Author: manshipxgr

Published: Nov. 26, 2021

By: Alex Tirado and Calista Rodal, LSU Manship School News Service

SLIDELL, La. — Wading through knee-high waters in the marshes near Slidell, James “Trey” Todd and his K-9 partner are on full alert for any sign of movement. While their mission is to locate the remains of a local man, they are also watching out for the 500-pound beast that bit into him.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, the man Timothy Satterlee, was attacked by an alligator outside his home. Then Satterlee and the gator both vanished.

Todd was one of several members of the Louisiana Search and Rescue Dog team called to search for Satterlee. Todd and his yellow Labrador retriever named Messi Rue crisscrossed the alligator-infested swamps for days, fully aware of the dangers that hid just below the surface.

“I was scared to death,” Todd said.

In that case, wildlife officials found the 12-foot alligator before the cadaver dogs could, and DNA showed that Satterlee’s remains were inside its stomach. But just three weeks later, Todd and Messi Rue were at the forefront of a search for a missing woman.

Leslie Ann Smith had abandoned her car on the side of the road a month earlier in Lamar County, Mississippi. Deputies looked for her in the adjacent woods, but the dog team found her scattered remains, along with a gun that suggested suicide, about a half-mile from the original search perimeter.

Members of the search-and-rescue team, known as LaSAR, have deployed their dogs on more than 600 searches across the country since Lisa Higgins and her daughter Troi-Marie founded the group in St. Tammany Parish in 1991. Working with the FBI and local police agencies, the team has helped solve dozens of criminal investigations by searching for cadavers. It also has rescued missing Alzheimer’s patients and found runaway teens.

As a non-profit organization, the team’s 11 members are all volunteers. Todd is an orthopedist, and Higgins has worked jobs ranging from a law enforcement reservist to a K-9 contractor for the FBI. But they all spend many hours training their dogs to rescue missing people and recover human remains.

Read more at KLFY

Published: Nov. 22, 2021

By: Claire Sullivan and Eternity Honore, LSU Manship School News Service

Six decades after a Louisiana man’s disappearance and presumed murder, his family is still looking for answers and a body to bury.

Carl Ray Thompson, then 26, spotted his cousin’s two-toned Buick on the side of the Ferriday-Vidalia highway as he sat in the back of a sheriff’s car in July 1964.

His cousin, Joseph “Joe-Ed” Edwards, had gone missing just a couple days prior, his family left with only rumors as to his whereabouts.

Thompson had spent a night sitting in a Ferriday jail cell for a robbery he did not participate in, listening as sheriff’s deputies beat three or four other young Black men arrested for the crime. As the night dragged on, Thompson felt his turn for a beating coming. But morning came, and the arrival of the regular office staff spared him the brutality the deputies reserved for the privacy of night.

As deputy Frank DeLaughter drove the men to the parish jail in Vidalia that morning, he pointed out the green-white Buick, belonging to Edwards, on the side of the highway.

DeLaughter, 6 feet 4 inches and 280 pounds, peered at Thompson through his rearview mirror. He told the men that if any of them spoke about what happened the night before, they would meet the same fate as Edwards.

Read more at the Daily Comet

Published: Sept. 17, 2021

By: Allison Kadlubar, LSU Tiger TV

BATON ROUGE — Lake Charles residents have been trudging through recovery from the catastrophic Category 4 storm Hurricane Laura for over a year.  

“It was just like, this is unreal,” said LSU junior and Lake Charles native Meredith Owen. “It’s so-much-worse-than-I thought kind of thing.” 

Owen is heartbroken every time she returns to her hometown as blue tarps still coat many homes and less than 13% of homes have begun the reconstruction process, according to the city.

“Our house still has a massive hole in the ceiling,” said Owen. 

Just over a year after the destruction of Laura, another Category 4 storm pummeled the Gulf Coast, sparing southwest Louisiana but leaving southeast Louisiana in the eye of the storm. 

“I really thought for a 2-hour window there, when the eye was over us, that we were not going to make it,” said LSU junior Dena Vial. 

Read more at Houma Today

Published: Sept. 16, 2021

By: Liz Ryan and Lara Nicholson / LSU Manship School News Service

Fourth in a four-part series

 A retired FBI agent was at a Christian retreat in the late 1990s when a churchgoer confided that he had witnessed a shooting of five Black men in 1960 that he believed had been racially motivated.

And when Congress started to pressure the FBI in 2007 to investigate dozens of cases involving violence by the Ku Klux Klan and other whites during the civil rights era, the retired agent told an active agent what he had heard, FBI documents say.

The case involved Robert Fuller, who ran a sanitation business near Monroe, and his claim to have shot five Black employees in self-defense, allegedly as they attacked him over back pay outside his home. 

A grand jury in Ouachita Parish chose not to indict Fuller, and Fuller died in the late 1980s. But the witness told the FBI that Fuller was “an extremely violent” man who had “snapped” in anger when the workers drove up, and he provided the FBI with a fresh allegation–that he had also seen one of Fuller’s sons shoot some of the wounded men to finish them off.

