Deamonte Love is a 6-year-old boy who single-handedly cared for his 5-month-old brother and five toddlers until they were taken to Baton Rouge from an evacuation point in New Orleans by this man.
Transporting the children alone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead” or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.
[…]
As grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New Orleans, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of public health.
Parents either dead or callously abandoned their children? From what deep well of contempt comes the licentious certitude behind this bile before Deamonte could explain what happened?
Abandoned, yeah, by the helicopter unit that convinced their parents they’d be back for them and never returned.
Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor, was the first person with whom Deamonte shared how he was separated from his family, or perhaps Robertson was the first person that took the time to ask two days on?
Robertson said he doubted the children would remember much of the helicopter evacuation, the Causeway, the sweltering heat or the smell of the flooded city.
“I think what’s going to stick with them is that they survived Hurricane Katrina,” he said. “And that they were loved.”
If Robertson truly cares about the children in his care he should hope they never forget that this govt. responded to their loved ones’ urgent need by leaving them behind to fight off a watery death with little chance of rescue then vilified them for requiring one.
Link to Deamonte’s story via Jesse Walker’s article.