Something Dallas quarterbacks saw fit to do with the football several times last night. Because of this, the Cruisers managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at the hands of the Touchdown Titans, 48-43. Next up, the probably easiest stretch of the schedule. Looking ahead, the 3-4 Cruisers are early 8 point favorites at the 1-5-1 Kenner Knights. Another one of the company's principal owners.

Speaking of turning over....this is a reprint from the Sunday, October 22, 2006, edition of the Times-Picayune. Almost belongs in Required Reading, were it not that I didn't learn this myself. Still, it shows how few people down here have taken AAR's "Move Along" to heart.

-KIE

IS KATRINA TO BLAME?

The storm may still have us down, but experts say we can't lay everything at Katrina's feet

Sunday, October 22, 2006

 

That the French Quarter couple fell in love on the very night Katrina bore down on New Orleans was a tidbit irresistible to worldwide media reporting that a young woman named Addie Hall had been murdered and dismembered at the hands of her live-in companion, Zack Bowen, who then committed suicide by jumping from a hotel roof.

 

A Katrina romance, yes, but was the murder-suicide more than a year later properly classified -- as so many media routinely assumed -- as a byproduct of post-Katrina trauma?

 

Or is it time to stop blaming New Orleans' every pathology on the hurricane and flooding that ensued? The horrific discovery last week of Hall's charred body parts in various pots and pans and in the refrigerator of the North Rampart Street apartment she shared with Bowen was not the first opportunity to contend that Katrina ripped holes in some residents' brains as surely as in the city's levees.

 

In late summer Elizabeth Marinello, 45, was gunned down in a Metairie parking lot by a bicyclist with a fake beard who Sheriff Harry Lee is convinced was her estranged husband, WWL radio personality Vince Marinello, 69. That notes found by detectives in the suspect's home amounted to a step-by-step guide to commission of the crime led swiftly to Marinello's arrest and indictment for murder, amid speculation that life in a FEMA trailer and loss of his mother's home in the flooding might have pushed him over the edge.

 

Similarly, a spate of what investigators called drug-related killings earlier this year and again over the Labor Day holiday weekend prompted New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley to muse that Katrina was a lingering tripwire for violence.

 

More than the storm

 

While emotional trauma can linger long after a precipitating disaster, experts cautioned against blaming Katrina for every scattered instance of bloodshed, particularly the crime that dominated headlines last week.

 

Truly bizarre and lethal behavior like Bowen's, whose judgment was surely clouded by the terminal cocaine and alcohol binge he acknowledged in his lengthy suicide note, has not been typical of storm survivors, said Dr. Howard Osofsky, who chairs the psychiatry department at LSU Medical School.

 

"Have you come close to killing someone and quartering them and putting them in an oven? Of course not, and I haven't either," Osofsky said. "I can blame a lot of things on Katrina, but I'm not sure I can blame barbaric crimes on her."

 

Osofsky emphasized that he was "not trying to be flip." Rather, he pointed out that neither Bowen nor Hall were New Orleans natives with roots or a home in a flooded part of the city; neither lost their jobs or valuables.

 

Without direct contact with the couple, Osofsky said, no professional can make a reliable diagnosis of what went so very wrong during what friends and acquaintances described as a tempestuous one-year romance. But he said it seems unlikely that Katrina was the sole or even a significant cause of Hall's grisly end.

 

"We are seeing mental health problems post-Katrina," Osofsky said. "We do see people more depressed by Katrina and the slow recovery, but I don't think we can label these as post-Katrina victims."

 

Katrina connection?

 

Dr. Frank Ochberg, a forensic psychiatrist who teaches at Michigan State University, echoed that view. In general, "the more psychotic and more delusional the behavior, the less likely it is to be tied to Katrina," said Ochberg, who is credited with first identifying Stockholm syndrome, wherein hostages and other prisoners sometimes become emotionally attached to their captors.

 

That media persist in asserting a Katrina connection behind the Grand Guignol of Bowen and Hall stems partly from the accident of their having been readily available to reporters in the storm's immediate aftermath.

 

Last Thursday, for example, The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala., published a column by Bill Barrow, who wrote about the couple and photographed them for The Press-Register in post-Katrina dispatches from New Orleans.

 

"Hurricane Katrina has claimed two more victims, this time without wielding her mortal force in the forms of wind, water and chaos," wrote Barrow, whose photo of the couple, taken in September 2005, appeared on the front page of The Times-Picayune last week.

 

Impact of crime

 

But if Bowen's murderous behavior can be seen as probably rooted in mental disorders unrelated to Katrina, psychologists hastened to add that the storm's aftereffects could be subtle and long-lasting. One repercussion could be to worsen unstable or psychotic reactions to crises encountered in the home or workplace, they said.

 

"How much is violence accelerated by or affected by a great disaster and the huge stresses it engenders?" asked Bruce Shapiro, the director of the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma based at the University of Washington.

 

"I'd argue that's a question the media should be asking: Namely, do terrible violent acts have an impact on a society that is already traumatized?" Shapiro said.

 

For his part, Ochberg said that may be the only legitimate question that can be asked in the aftermath of such astonishing slayings.

 

"I would tend to think the bizarre crime has less meaning to the criminal, but does have meaning to the citizens of New Orleans, who may be left thinking that the city is somehow unlucky, or that it isn't coming back as it should be," he said.

 

Paradoxically, media coverage of these sensational crimes can serve as a kind of escape valve among readers and viewers who can observe them at the safe distance, reinforcing the comforting sense that their own worlds are relatively more secure, Shapiro said.

 

Dr. Alvin Rouchell, head of psychiatry at the Ochsner Clinic, declined to hazard an analysis of Bowen's psychological condition. But he noted one does not need a doctor to know Katrina has increased the pressures of everyday life.

 

"The stress and difficulty people have been having is well-chronicled," Rouchell said.

 

. . . . . . .

 

James Varney can be reached at jvarney@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3386.