Some N.O. Chaos Fact Or Fiction?

Police Now Question Reports Of Rapes, Many Murders

(CBS/AP)  On Sept. 1, with desperate Hurricane Katrina evacuees crammed into the convention center, Police Superintendent Eddie Compass — who resigned Tuesday with very little public explanation — reported: "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten."

Five days later, he told talk show host Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. On the same show, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

The ugliest reports — children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement — soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans.

The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements, and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution.

But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.

They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Two of those are believed to have been murdered.

One of those victims — found at the Superdome — appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.

"It was a chaotic time for the city. Now that we've had a chance to reflect back on that situation, we're able to say right now that things were not the way they appeared," said police Capt. Marlon Defillo.

New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan said officials at the morgue in St. Gabriel have identified four apparent homicide victims from the city. All were shot and all were adults. Police arrested one person on suspicion of attempted sexual assault but received no official reports of rape.

Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault, cautioned that it might be too soon to say whether there really were rapes at the evacuation sites. Because the evacuees and any perpetrators have been scattered across the country by Katrina, and now Hurricane Rita, victims may come forward later, she said.

"It is extremely difficult to get good statistics about rape under normal circumstances, and these are certainly not normal circumstances," she said.

Questions over what did or did not happen in New Orleans did not come up at Tuesday's news conference at which Compass and Nagin dropped the bombshell that after 26 years on the police force, and at only age 47, Compass is resigning to go on "in another direction that God has for me."

Neither Compass nor Nagin would say whether Compass — at the helm when nearly 250 police officers failed to report for duty — was pressured to step aside.

Asked Tuesday about changing perceptions of what went on at the evacuation centers last month, Nagin spokeswoman Sally Forman said the mayor, in his statements at the time, was relying on others for his information about conditions at the evacuation sites. "He was listening to officials," she said, "trusting that information they were providing was accurate."