “I swear on my momma I tried to save everybody in that house. But I couldn’t. Most of the kids, they were like little boards. When you carried them, they were cold and still.”

Residents frantically performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the victims; the first ambulance, they said, arrived 30 minutes later. Officials said the response was delayed because the ambulance drivers who were called had been brought into Beaumont from Kentucky and had a hard time finding the apartment complex. Numerous roads in the area are still blocked by massive pine trees.

The dead, relatives said, included Coleman; Bean’s son Demarcus, 9; her daughters Aaliyah Reese, 7, and Crystal Favre, 12; and Bean’s sister Diana Bean, 26. Bean, Coleman’s girlfriend, was taken to a Beaumont hospital in critical condition. Her son Emery Reese, 8, was airlifted to a Houston hospital, also in critical condition. Kenya Coleman was listed in stable condition at a local hospital.

“It hurts,” Hall said. “It hurts.”