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A year after Katrina, images of her quiet death still resonate

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published September 2, 2006

NEW ORLEANS - In death, she became a symbol of government failure - a woman slumped in a wheelchair, abandoned outside one of the city's overwhelmed shelters.

One year after her death, her family gathered to remember her, laying roses at her grave and preparing for a memorial.

"She was a nobody in life. She was just an ordinary woman, but God made sure she'd become someone in death," said Veronica White, a friend of 91-year-old Ethel Freeman, who died last Sept. 1 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Freeman's son, Herbert Freeman Jr., had wheeled her to the city's convention center from their flooded home, expecting buses to carry them to safety. The buses arrived Sept. 4, but by then Ethel Freemen was dead.

After she died, her son tried to cover her face with a towel, but her arms and body stuck out. Someone offered Freeman a poncho, and he laid it over her.

The image was captured by photographers and transmitted around the world, becoming one of the most memorable photos of the disaster.

When the buses arrived, Freeman's son begged the driver to take the woman's body, but he was instead forced to board without her, leaving her in the wheelchair, pushed to the side of the cavernous building, a piece of paper attached to her clothes bearing his cell phone number.

After being evacuated to a shelter in Birmingham, Ala., Freeman saw her shroud-covered body on television. It would be two months before he found her again, in a morgue at St. Gabriel, La., alongside Katrina's other dead.

"I asked God to take her soul and bless her and keep her safe - and to help me avenge her death, what society did wrong," Freeman said. He has filed two lawsuits, one accusing the state and city of negligence and the other aimed at federal authorities.

Ethel Freeman, a former custodian who retired in 1978, had broken both hips and was bedridden. She was legally blind and was fed through a tube in her stomach. Because of her frail health, her son thought it would be unwise to move her when an evacuation order was issued.

Their house survived the storm, but then came the flood. Freeman found a boat and placed his mother inside, then walked the vessel through hip-high water to dry ground.

He began pushing her toward the Superdome. A passing police officer told them to head instead to the riverfront convention center, where buses were expected to arrive. Freeman said a second police officer told him to wait on the pavement outside the center.

"He told me, 'The buses are coming. Wait here so you can get your mom on first,' " Freeman said.

She survived through Aug. 31 and into the next morning, then died quietly before dawn, exhausted and dehydrated.

[Last modified September 2, 2006, 01:17:10]