Based on that information, the bureau added the allegation to a list that eventually grew to 132 cases involving the deaths of 151 people, including 15 in Louisiana, that seemed worth new looks.

Under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, approved by Congress in 2008, the FBI’s main goal was to see if any suspects were still alive and could be prosecuted. 

But as soon as the bureau learned that the Fuller son named by the witness also had died, its interest waned, just as it eventually did in nearly all of the other cases.

And the FBI missed questions, recently uncovered by the LSU Cold Case Project, about whether a different Fuller son who was still alive when the FBI did its work, could have been involved in what happened at Fuller’s house that day. 

Read more at The Concordia Sentinel

Published: Sept. 7, 2021

By: Liz Ryan And Rachel Mipro, LSU Manship School News Service

Third in a four-part series

More than six decades ago a grand jury assembled to hear a grisly case. Four Black men had been shot to death and a fifth seriously wounded in a hail of gunfire on Ticheli Road near Monroe, Louisiana.

The all-white grand jury would do something in character for the segregated South of the early 1960s, finding that the white shooter had acted in self-defense. Later that day, the panel made another decision that also says a lot about the justice system back then: It charged the lone survivor with attempting to murder the white man.

“That’s when the justice system just gets flipped on its head, which it did so many times in these cases,” said former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, who in 2001 and 2002 prosecuted two Klansmen in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham that killed four Black girls.

The FBI has compared the scale of the killings in Monroe to that bombing.

Jones and other criminal justice experts said the self-defense claim of the shooter, Robert Fuller, does not add up.

“It made no sense,” he said, after reviewing U.S. Justice Department documents on the case and other evidence provided by the LSU Cold Case Project.

Jones said it was common then for law enforcement to “try to protect those who committed the crime, to try to put the onus on the victims or their community.”

Damon T. Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group based in Washington, D.C., went even further in criticizing how the case was handled.

Read more at Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

Failing to achieve a GoFundMe goal can be a death sentence for diabetics.

Published: Aug. 23, 2021

By: Baily Williams, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

MISSISSIPPI, USA — GoFundMe began as a place to support social and similar causes, but now families battling diabetes are using the fundraising platform as a last-ditch attempt to cover the skyrocketing price of their life-saving drugs and supplies.

“My mom needs insulin to live,” Zoë Massery of Ward, Arkansas, pleaded in her fundraiser. “I don’t know what I would do without my mom. I am 16 years old and still need my mother. I see the stress that my mom and other people have of wondering if they are going to be able to get the stuff they need to live along with tons and tons of other bills.”

Her mother, Courtney, is one of more than 9 million Americans dependent on insulin in the United States. Deep South states like Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana have some of the highest diabetes rates in the country. The Massery family is among the many desperate to find funds somewhere to cover the costs of drugs and supplies that keep them alive.

There are approximately 3,728 campaigns still present on GoFundMe that mention both “insulin” and “diabetes.” Almost 1,000 GoFundMe accounts mention insulin pumps. Even after insurance, some campaigners reported that they needed $7,500 out of pocket for their insulin pumps.          Monthly sensors for glucose monitors can cost around $250. Others express urgency to raise funds for their monthly supply of insulin, which for some costs $1,600.

Crowdfunding, which raises small amounts of money from a large number of people, occurs predominantly through posting social media and online platforms like GoFundMe.

Zoë Massery created a GoFundMe campaign on Feb.11 titled, “Help our mom with her diabetic supplies.” The teen had witnessed insulin prices fluctuating throughout different presidencies, as well as sacrifices her family made to afford it. Her frustration motivated her to surprise her mother, Courtney Massery, with a fundraiser to alleviate costs.

Courtney Massery was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1985, when she was a year old. Her pancreas ceased producing insulin, a hormone instrumental for regulating blood glucose levels. Massery, now 38, said pharmaceutical companies continue “gouging” insulin prices to where diabetics can’t afford it.

However, Massery’s feelings were mixed after learning of her daughter’s project.

Read more at 4WWL

Published: Aug. 23, 2021

By: Robert Mann

As the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the following is an excerpt from Robert Mann’s new memoir: “Backrooms and Bayous: My Life in Louisiana Politics,” looking at how the late governor handled the crisis.

Governor Kathleen Blanco’s administration had two periods. There was pre-Katrina, during which she devoted herself, among other things, to creating jobs and reforming education and juvenile justice. Post-Katrina, there was nothing but recovering from Katrina and Rita. After the searchand-recovery phase, the work of restoring south Louisiana began.

To secure the billions in recovery aid Louisiana needed from the federal government meant Blanco would be forced to testify before congressional committees investigating the errors and missteps by officials at every level of government. She also would have to make a dozen or so trips to Washington to lobby congressional leaders and Bush administration officials for the money, especially after the initial appropriations bill awarded much more per capita to Mississippi than Louisiana.

