Death in New Orleans

At first there was only the smell of smoke. Robert Bemish, 43, a San Francisco broadcasting executive, opened the door of his eighth-floor room at New Orleans' Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge to investigate, and noticed "light bulbs popping all over the place" from the heat. He was standing facing the motel's swimming pool when a black youth with a rifle jumped out from some bushes, stared at him for a full second, took aim and fired. Shot through his midsection, Bemish fell into the pool. He pretended to be dead, his air-filled trench coat providing just enough buoyancy to keep him above water.

Soon shots were ringing out from several other floors of the motel, and smoke began pouring from half a dozen balconies. One newly married couple were killed in a corridor while clutching each other in a death embrace. A fireman ascending a ladder to the tenth floor was shot. The assistant manager of the motel, investigating reports of fire, was killed as he moved down a hallway. So was Louis Sirgo, 48, the city's deputy police superintendent, as he led a search through the motel.

Even in a period of increasing terrorism, it was a startling explosion of violence. When it was over, six people were dead and nine wounded. The episode was reminiscent of Charles Whitman's homicidal outburst from the top of Austin's Texas Tower, but last week's madness seemed to have more method. The victims were all white, and seven--three dead, four wounded--were policemen.

Super-brain. For hours, police had no idea how many snipers they were up against, but there seemed to be at least two, since blazes were set almost simultaneously on different floors. A besieging army of 200 uniformed policemen, detectives, sharpshooters and volunteers soon surrounded the motel. As the cordon tightened, the assailants found refuge behind the concrete walls of the rooftop's boiler room and stairwell casements. An armor-plated Marine helicopter made repeated passes as the cops tried to blast through the walls, but the sniper shots kept coming. Finally, eleven hours after the violence had begun, one lone sniper darted under the glare of a helicopter spotlight, ran about 30 ft. in a zigzag pattern across the rooftop, and fell dead in a hail of police tracer bullets, his body riddled with more than 100 slugs.

Convinced that other gunmen were still on the roof, police kept their vigil throughout the night and the next morning. When they finally raided the rooftop, they found just the body of the youth they had shot down 16 hours earlier. A thorough room-by-room search of the motel failed to turn up any other snipers. Said Police Superintendent Clarence Giarrusso: "Either there was only one, or another got away. The speculation might run the gamut all the way from negligence on the part of police to a superbrain on the part of the sniper."

The identity of the dead sniper at first simply deepened the mystery. Mark James Robert Essex, 23, a black trainee in the city's vocational classes for hard-core unemployed ("probably the best student in the class," said a teacher), hardly seemed to fit the profile of a maniacal killer. Neighbors, acquaintances and teachers from his home town of Emporia, Kans., sketched a portrait of a congenial and well-liked youth. His parents, neighbors reported, were "upstanding Christian people." Jimmy's father was the foreman at a meat-packing plant, and his mother, who holds a master's degree in education, worked at the local Head Start program.

Summoning reporters to a news conference, the Essex family painted a different picture, one of disillusionment, bitterness and finally hatred. "It all started in the Navy," Jimmy's mother declared. "He was all right when he left here." Confronted with prejudice and discrimination, Jimmy finally went AWOL. He testified at his court-martial: "I had begun to hate all white people. I was tired of going to white people and telling them my problems and not getting anything done about it." He was given a general discharge for "unsuitability" based on character and "behavior disorder." The bitterness left over from his Navy experience continued to fester. Friends reported that he became a different person. The walls of his apartment in New Orleans were decorated with revolutionary slogans such as MY DEATH LIES IN THE BLOODY DEATH OF RACIST PIGS and POLITICAL POWER COMES FROM THE BARREL OF A GUN.

As police dug further, they began to suspect that Essex may have been involved in earlier unsolved shootings. Just one week before the Howard Johnson shootout, on New Year's Eve, one cop had been killed and two wounded within the space of 15 minutes in or near police headquarters. Slugs recovered from two of the victims matched some of the .44 magnum bullets fired during the Howard Johnson murders. The morning of the shootout, a white grocer in New Orleans' black Broadmoor section was also shot and wounded by a .44 magnum slug. The attacker fled on foot, and shortly thereafter a car was stolen five blocks from the grocery store, only to turn up in the motor lodge's garage. Whoever else had been involved with Essex--one cop insisted that he saw a black woman sniper--race clearly played a large role in the killings. At about the same time Bemish was shot, a black chambermaid almost bumped into the sniper on the pool deck. "Don't worry," he reassured her. "We're not going to shoot any blacks, just whites. The revolution's here."

Convinced it was racism that had turned her son from a cheerful adolescent into a murderous adult, Mrs. Essex seemed almost remorseless during a press conference last week in Kansas. "I do think Jimmy was driven to this," she said. "Jimmy was trying to make white America sit up and be aware of what is happening to us." Though prejudice is hardly an excuse for wholesale slaughter, Mrs. Essex made her point. So did a white youth outside the church. As a radio reporter walked from his car to the press conference, the boy drove by shouting, "Have fun with the niggers. We hate 'em."

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