Mayor Mitch Landrieu on Monday formally announced $13.3 million settlements reached over the past month with family members and surviving victims in a pair of police shootings that left three people dead after Hurricane Katrina, as well as a settlement last summer over a third police killing a month before the storm.
The announcement followed a prayer service at Xavier University's St. Katharine Drexel Chapel, where many of those family members, along with New Orleans Police Superintendent Michael Harrison and a host of NOPD brass, gathered to memorialize the victims.
During the prayer service, Landrieu said that after Katrina, everyone was trying to seek safety for their families. These families looked for help from those sworn to protect them.
"Instead they found terror," he said. "Please accept my apology on behalf of the citizens of New Orleans."
Harrison also expressed regret.
Sherrell Johnson, James Brissette's mom, thanked the mayor and the chief of police for their apologies. "This means so much to me," she said. "As of this day, we know that James Brissette's death was not in vain."
The event was meant as a gesture of peace more than 11 years after several police officers, responding to an "officer down" call, spilled out of a commandeered U-Haul truck and opened fire on the Danziger Bridge on Sept. 2, 2005, killing two unarmed civilians and wounding four others.
Two days earlier, a rookie New Orleans police officer, David Warren, fired a single shot from his rifle down on Henry Glover behind an Algiers strip mall.
Another officer then burned Glover's body on a nearby levee, turning evidence of a homicide to ash and shards of bone and leaving Glover's fate a mystery for years.
The twin incidents of fatal police gunfire, with allegations of cover-ups in both cases, were leading exhibits in the federal case for court-mandated reforms that remain ongoing for the city's long-maligned police force.
Last month, the city reached settlements with several victims in the Danziger Bridge shootings and family members of those killed: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison.
Among those who agreed to terms in that case were Madison's brother, Lance Madison, who was falsely arrested and jailed as part of an elaborate whitewash; Jose Holmes Jr., who was permanently disfigured by two gunshots to the abdomen; Susan Bartholomew, who was struck in an arm that doctors amputated; Leonard Bartholomew, who took a glancing shot to the skull; and Lesha Bartholomew, who was shot in the leg and knee.
Sherrel Johnson, Brissette's mother, also agreed to a settlement in the case.
Similar agreements were reached this month with Glover's five children; his brother, Edward King; and brother-in-law Bernard Calloway.
King and Calloway claimed police detained and beat them with rifle butts after they rushed a dying Glover to an emergency outpost at nearby Habans Elementary School, seeking aid.
While they were detained, NOPD Officer Gregory McRae drove Glover's body to a nearby levee and torched it.
Of the three officers who were initially convicted of the shooting, burning and alleged cover-up, only McRae's conviction has stood up to legal review. He is now serving a 12-year federal sentence.
Warren was retried alone, and acquitted by a jury in late 2013, for shooting Glover. U.S. District Judge Lance Africk tossed the conviction of the third officer, Travis McCabe, finding that evidence had been unearthed after the trial cleared him.
In the Danziger case, the convictions of five officers were overturned in a stunning ruling three years ago by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt, who found "grotesque prosecutorial misconduct" related to the online posting scandal that engulfed former U.S. Attorney Jim Letten's office in 2012.
Those five officers pleaded guilty last spring in exchange for sharply reduced sentences, avoiding a retrial.
The final resolution of both criminal cases cleared the way for plaintiffs to reopen their claims in the federal civil rights cases.
Attorneys for several of the plaintiffs have credited Landrieu for coming willingly to the bargaining table to resolve the civil disputes and put an ignominious chapter in the history of the city and its police force behind them.
In July, the city also quietly settled a decade-old federal lawsuit from two sisters of Raymond Robair, a 48-year-old handyman who was fatally beaten by police in the Treme neighborhood on July 30, 2005.
Former veteran officer Melvin Williams is now serving a 22-year federal sentence after a jury in 2011 found him guilty of depriving Robair of his rights under color of law and obstructing a federal investigation.
Williams' rookie partner that day, Matthew Dean Moore, received a 70-month prison term after the same jury convicted him of obstructing a federal investigation and making false statements. He is now free.
A federal judge sealed the terms of that settlement agreement, and the city declined repeated requests for its terms. But a federal judge unsealed it Tuesday morning in a move that appeared timed for Monday's announcement.
(c)2016 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.