The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS — A nearly 10-hour standoff with a police SWAT team ended Wednesday morning when police fatally shot the mentally ill occupant of a federally supplied trailer in one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina.
Federal Emergency Management Agency workers alerted police Tuesday afternoon after a man with a handgun ordered them to leave the trailer in an overgrown, weedy lot in the affluent Lakeview neighborhood after an inspection, authorities said.
The man then locked himself inside a partly gutted home adjacent to the trailer. Police got into the downstairs part of the home, but the man shot at them twice, causing no injuries, officials said. Authorities shot the man around 2 a.m. after he pointed a handgun at officers who tried to arrest him, police said. The man later died at a hospital.
The man’s brother told police that he was mentally ill and had been untreated for years, according to a statement from Officer Garry Flot, a police spokesman.
The man’s trailer was the only one visible for blocks. The whole block appeared abandoned, the houses unrepaired since the storm, their windows broken.
Police did not immediately say whether the officers involved in the shooting were placed on administrative leave during the investigation. The 49-year-old man’s identity was not released.
The FEMA inspection was a first step toward reclaiming the trailer. The federal agency has been pushing to get residents out of trailers across the Gulf Coast, in part because possibly dangerous levels of the chemical formaldehyde have been found in many of them.
FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said the agency cannot release any specifics about the case, such as when the man got the trailer or whether anyone else lived there with him.
“This is a very unfortunate situation and our prayers go out to the family of the deceased,” he said.
Lakeview, one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, was under as much as 11 feet of water after the levee on the nearby 17th Street Canal broke during Katrina on August 29, 2005.
While it has been one of the fastest to recover, it is not without scars from the flood. Some trailers were still parked outside homes under renovation, schools and firehouses have been slow to reopen and there are many vacant lots where homes were demolished because of damage suffered during the storm.