The New Orleans Times Picayune follows up on the Hurricane Katrina prison break and local law enforcement cover-up:

Despite assurances from Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman in the days after Hurricane Katrina that no inmates escaped during a tumultuous three-day evacuation of Parish Prison, fugitive arrest warrants were issued for 14 inmates who were in the jail at the time of the storm, records show.

They include a murder defendant who recently was captured and booked with a fresh murder in Mississippi.

… The murder suspect, George Schaefer III, is one of five inmates who have been rounded up since the storm, three of them after allegedly committing crimes in other states, police and court records show.

Gusman now acknowledges escapes by some inmates during the evacuation, although he puts the number of Orleans Parish escapees at two. He said his office is not responsible for Schaefer and two other escapees who were moved from St. Bernard Parish as the storm approached…

…On the Sheriff’s Office Web site, Gusman has claimed for weeks that “all inmates housed in Orleans Parish were safely evacuated from our 10 facilities by boat, and transported to state and parish facilities by bus.”

But in a prepared statement issued Friday, Gusman backed off that claim, conceding that two inmates “eluded custody during or after the evacuation.”

…As for the other missing Orleans Parish inmates, Gusman appears to be holding out hope that they will turn up in the diaspora of local prisoners now spread throughout Louisiana and neighboring states. In the prepared statement, Gusman stated that officials are still nailing down the identities of the transferred inmates, no small task given their dispersal to 38 different state and local jails.

“Out of an abundance of caution, the OPSCO issued 14 fugitive warrants while we were still in the process of identifying inmates . . . In the evacuation, many of the inmates removed their arm bands and used assumed names when they were booked into facilities outside of Orleans Parish,” Gusman wrote.

Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections spokeswoman Melissa Callahan said several inmates who initially were unaccounted for eventually surfaced through fingerprint checks after trying to conceal their identities. However, she said that head count is now nearly complete.

“We’re just about done, but we’re double-checking to make sure everyone is properly identified,” Callahan said. “Some guys tried to fake who they were. That made it a longer process than it had to be.”

Unlike Gusman, though, state corrections officials are taking the position that the missing inmates escaped until proved otherwise. In fact, three of the New Orleans inmates with fugitive warrants have overlapping warrants issued by the state corrections department on parole violations. While the Sheriff’s Office isn’t counting them as escapees, the state is.

“There is no intelligence on them or their whereabouts,” Callahan said.

On a related note, Time magazine has a lengthy article worth perusing:

New Orleans Today: It’s Worse Than You Think

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Update: Several readers have e-mailed me this story of more post-Katrina ugliness.

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