http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050903/ts_nm/mayhem_dc

Murder and mayhem in New Orleans' miserable shelter
By Mark EganFri Sep 2,11:44 PM ET

With the rotors of President George W. Bush's helicopter sounding overhead,
New Orleans' poor and downtrodden recounted tales of murder, rape, death
threats and near starvation since Hurricane Katrina wrecked this city.

Ending days of abandonment since the hurricane struck on Monday, the U.S.
National Guard handed out military rations and a bottle of water to
thousands of evacuees -- the first proper meal most had eaten in days.

But as the masses lined up outside, herded by Army troops toting machine
guns, inside the convention center where these people slept since Monday was
the stench of death and decay.

Leroy Fouchea, 42, waited in the sweltering heat for an hour to get his
ration -- his first proper food since Monday -- and immediately handed it
over to a sickly friend.

He then offered to show reporters the dead bodies of a man in a wheelchair,
a young man who he said he dragged inside just hours earlier, and the limp
forms of two infants, one just four months old, the other six months old.

"They died right here, in America, waiting for food," Fouchea said as he
walked toward Hall D, where the bodies were put to get them out of the
searing heat.

He said people were let die and left without food simply because they were
poor and that the evacuation effort earlier concentrated on the French
Quarter of the city. "Because that's where the money is," he spat.

A National Guardsman refused entry.

"It doesn't need to be seen, it's a make-shift morgue in there," he told a
Reuters photographer. "We're not letting anyone in there anymore. If you
want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq."

As rations were finally doled out here on the day President Bush visited the
devastated city, an elderly white woman and her husband collapsed from the
heat.

"I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three
ruptured discs in my back," said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay
beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten
nothing since Wednesday.

Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost
exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened
with murder on Thursday.

"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come
last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said,
sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away
because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people
in charge told us this morning."

Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder.

Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men
had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and
murdering children.

She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four
hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the
convention center.

"She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said through
tears. "Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in
the kitchen freezer last night."

Several others interviewed by Reuters told similar stories of the abuse and
murder of children, but they could not be independently verified.

Many complained bitterly about why they received so little for so many days,
and they had harsh words for Bush.

"I really don't know what to say about President Bush," said Richard Dunbar,
60, a Vietnam veteran. "He showed no lack of haste when he wanted to go to
Iraq, but for his own people right here in Louisiana, we get only lip
service."

One young man said he was not looking forward to another night in the
convention center and wondered when conditions would improve. "It's been
like a jail in there," he said. "We've got murderers, rapists, killers,
thieves. We've got it all."