The front page of 02 September 2005's Daily News of New York shows a white man, having been beaten within an inch of his life by a black mob in the Superdome, being carried to paramedics.
Reuters carried reports of an elderly white couple that had collapsed from the heat in an "almost exclusively black refugee camp". [Editor: Media use of the word 'Refugee' is inappropriate to describe American citizens who are encamped in shelters. Dictionary.com: Refugee: an individual seeking refuge or asylum; especially : an individual who has left his or her native country and is unwilling or unable to return to it because of persecution or fear of persecution.]
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."
Unconfirmed transcripts of NBC's "Today" show state that New Orleans' native Harry Connick Jr. gave an emotive tour of the city streets. Following Connick's conversation with Katie Couric, NBC's Kerry Sanders reported on "Airport Triage" from New Orleans International Airport. He briefly showed two white men who were recovering from attacks sustained at the Superdome, "their friend was beaten to death," by a black mob. It is noted that the two men were edited out of the evening broadcast of "Airport Triage" on "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams".
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