A retired police lieutenant was charged Wednesday with obstruction of justice, the first charge in a wide-ranging federal inquiry into whether police misconduct led to civilian deaths in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina.
The charge stems from the shooting deaths of two civilians, one of them
nike basketball shoes mentally retarded, by police officers on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans on Sept. 4, 2005, as floodwaters filled the city. The police officers had claimed they were responding to gunfire. Four other civilians were shot and seriously wounded.
A bill of information, which was unsealed on Wednesday, describes Lt. Michael Lohman, who was working at a temporary headquarters nearby, arriving at the bridge and seeing dead and wounded civilians, none of whom had weapons. Concluding that the shooting was “legally unjustified,” he spoke to officers at the scene who were already planning to lie about the shootings, according to prosecutors.
Lieutenant Lohman and another investigator did little to examine the scene, and later encouraged two police sergeants involved to go back to the bridge and dispose of shell casings that were left behind, according to the bill of information.
Lieutenant Lohman was expected to plead guilty to the charge against him in federal court on Wednesday afternoon.
The bill of information describes how Lieutenant Lohman and others who were involved in the investigation repeatedly helped officers who were involved to modify their stories to make them sound more believable. They made up details, like a claim that one of the people who was shot had reached for a “shiny object” in his waistband. One of the investigators was accused of planting a gun at the scene.
At one point, the bill of information says, Lieutenant Lohman was frustrated that the cover-up story in the report, which was drafted by a police sergeant, “was not logical,” so he “personally drafted up a 17-page false report”
Tim Duncan and provided it to the sergeant to submit as the official report. Lieutenant Lohman is also described as lying in an interview he gave to the F.B.I. in May of last year.
At least two other officers have received target letters in the federal investigation, one of whom was assigned to the investigation and another who was involved in the shooting.
The charge against Lieutenant Lohman shows the scope of the federal probe, which goes beyond the actual shooting to the activities of the police who were assigned to look into the deaths.
In 2006, the seven officers who were directly involved in the shooting were charged with murder and attempted murder, but the charges were dismissed in late 2008 by a judge who cited improprieties in the handling of the case.
The United States attorney’s office picked up the case soon after.
The federal investigation took place throughout 2009, during which dozens of police officers testified before grand juries, federal agents seized files from the police homicide division and Danziger Bridge was shut down for hours as agents looked for evidence.
Several other cases are under investigation by federal authorities, including the shooting death of Henry Glover, 31, whose remains were eventually discovered in a burned car parked behind a police station in the Algiers section of
Allen Iverson New Orleans. This case was brought to the attention of authorities by an article that appeared in The Nation magazine in December 2008 and at ProPublica.org.
A spokeswoman for the New Orleans Police Department declined to comment, citing the federal investigation.