For Blanco, the job was grueling and often humbling. On virtually every trip, she went to the White House to plead for funding from officials who attacked her or who doubted that Louisiana government was honest or efficient enough to spend properly the rebuilding dollars we requested. In these visits, she showed her steel, once threatening to blast President George W. Bush in a press conference on the White House driveway if his aides did not give Louisiana what it needed. They quickly relented when they realized she wasn’t bluffing. Then, she would trudge over to Capitol Hill for meetings with Democratic and Republican leaders.

The stress on Blanco was clear. The suffering she witnessed weighed on her constantly. She had to know that Katrina would be her legacy, for good or bad. And bad it was, at least in the early months. During this time, I think she looked for and treasured moments when she could forget about Katrina and Rita for a few hours.

Read more at 318 Forum

In 1960 5 Black men arrived at their white boss’s home. Within minutes, 3 were dead & 1 mortally wounded. The killer walked, & the survivor went to jail.

Published: Aug. 23, 2021

By: Liz Ryan, LSU Manship School News Service

MONROE, La. — In the rural neighborhood around Ticheli Road, the sound of multiple gunshots erupted in the early morning quiet of July 13, 1960.

Sam Brooks wasn’t sure why shots were being fired, but peeking out the front window of his home, the nine-year-old looked across the street where they came from. Brooks wanted to go outside and see what was going on, but his mother kept him inside.

Nearby, 34-year-old Patricia Sherman, sleeping soundly, was awakened by her 13-year-old son. Exhausted from a late-night drive home from Arkansas, she had not heard her husband Richard, a decorated World War II veteran, leave for his job at a nearby mill.

“Mama, Mama, wake up!” her son shouted. “Mr. Fuller has shot his men.”

At first, Sherman told her son to let her sleep, not understanding what he was saying. But she sensed the urgency in his voice. She got up and looked out the bedroom window. Just below the sill, she saw the lifeless body of a Black man on the ground.

Sixty-one years later, Sherman, now 94, vividly remembers walking out onto her front porch. Less than 100 feet away, she saw her next-door neighbor, Robert Fuller, standing under his carport, and near him lay the bodies of three more young Black men. All appeared dead except one. Fuller held a shotgun over that man’s head.

Fuller’s wife was crying and screaming.

“Robert,” Sherman shouted, “what in the world is going on?”

Read more at 4WWL

Published: Aug. 15, 2021

By: Rachel Mipro, LSU Manship School News Service

First in a four-part series.

During the 1950s in northeast Louisiana, future Klansman Robert Fuller was a familiar face to law enforcement.

He lived on the outskirts of Monroe. Local police considered Fuller a thug, and the FBI opened a file on him because of his involvement in prostitution. Fuller then started a sanitation business that employed his sons and several young Black employees. Their job was to empty human waste from septic tanks.

In July 1960, five of the Black employees showed up at his home, their normal gathering spot, one Wednesday morning. Minutes later, three were dead, a fourth mortally wounded. A fifth, also wounded, would survive.

Fuller would later claim he shot all five in self-defense. He said he grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from his truck — reloading three times — to fend off men swarming him with knives.

The horrific event was reported in newspapers, but two versions of the events would emerge.

One was Fuller’s self-defense claim — that he was simply saving his family from his attackers.

The other, in the Black press, was a story of mistreatment, of tensions over employees forced to beg for paltry wages and of racial animosity against Black employees. Black newspapers reported that Fuller owed the men money. By these accounts, there was no way Black men would attack a white man in an all-white neighborhood at a time when Blacks around the Jim Crow South were still struggling to secure their civil rights.

Even the FBI, in a statement released for this story, compared the scope of the killings to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that came just three years later in 1963. In that bombing, one victim was permanently blinded while four girls, ages 11 to 14, were killed.

Read more at Shreveport Times

Published: Aug. 6, 2021

By: Josh Archote, LSU Reveille

BATON ROUGE, La. — LSU professors pleaded with the Board of Supervisors and upper administration Friday to allow faculty to teach remotely or at lower classroom capacity in the fall as COVID-19 spreads rapidly and strains hospitals in Louisiana.

President William Tate did not directly respond to any professors’ concerns. He said the university intends to mandate the vaccine once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration grants final approval.

The tension comes amid a fight between LSU administration and faculty over mandatory COVID vaccines. Although LSU has maintained that requiring vaccines presented legal challenges, Louisiana colleges need only Louisiana Department of Health approval to mandate them.

Professors are switching their focus to convincing the university to return to previous COVID-19 protocols that would allow them to teach their classes away from campus, where only around 26% of students have reported being vaccinated.

The 2021 COVID-19 protocols that LSU released Wednesday did not include a vaccine mandate or say what the school would do when the FDA start providing full approvals. News reports say that could come as soon as Labor Day for the Pfizer vaccine.

Gov. John Bel Edwards said Wednesday that he expected the state Health Department to add the COVID vaccines to its list of required student vaccines after the FDA gives its full approval. Tate told the supervisors Friday that LSU will announce its mandate as soon as the FDA acts and will not wait for the Health Department to update its vaccine list.

“We will move forward with that, and hopefully the FDA operates in an expedited fashion,” Tate said Friday.

Read more at KTBS3