By: E&P Staff A photographer for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans who has undergone severe personal trauma since Hurricana Katrina hit was arrested Tuesday after trying to get police to shoot him to death. Police said he claimed he was depressed after he found out he didn't have enough insurance money to rebuild his Katrina-damaged home.
They said he was seeking "suicide-by-cop," but police who found him tasered him instead.
Earlier published accounts had revealed that he had recently taken a leave of absence from the paper and was undergoing therapy.
John McCusker, the photographer, was being held under psychiatric observation and faces unspecified charges.
He had been one of the paper's key photographers in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. "Katrina didn't flood New Orleans - government failure did," he told visiting students from Brown University recently.
McCusker is also known locally as a jazz expert who gives guided "Cradle of Jazz" tours in the city in a van on Saturday mornings and speaks on the subject. His photos of the Preservation Hall band and other jazz performers have also gained attention, and he produced a 53-minute DVD called "The Story of Jazz: New Orleans Stomp."
A photo taken by McCusker -- at a minor league baseball Zephyrs game -- appears on the newspaper's Web site today, but it is unclear when it was taken.
Police said they noticed McCusker driving erratically in the city on Tuesday evening, then hit several parked cars when they pulled him over. McCusker rolled the window down and said several times, "Just kill me, get it over with, kill me."
When that didn't happen, he put the car in reverse and pinned one of the officers between the rear bumper of his car and the officer's cruiser, police said, and he suffered minor injuries. McCusker drove away, to fabled St. Charles Avenue, "going out of his way to knock down any signs advertising construction," police told the newspaper.
When he finally stopped, police had to taser him -- as he again begged them to kill him.
The police official said, according to newspapers, that this was only one of many examples of the mental damage that Katrina has caused, "and he sees it all the time now."
Immediately after Katrina struck, numerous Times-Picayune photographers fanned out on their own in the city, but McCusker was the only one who traveled with a key reporting team as they roamed the city. In fact, they stayed at times at McCusker's mother's house.
McCusker is a graduate of local Loyola University and worked on the paper there. He was a staff writer at the Times-Picayune several years ago and often wrote about jazz, including a three-part series in 1993.
A Boston Globe story about his jazz tours in 2002 noted that he had started doing that about five years earlier, feeling that tourists did not really know the background there. To that end he drove them all over the city, playing CDs, and showing off, for example, Jelly Roll Morton's house and a club where Louis Armstrong performed.
The current issue of American Journalism Reviews includes a New Orleans feature that mentions McCusker in several paragraphs. It said he went back to work on June 20 after taking a leave and attending therapy sessions three times a week. He explained that he had essentially become nonfunctional, "a joker who had become humorless, a man who had given up cigarettes 20 years ago who was smoking two packs a day."
Besides losing his house, McCucker had photographed that post-hurricane catastrophe. "You have to understand the depth of the horror that the city was," McCusker says in the article. "Tens of thousands of people on the freeways stranded. The children begging for food and water. The looting at the Wal-Mart. It was of biblical proportions." Devastated, he was not able to help his own family very much, he admits.
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Related E&P stories:
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'Times-Pic' Editor Comments on Arrest of Photographer--
In Radio Interview, Troubled 'Times-Pic' Photographer Detailed Katrina Aftermath
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