Return to Transcripts main page

Live From...

National Guard Back in New Orleans; Katrina Refugee's Harrowing Story; World Refugee Day

Aired June 20, 2006 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(MARKET REPORT)
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well the National Guard back on the streets of New Orleans. This time, the focus is crime, not Katrina. Details ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Well, they were a familiar sight in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Now after a violent weekend and a remarkable plea from the mayor, National Guard troops are back.

CNN Gulf Coast correspondent Susan Roesgen joins me now with all the details. Susan, what exactly is the guard going to do?

SUSAN ROESGEN, CNN GULF COAST CORRESPONDENT: Well, they're going to patrol in mostly, we understand, the abandoned parts of town, Kyra, focusing on the areas that are still being looted, houses and neighborhoods that are mostly desolate now.

And that would free up the police officers to focus on the real crime hot spots. We've got 100 National Guard troops that rolled into town on their humvees today. The governor says eventually that number will go up to 300 plus about 60 state troopers. They are all armed and ready for business and they are Louisiana troops with a Louisiana mission.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have a stake in this. Most of these units, this unit here is from the Baton Rouge/New Orleans area. We're Louisiana citizens first and foremost. So it means something to us to bring this city back and it means something for us to be here and support of the police department. We want to see this city come back to the great place that it was before the storm.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROESGEN: Kyra, those troops will have the power to arrest people and, if necessary, to shoot.

PHILLIPS: Wow. All right, well that changes it quite a bit because we thought they weren't going to be involved with the crime aspect. So that's interesting. That is probably going to add to this debate, possibly a little controversy. Well let's talk about the crime. What seems to be the problem? Is it gang activity? Is it drug dealing, what seems -- what area is the high-crime area and what are the crimes?

ROESGEN: Both, Kyra, really. You remember how high the crime problem was in the city pre-Katrina. It has come back. The number of murders has gone up every month since the hurricane. We had zero last September, we're not at about 54, 55 murders. We had a double shooting just today. One person killed, the other critically wounded. And then over the weekend we had five teenagers traveling in one SUV, all of them killed, all gunned down in one shooting.

It's mostly in a part of town called Central City. It's a residential area. People have come back there and so have the drug dealers. So yes Kyra, we do have some gang activity again and we do have some drug dealers and they are shooting to kill.

So, this is what the police department has decided to do. They wanted to bring in the National Guard troops. They were actually asking for them back in March, expected to have guard troops, again, just to patrol the basically abandoned areas and free up the police officers to focus on the other areas of town that had the real crime issues, but because of the shootings over the weekend, the city council and the mayor both asked the governor to send the National Guard in right away and that is just what she has done today, Kyra?

PHILLIPS: Well how long will the guard stay and also, Susan, you're right. I mean for far more than a decade you and I have talked about this police department and the struggles that it has had. I mean, you tend to wonder, will things ever change within this department? Will they get paid more? Will they be able to fight this crime that has been an ongoing problem?

ROESGEN: Boy, that is the big issue, is retention, how to keep police officers. The department is down about 10 percent since Katrina and, yet, the population is really starting to come up again. We think we're at about 220,000 people based on the latest statistics. That's about half of the people that were here pre-Katrina and, yet, the number of murders per capita is actually greater now in this city than it was before the hurricane.

So we need to keep police officers, certainly the department is still talking about trying to give them more money, trying to find housing for them. You know, Kyra, about 80 percent of the police officers in this city lost their homes in Katrina. And so those who have stayed, you have to really admire them because they're doing an incredible job here without their own homes.

So we've got a lot of issues to try to keep the police and, as we see now, crime did not get chased away by the hurricane. We have to do something to get a handle on it. We want people to come back, both homeowners and tourists. We want you to come, Kyra, we want people to come down in this city and you cannot encourage people to come back to this city if you've got a crime problem like we're starting to develop now.

PHILLIPS: Susan Roesgen, thanks so much.

We're going to stay on this story, of course. Straight ahead on LIVE FROM, I'm going to speak with retired New Orleans police major and former SWAT commander Howard Robertson. He's going to join me in the next hour of LIVE FROM.

We met Hardy Jackson the very day that his life was ripped apart by Hurricane Katrina. Jackson lost almost everything that was near and dear to him in Biloxi, Mississippi. Too many memories to rebuild there, so he's resettled here in the Atlanta area.

CNN's Rusty Dornin checked in with him.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Rooftops floating among the treetops. This was the Hurricane Katrina storm surge flooding Biloxi, Mississippi. Just a few blocks from this spot, Hardy Jackson was in a treetop trying to hold on to his wife of 28 years. For many watching T.V., it was Hardy Jackson. who captured the emotion. A local reporter found him wandering just hours after he lost the fight and watched his wife Tonette swept away.

