Aaron Broussard

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Aaron Broussard is the Democratic president of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. He is best-known for an appearance he made on the television program Meet the Press in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the course of that interview he was very critical of the federal disaster-response effort, finishing with a tearful account of the death by drowning of his emergency services manager's mother. Broussard's account of that incident was subsequently shown to contain significant inaccuracies.

1 Pre-Katrina events
2 September 4, 2005, Meet the Press appearance
3 Subsequent reporting about the St. Rita's nursing home deaths
4 September 25, 2005, Meet the Press appearance
5 See also
6 External links

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Pre-Katrina events

Broussard was president of Parishes Against Coastal Erosion (PACE) and in a June 14, 2005 press release predicted:

With the National Hurricane Center predicting another active hurricane season, PACE President Aaron Broussard said he fears that it is going to take a major storm and significant loss of life before the nation acts responsibly.[1]

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September 4, 2005, Meet the Press appearance

Broussard and his employees were directly involved in the initial disaster-recovery efforts that followed Hurricane Katrina. On September 4, 2005 he was interviewed on NBC's Meet the Press and broke out in tears.

He said:

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, Emergency Management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Momma, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday' — and she drowned on Friday night. She drowned on Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us, nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised, everybody's promised. They've had press conferences — I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send us somebody."

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Subsequent reporting about the St. Rita's nursing home deaths

Subsequent news reports identified the son in the story as Tom Rodrigue, Jefferson Parish's emergency services director. Rodrigue's 92-year-old mother, Eva, lived in the St. Rita's nursing home.[2] It appears from a CNN interview with Rodrigue that he made phonecalls to the nursing home on Saturday, August 27, 2005, and on Sunday, August 28, 2005, urging that the home be evacuated.[3] That evacuation did not take place, and at least 30 residents of the nursing home drowned on Monday, August 29, 2005.[4]

A September 19, 2005, MSNBC story quotes Rodrigue as saying, in response to being told about Broussaard's statements on Meet the Press, "No, no, that's not true." A Broussard spokesperson described Broussard's statements about Rodrigue's mother on Meet the Press as "a misunderstanding." [5]

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September 25, 2005, Meet the Press appearance

On September 25, 2005, Broussard was interviewed again on Meet the Press, and host Tim Russert asked him about the timeline discrepencies noted in the MSNBC story.[6] Broussard did not directly account for those discrepencies, repeating the statement that "this gentleman's mother died on that Friday before I came on the show." In his subsequent remarks, though, he said that:

The story as related by him in his earlier appearance was the story told to him by his staff.
Tom Rodrigue was very distraught over his mother's death, and he (Broussard) wasn't inclined to interrogate him as to the specifics because of that.
For people to nitpick over the specifics of the story is a sign of "a sick mind": "What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death? You want to come and live in this community and see the tragedy we're living in? Are you sitting there having your coffee, you're in a place where toilets flush and lights go on and everything's a dream and you pick up your paper and you want to battle ideology and political chess games? Man, get out of my face. Whoever wants to do that, get out of my face."

Mistakes were made at all levels of the disaster response.
He hadn't had a full night's sleep in the past 30 days, and would be happy to debate someone as to the specifics of his story after having one.

The closest Broussard came to acknowledging making an error in his original appearance was this response:

"Sir, with everything I said on Meet the Press, the last punctuation of my statements were the story that I was going to tell in about maybe two sentences. It just got emotional for me, sir."

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