related: Hurricane Katrina - Our Experiences
and Police made their storm misery worse

Police agencies south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds attempting to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, according to two paramedics who were in the crowd.

The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people. The witnesses said they had been told by New Orleans police to cross this same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.

Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.

``The police kept saying, `We don't want another Super Dome,' and `This isn't New Orleans,' '' said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., police department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.

``As soon as things calm down, we will do an inquiry and find out what happened,'' he said.

Bradshaw and his partner, Lorrie Beth Slonsky, wrote an account about their experiences that has been widely e-mailed.
Cathey Golden, a 51-year-old from Boston, and her 13-year-old son, Ramon Golden, on Friday confirmed the account.

The four met at the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter. Bradshaw and Slonsky had attended a convention for emergency medicine specialists. Golden and her two children, including 23-year-old Rashida Golden, were there to visit family.

The hotel allowed its guests and nearly 250 residents from the nearby neighborhood to stay until Thursday, Sept 1. With its food exhausted, the hotel's manager finally instructed people to leave. Hotel staff handed out maps to show the way to the city's Convention Center, to which thousands of other evacuees had fled.

A group of nearly 200 guests gathered to make their way to the center together, the four said. But on the way, they heard that the Convention Center had become a dangerous, unsanitary pit from which no one was being evacuated. So they stopped in front of a New Orleans police command post near the Harrah's casino on Canal Street.

A New Orleans police commander whom none of the four could identify told the crowd that they could not stay there and later told them that buses were being brought to the Crescent City Connection, a nearby bridge to Jefferson Parish, to carry them to safety.

But on the bridge there were four police cruisers parked across some lanes. Between six and eight officers stood with shotguns in their hands, the witnesses said. As the crowd approached, the officers shot over the heads of the crowd, most of whom retreated immediately, Bradshaw, Slonsky and Golden and her son said.