By Greg Palast

Matt Pascarella and I encountered Patricia Thomas while she was breaking into a home at the Lafitte Housing Project in New Orleans. It was her own home. Nevertheless, if caught, she’d end up in the slammer. So would we.

Matt was my producer for the film, Big Easy to Big Empty, and he encouraged my worst habits. I’d worked for the New Orleans Housing Authority years back and knew they wanted the poor black folk out of these pretty townhouses near the French Quarter. Katrina was an excuse for ethnic cleansing, American style. Matt and I skipped cuffs on this shoot, but were charged later by Homeland Security (see below).

While I recorded the story of hidden evils on film, Matt gathered a story which no camera can capture. Here it is.

By Matt Pascarella

Four years ago, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I sat with Patricia Thomas. Greg Palast and I had just helped her break into her home in the Lafitte Projects. She had been locked out for a year. She showed us her former home, her belongings scattered everywhere, and wrestled out endless stories of post-Katrina life: how she struggled to find shelter over the last year, how they came and put bars on her doors and windows and locked her out, how it was “man made.”

I picked up a photo of her at Mardi Gras, taken a few years earlier, and compared it to what she looked like now. In the picture her hair was longer, her face younger, her smile deeper. Now her arms were wasted and thin, her eyes sunken into her face, and her bottom front teeth were gone. On most days, she told me, she wore her dead mother’s dentures, but today she had forgotten to put them in. Her own teeth broke off when escaping the rising waters. She had fallen face first onto the concrete slab that was her front porch. The very spot where we were sitting was where it had happened. Over my left shoulder, running the length of the building, was a scar, a stain from the water line.

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