By: Greg Mitchell In a tragic story detailed elsewhere on this site, John McCusker, a photographer for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans -- and a local jazz expert -- was arrested Tuesday night after a car chase ended with McCusker begging the police to shoot and kill him. He cited what could be called post-traumatic stress syrdrome from experiencing, and covering, the impact of Hurricane Katrina.
An interview, produced by Adeline Goss, that he gave recently to a Brown University radio station (students from the school had visited New Orleans) no doubt illustrates some of the reasons for the incident. It can be found at:
http://www.prx.org/pieces/12547
It concluded:
"And some nights, you know, I gotta tell you, some nights that just in despair you lay in your bed, and like you?re a three-year-old and you just lay there and say, Oh my God. I want to go home. And you can?t go home.
"And it?s, you go some days where you don?t think about it and things are okay and you just kind of move along through your life. But then one day, maybe you get a FEMA rejection letter, maybe you have a terse discussion with the guy handling your SBA loan, maybe your insurance adjuster promised to meet you somewhere and he doesn?t show up, you know, and anything. And you?re right back to August 29th. ...
?I was a worrier, Dad was a worrier, you know, and I?d worry about this and worry about that. And I started thinking, all of the things in my life that I spent all the time worrying about, and none of them did anything to me that could in anyway compare with this mystery that comes out of the Gulf and just destroys the city and just ruined my life."
Sarah Weber of E&P transcribed the interview, available in audio form at http://www.bsrlive.com. The complete transcript follows.
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Times-Picayune photojournalist John McCusker is hunched over half-eaten oyster po? boy. He?s smoking his fifth cigarette of the night.
?I quit smoking 20 years ago. Started smoking on August 30th. You know and I?m really ashamed of it because I actually watched my dad die from not being able to take in enough air. He started smoking when, like, Hitler annexed the Rhineland."
John was one of only nine Times-Picayuners who stayed in New Orleans through Hurricane Katrina. The morning the levees broke, the rest of the newspaper staff left town on the back of a delivery truck. John?s wife Johanna, also a reporter, went to Baton Rouge, taking their son Ian who had stayed the first night of the storm so he could cover the hurricane for his high school newspaper. John stayed behind with his kayak, which was part of his usual pre-hurricane preparations.
He loaded it up with cameras, film and extra batteries. Then he launched off the front steps of the Times-Picayune into six feet of floodwater.
John had covered hurricanes before, enough to anticipate some of the dangers of hurricane reporting: nails, debris, live power lines, uncovered manholes.
?One of the most dangerous things you have to watch out for when you?re covering a hurricane or a flood are ant balls. When an ant mound floods, the ants form a giant ball where they keep climbing on each other. And the second they come in contact with anything dry, they are ON it.?
But nothing could have prepared John for what he saw over the next four days. That first day, he stood on the 17th Street Canal and looked over Lakeview. His home, his neighbor?s home, every home in sight, was covered in water.
?It was the first that I had covered anything that I knew exactly what most of those people were feeling, because I was feeling it myself. It wasn?t like covering a fire where somebody else?s house burnt down, or somebody else?s daughter dies in a car crash. This was my city, this was my town, this was my life. My house had seven feet of water in it. You know, you?re almost crying as you?re taking the pictures.?
But he kept taking them. He shot the Superdome, the French Quarter, the Ninth Ward, just following the refugees. He photographed dead people, old people, drug addicts, children, escaped prisoners. He photographed looters at a Wal-Mart in the Garden District running with blenders and television sets. He photographed a police officer leaving the same Wal-Mart with armloads of CDs.
Eventually he paired up with reporter Brian Thevenot, taking a van with a full tank of gas that they had stashed in a garage before the hurricane. They drove onto Interstate-10, the only high ground in the city. The road was clogged with starving, thirsty people who thought they could follow the road out of New Orleans. But they couldn?t. The highway was flooded on both ends.
?They all had the same look on their faces, perplexed disbelief. You know, just these thousands and thousands of people, invalids and old people put in shopping carts and pushed up onto the Interstate. Seven- and eight-year-old girls, like the ages of my daughters, begging me for food, begging me for water. And I had nothing for them.?
John just kept photographing, not knowing what else to do. When he could, he would go back to his mother?s house in Algiers, about 10 minutes away, to sleep or to file a story online. But on Wednesday, the line went dead. He and the other reporters drove on the highway through pitch black to the Picayune?s temporary headquarters in Houma, Louisiana. There, they filed their stories and ate their first hot meal.
?We were all kind of sitting around the news room at the Houma Courier, and we?re checking email and we?re all on different computers, and I looked up at Terri Troncale our editorial page editor, and she started to cry. And I asked her 'What?s wrong?' and she says how do you have a newspaper without a readership? And that?s when it dawned on us. Our city, for which we printed our newspaper, did not exist. And it whipped through us like a shockwave, and I think just everybody started crying at that point.?
John?s wife and children stayed in Hoover, Alabama, for three months after Katrina hit. The girls stayed connected with friends through the Internet, and Ian?s stories in the school paper earned him instant popularity.
The Times-Picayune eventually set a date by which reporters had to come back to work. But many reporters had children, and schools just weren?t open yet. So in the fall, after 22 years of working at the newspaper, Johanna received a call that her services were no longer needed. That left John in New Orleans alone until December while Johanna tried to decide if she would ever come back to New Orleans.
?You know a married man with three kids, I?m living by myself. I was staying at a friend?s house, this mansion, all by myself. I?m like Bruce Wayne over in this place. We were going out, getting drunk every night, because what the hell else are you going to do in post-apocalyptic New Orleans??
Around Thanksgiving, Johanna agreed to bring the kids back home. Right before Christmas, the five of them moved into what John calls a fabulously over-priced two-bedroom apartment uptown. Eventually, John and Johanna went back to their flooded home.
?That was a ... bizarre experience. It?s kind of like Tim Burton does your house.?
The McCuskers don?t know yet what to do about their house. They could probably rebuild their home for about $200,000, which their flood insurance would help pay for. But they can?t get a FEMA trailer, because there?s no any power yet in Lakeview. Besides, as far as the McCuskers know, they?re the only family on their street who?s planning to come home.
?Imagine going to bed one night, and waking up and everybody in your entire neighborhood and everybody that they know and everybody that they know is gone and you don?t know where they are. And some nights, you know, I gotta tell you, some nights that just in despair you lay in your bed, and like you?re a three-year-old and you just lay there and say, Oh my god. I want to go home. And you can?t go home.
"And it?s, you go some days where you don?t think about it and things are okay and you just kind of move along through your life. But then one day, maybe you get a FEMA rejection letter, maybe you have a terse discussion with the guy handling your SBA loan, maybe your insurance adjuster promised to meet you somewhere and he doesn?t show up, you know, and anything. And you?re right back to August 29th."
It?s 11 o?clock at night. John has smoked about half a pack of cigarettes since we started talking.
?I was a worrier, Dad was a worrier, you know, and I?d worry about this and worry about that. And I started thinking, all of the things in my life that I spent all the time worrying about, and none of them did anything to me that could in anyway compare with this mystery that comes out of the Gulf and just destroys the city and just ruined my life. So if anything, it?s made me more of a mumble, because I?m not worrying about anything. I?m glad to be alive.
***
Related E&P stories:
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Photographer for 'Times-Pic' Arrested As He Begs Cops to Kill Him--
'Times-Pic' Editor Comments on Arrest of Photographer
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