HARDY JACKSON, LOST WIFE IN KATRINA: I was holding her hand as tight as I could and she told me you can't hold me. She said, take care of the kids and the grandkids.

DORNIN: And he is taking care of the kids.

JACKSON: I'm OK.

DORNIN: Just south of Atlanta, Jackson lives with two children and three grandchildren. It's been nearly a year since his wife died, but for Jackson, there has been no closure.

(on camera): They haven't found your wife's body. She was never identified, right?

JACKSON: Right. They never find.

DORNIN (voice-over): Only a few precious photographs to remember her because their home was completely destroyed. His daughter Mary says her father often closes the bedroom door and cries.

(on camera): Would it help to be able to know that your mother's body, to be able to bury it?

MARY WALTMAN, JACKSON'S DAUGHTER: It would help a whole lot. We'd feel much, much better and maybe things will start being easier for him.

DORNIN (voice-over): Because there is no death certificate, Jackson and his family could not collect the $25,000 life insurance policy. They did get $12,000 from FEMA. Jackson says he's unable to work after he was struck by a train 15 years ago and receives a monthly disability check of $629. On that, he and his family barely scrape by.

But Jackson knows they have fared much better than many Katrina refugees. They live in a lovely three-bedroom home, one that was given to them outright, a gift from this group of musicians, the band Maze and Frankie Beverly. But born and raised in Mississippi, Jackson feels a long way from home.

(on camera): Would you ever want to move back to Mississippi after this?

JACKSON: Oh, no. You know, they could build me the bigger house in Biloxi, just give it to me for me to move back. No, I wouldn't move back. Way too much pain.

DORNIN: Pain and remembrance. Ten months after Katrina, Hardy Jackson still feels like a stranger in a strange land.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

DORNIN: The Jackson family having trouble adjusting to life in another place, feeling like they really can't go home and don't even want to go home at this point. It's a tough thing for their family, of course, and for thousands of others that are Katrina displaced victims.

PHILLIPS: Talk to me about the life insurance. He should have money coming to him, since he lost his wife, but there's strange laws.

DORNIN: Strange laws. Each state has their own laws. New York decided after 9/11 that they would shorten the time allowed when a person is missing. Usually they wait seven years, you have to go before a judge and that sort of thing.

Well, in Louisiana they shortened it. It was five years. They shortened it to two, so if someone is missing -- and they have 167 people missing -- families have to wait two years before they get a life insurance policy, the monies from it.

But in Mississippi, they have not changed the laws. So they're going to have to wait seven years before they can get any money from that policy, even though it's obvious that she was killed in Katrina.

PHILLIPS: Maybe that will change as this story is out there and you're talking about it more. Now, how is he holding up? I mean, I know I always ask you, did he find a job, is he working? But he is having to help raise all these kids. How are they attempting to get a money flow?

DORNIN: He really can't work. I mean, he was hit by a train 15 years ago. It destroyed his liver. He's had three heart attacks, a couple of seizures. He really can't work full-time, and the other family members that are living with him, one of them says that she has to stay with him to watch the grandchildren and that sort of thing. So they are just scraping by. I mean, the house is lovely. It's really very, very nice.

PHILLIPS: A beautiful gift.

DORNIN: But it goes to show you that even material things don't make up for the loss of a loved and being uprooted from your home.

PHILLIPS: Well, we'll keep following the family. Thanks, Rusty.

Well, severe weather warnings in parts of the U.S. Details straight ahead. Stay with CNN, the most trusted name in news.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Well, another dreary day in rain-soaked southeast Texas. So far though no big floods on the order -- or on the order, rather, we saw yesterday in Houston, rather. Governor Rick Perry dropped by earlier to see for himself the damage done by yesterday's downpour. He sent in the National Guard to help.

If only that rain would go away. Firefighters are struggling to save hundreds of homes and businesses in Sedona, Arizona, where an out of control wildfire has burned 1,500 acres, mainly along the rim of Oak Creek Canyon. Most of the endangered homes are in the bottom of that canyon. You can see a little bit here from this wide shot. That fire broke out Sunday, supposedly from a camp fire.

Meteorologist Jacqui Jeras with the latest on the fires and a new tornado warning -- Jacqui.

(WEATHER REPORT)

PHILLIPS: All right, Jacqui, thanks so much.

