Death in New Orleans

At first there was only the smell of smoke. Robert Bemish, 43, a San Francisco broadcasting executive, opened the door of his eighth-floor room at New Orleans' Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge to investigate, and noticed "light bulbs popping all over the place" from the heat. He was standing facing the motel's swimming pool when a black youth with a rifle jumped out from some bushes, stared at him for a full second, took aim and fired. Shot through his midsection, Bemish fell into the pool. He pretended to be dead, his air-filled trench coat providing just enough buoyancy to keep him above water.

Soon shots were ringing out from several other floors of the motel, and smoke began pouring from half a dozen balconies. One newly married couple were killed in a corridor while clutching each other in a death embrace. A fireman ascending a ladder to the tenth floor was shot. The assistant manager of the motel, investigating reports of fire, was killed as he moved down a hallway. So was Louis Sirgo, 48, the city's deputy police superintendent, as he led a search through the motel.

Even in a period of increasing terrorism, it was a startling explosion of violence. When it was over, six people were dead and nine wounded. The episode was reminiscent of Charles Whitman's homicidal outburst from the top of Austin's Texas Tower, but last week's madness seemed to have more method. The victims were all white, and seven—three dead, four wounded—were policemen.

Super-brain. For hours, police had no idea how many snipers they were up against, but there seemed to be at least two, since blazes were set almost simultaneously on different floors. A besieging army of 200 uniformed policemen, detectives, sharpshooters and volunteers soon surrounded the motel. As the cordon tightened, the assailants found refuge behind the concrete walls of the rooftop's boiler room and stairwell casements. An armor-plated Marine helicopter made repeated passes as the cops tried to blast through the walls, but the sniper shots kept coming. Finally, eleven hours after the violence had begun, one lone sniper darted under the glare of a helicopter spotlight, ran about 30 ft. in a zigzag pattern across the rooftop, and fell dead in a hail of police tracer bullets, his body riddled with more than 100 slugs.

Convinced that other gunmen were still on the roof, police kept their vigil throughout the night and the next morning. When they finally raided the rooftop, they found just the body of the youth they had shot down 16 hours earlier. A thorough room-by-room search of the motel failed to turn up any other snipers. Said Police Superintendent Clarence Giarrusso: "Either there was only one, or another got away. The speculation might run the gamut all the way from negligence on the part of police to a superbrain on the part of the sniper."