Apparently at least a dozen inmates jumped out of the windows. They also set fire to blankets and shirts and hung them out of the windows to let people know they were still in the facility. Inmates broke jail windows to let air in. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells. Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. ![]() I feel like I'm about to drown.' He was crying.” The one that I was cool with, he was saying ‘I'm scared. “We was calling down to the guys in the cells under us, talking to them every couple of minutes. “The water started rising, it was getting to here,” said Earrand Kelly, an inmate from Templeman III, as he pointed at his neck. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. “They left us to die there,” Dan Bright, an Orleans Parish Prison inmate told Human Rights Watch at Rapides Parish Prison, where he was sent after the evacuation.Īs the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. A spokeswoman for the Orleans parish sheriff’s department told Human Rights Watch she did not know whether the officers at Templeman III had left the building before the evacuation.Īccording to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmates' last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. Inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch varied about when they last remember seeing guards at the facility, but they all insisted that there were no correctional officers in the facility on Monday, August 29. These prisoners were taken by boat to the Broad Street overpass bridge, and ultimately transported to correctional facilities outside New Orleans.Ĭaged for the Storm: Prisoners in the Path of Hurricane Florenceīut at Templeman III, which housed about 600 inmates, there was no prison staff to help the prisoners. The evacuation of Orleans Parish Prison was not completed until Friday, September 2.Īccording to officers who worked at two of the jail buildings, Templeman 1 and 2, they began to evacuate prisoners from those buildings on Tuesday, August 30, when the floodwaters reached chest level inside. ![]() Other parish prisons, she said, had called for help on the previous Saturday and Sunday. ![]() Gusman, did not call for help in evacuating the prison until midnight on Monday, August 29, a state Department of Corrections and Public Safety spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, which oversaw the evacuation, and the Orleans Sheriff’s Department should account for the 517 inmates who are missing from the list of people evacuated from the jail.Ĭarey spent five days in Louisiana, conducting dozens of interviews with inmates evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, correctional officers, state officials, lawyers and their investigators who had interviewed more than 1,000 inmates evacuated from the prison. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Orleans Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, and to establish the fate of the prisoners who had been locked in the jail. Evacuated prisoners in sit on a sunken highway during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, August 31, 2005.
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