Well, the Gulf Coast may be on the road to recovery, but many of these cars will never hit any road again. After all this time, crews are towing some 100,000 vehicles that were flooded by Katrina or Rita to places where their owners will have 30 more days to claim them. Unclaimed cars will be sold for scrap.

Well, her fame helped shine a spotlight on the world's refugees, and today Angelina Jolie talks about her role with the U.N.'s refugee agency. Coming up, Anderson Cooper gives us a preview of his exclusive interview with the actress and activist.

NICOLE LAPIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: President Bush just designated a chain of islands northwest of Hawaii as the nation's newest marine sanctuary. You can find all the details at CNN.com.

This is actually the 14th marine sanctuary in the United States and you know what? It's larger than all U.S. national parks combined. Get this: it's 1,400 miles long, 100 miles wide and of the 7,000 marine species found there, at least a quarter of them can't be found anywhere else in the world.

Designating it a sanctuary is going to further protect this chain of islands and its species, like the endangered monk seals and green sea turtles. This picture gallery highlights other species found there, including the Hawaiian swirl fish and the vast shallow water reefs.

This is actually the second time President Bush invoked the 1906 Antiquities Act that gives him the authority to designate national monuments.

You can find all the details on this new marine sanctuary and all those great images at CNN.com/science.

For the .com desk, I'm Nicole Lapin.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Tens of millions of people without homes and with little, if any, hope. This is World Refugee Day and we're going around the globe to bring you the story.

Here's a CNN "Fact Check."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE CORRESPONDENT: According to the United Nations, a global refugee population is over eight million people, almost equal to the entire population of New Jersey. If you add in the people who are displaced within their own countries, like those in Darfur, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that number jumps to nearly 21 million, and that is nearly the population of entire state of Texas.

Breaking it down by nationality, nearly three million refugees are Afghan, followed by 2.5 million Colombians. Iraqis, Sudanese and Somalis round out the top five. More than half the world's refugees are children.

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, many children are forced into becoming soldiers. Others are at risk of being abducted or pushed into to child labor, while many others face the risk of death because they have to cross war-torn borders to try to get to safety.

On the other hand, since 2002, more than 6,000 refugees have been able to go home.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: She's a Hollywood star who's eager to share the spotlight with people who are all too easily ignored. Angelina Jolie is the goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Refugee Agency, and for her, that's not just an honorary title. Jolie has traveled to more than 20 countries and given more than $3 million to refugee causes.

In an exclusive interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, she talks about her drive to bring hope and help to millions of people who have nothing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Since the late '90s, I mean, more than 3 million people have died. A thousand, they say, die a day from war-related conditions, malnutrition and things like that.

ANGELINA JOLIE: And there's all the rapes in Congo and (INAUDIBLE) that thing...

COOPER: Oh, the rapes.

JOLIE: ... which is -- and from Rwanda, which, you know...

COOPER: Right. Right.

JOLIE: That shocked me. I didn't realize how that was still in -- I mean, that's the thing you realize, and I think why people worried about Darfur now. You -- one area of Africa falls apart and then how it just destabilizes as a region. And you can see from Rwanda, still affecting Congo, from these, you know...

COOPER: It's also so often women and children who are the ones bearing the brunt of all this. I mean, in the Congo, it's women being raped, tens of thousands of women. I mean, I read that you saw children who had been, you know, macheted. And what is that like to see that? I mean, to see that being done to kids?

JOLIE: It's just -- well, I mean, how do you possibly explain that? It's like, being in Sierra Leone, I saw a 3-year-old who had her arms cut off? And you just think, you know, what kind of a human being -- you try to imagine, it must be drugs, it must be -- but what kind of a person could do that?

And the rapes in the Congo are so brutal. I mean, for the people that don't know about it, there's so much. And even recently, I had a baby in Africa, and people talking about the surgeries and the different types of surgeries. But they talk so much about Congo and having to sew the kids back together because they've been just ripped completely open.

And, you know, that's -- how do you make sense of any of that? It doesn't make any sense. It's disgusting and it's horrible and it needs -- you start to wonder, with all of these things, when does it take us as an international community to just get together and say, OK, that just has to stop. Joseph Kony has to stop. And it has to stop now. How long does it have to take for us to start to enforce an international law on these kind of situations and deal with it immediately?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIPS: Well, you can watch all of Anderson Cooper's exclusive interview with Angelina Jolie, tonight at 10:00 Eastern on "ANDERSON COOPER 360."

Terror in the night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) come and kill people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They arrest people. And they kill and they destroy our homes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIPS: Seeking safe haven. These children walk a trail of tears every night. Their stories straight ahead on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com