Anchor Norman Robinson said he considered suicide and turned to alcohol after Hurricane Katrina, After Katrina left his spacious home in eastern New Orleans a stinking shambles, TV news anchor Norman Robinson and his wife lived for two years in a 700-square-foot River Ridge apartment where, he testified in federal court Wednesday, he got drunk every night to cope with post-hurricane trauma.
"I ended up going to a psychologist because I wanted to commit suicide, and I ended up in a drunken stupor most of the time, " Robinson said.
His testimony came during the third day of a trial in which he and four others hope to prove their case that the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet created a speedway for Katrina storm surge that destroyed their property.
Robinson's testimony marked the veteran broadcaster's first public account of a downward spiral that began with Katrina and ended after his DWI arrest in June last year.
Robinson was booked on charges of driving while intoxicated and reckless driving after he lost control of his vehicle. After he was taken out of the car, Robinson urinated in front of officers and was issued a summons for public urination, police said.
On the stand Wednesday, Robinson, a former CBS White House correspondent, did not talk about his arrest but did describe how his life changed after Katrina.
It wasn't until mid-September 2005, after a two-week stint broadcasting about the storm from a WDSU sister station in Jackson, Miss., that Robinson got a chance to see what Katrina had done to his neighborhood in the Spring Lake subdivision, where people knew each other and neighbors walked their dogs up and down the street at night.
Robinson told U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval, who is hearing the trial without a jury, that he decided to use his 6965 Mayo Blvd. house as an example to viewers of the damage the storm had done.
But even after his years of covering hurricanes, he said, he found himself unprepared for what was behind his front door: a nightmarish scene he said left him feeling "like the house, torn up inside."
"Everything just totally, like, disintegrated as if it had been dissolved by some giant vat of acid, " the newsman said. "The furniture was unrecognizable; the walls were covered with what look like giant amoebae just sticking to the walls, hanging from the ceilings.'
Robinson said he was able to salvage some things from the second floor of his home but lost many items that cannot be replaced. For example, a wooden Easter egg signed by the first President George Bush when Robinson was a network correspondent was lost.
In the face of losing "stuff that gives you humanity and connection to other people, " Robinson said, "then you hear people denigrate you because, 'You're from New Orleans, you're a whiner, why don't you suck it up, why don't you get over it and move on?' "
A clearly angry Robinson answered this way: "We're entitled to live where we want. You know, if you're supposed to be protected, then you're supposed to be protected."
The broadcaster said that after Katrina, he thought about where else he might live and concluded there was no safe place -- not the Midwest, with its blizzards and tornadoes, not California, with its earthquakes.
Attorneys for Robinson and his fellow plaintiffs say that if Duval rules in their favor and higher courts uphold the decision, the stage would be set for thousands of other Lower 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard residents to seek compensation from the federal government for their Katrina-related losses.
