By Tim Carman
GONZALES, Louisiana – Walking back to their car with their gentle white pit bull, Gomez, once again by their side, Richard Heintz and Monica Hoover could be just another couple reuniting with an animal at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center shelter—except for the fact that they sport matching dreadlocks and that intricate tattoos cover much of their visible skin. Hoover's wearing black, calf-high platform boots with black cut-off sweats, and Heintz's T-shirt reads, "Get the scare of a lifetime."
At a time when they should be shedding tears of joy over Gomez's return, Heintz and Hoover can't help crying Friday morning over the loss of their other dog, Rada, a white German Shepherd who didn't survive his own scare of a lifetime: Hurricane Katrina.
HSUS rescuers had saved Gomez just the day before from the couple's duplex on Iberville Street in the Mid City section of New Orleans, but they arrived too late to save Rada, a heavy coated animal not suited to surviving in non-climate controlled homes that quickly turn into ovens when the power is out.
The animal's death was just another dark reminder of what HSUS President & CEO Wayne Pacelle spoke about today at a press conference in Baton Rouge: that animals continue to die in south Louisiana, and that part of the reason they're dying is that the federal government does not have an official policy to include pets as part of their human rescue missions.
"We aren't big enough to handle the magnitude of this crisis," Pacelle said about a coalition of animal groups battling to save abandoned pets in New Orleans and other areas.
A Morbid Discovery
As she continued to cry on the scorching concrete outside Barn 5 on the Lamar-Dixon compound, Monica Hoover expressed anger toward those who couldn't reach her pooch in time. She clearly needed to be angry at someone.
Hoover and Heintz evacuated their home on Sunday, August 28, the day before Katrina struck, believing like so many others that they would return in a couple of days, their optimism based on the fact that the hurricane would not hit New Orleans directly. So they packed their antique Cadillac and headed to Shreveport, where they stayed with a relative of Heintz's.
Hoover recalled the details of their 4 a.m. departure: She set out a lot of water for 9-year-old Rada because the female dog had, for a week leading up to Katrina, developed a habit of knocking over her bowl and "bird bathing" in the water. Hoover worried that Rada would do the same in their absence, leaving the dog with an inadequate supply for the duration of the storm. Hoover overcompensated by leaving a ton of water.
It wasn't enough.
A pair of HSUS animal rescuers reached the couple's duplex in the early afternoon on Thursday, September 15. According to the report that HSUS volunteer rescuer Jane Garrison had received, she and her partner Drew Moore were looking for a dog and cat. As Garrison held open the screen door, to which were affixed a plastic bat and a couple of voodoo dolls, Moore peered through the front door.
"Hey, pooch!" he said, his words as musical as Mozart symphonies to rescuers still hoping to find animals alive some 17 days after Katrina. "I see a dog."
And then Garrison added the dark coda: "There's a dead dog, too. Oh, god."
Moore promptly applied five ferocious kicks to the door, which yielded to the brute force, and the team entered the duplex. The main living room looked like a Victorian-era haunted house, with light filtering into the space through red lace curtains. A coffin stood upright in one corner, a fake full-body skeleton lying inside its shallow black walls. On the opposite site of the room, a mannequin wearing a gas mask held a faux severed head in its hands. A cow skull rested on one of two plush red couches.
Amid this morbid decor lay the real thing: Heintz and Hoover's Rada, who was curled up against a back wall, still as the air in this humid house. Gomez, named after the character in the Addams Family, circled around his departed friend, then landed himself on the steps leading to the second floor.
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| Moore, in his contamination suit, waits for Gomez to drink his fill. |
It was here that Moore went to work, leash in hand. He sat at the food of the stairs and told Gomez, "Let's be friends."
"Hey, buddy, I know I look funny," Moore said to the animal, while wearing his all-white contamination suit. "But we're the same color."
Within just a minute or two, Moore had slipped the leash around Gomez's neck and was escorting him to the van, where the dog ravenously gulped down one and a half bowls of water—half of which he then immediately threw up.
Moore was surprised at how good Gomez looked. The dog was thin, but in startlingly good shape after 17 days in a locked house.
The Sad Reality of Grief
Residents of New Orleans have been practicing voodoo since the 18th century, when African slaves toiling in Haiti brought their newly developed black magic and spirit worship to south Louisiana and promptly scared their white masters into creating laws to ban it. Ever since, voodoo in all its many forms—some serious and others purely ornamental—have appealed to disenfranchised minorities and even alternative young adults like Richard Heintz and Monica Hoover.
However the couple embraced death in their private lives, Heintz and Hoover were not immune to its deep emotional consequences in this Lamar-Dixon parking lot. As Hoover stood there talking to a reporter, she recounted that Rada was only nine years old, and that she was in good health.
"She could have made it to 15," Hoover said, before turning away again and quietly crying to herself.
Heintz's approach to grief was different. He stressed the positive, which was attached to a leash in his left hand: the 5-year-old Gomez, who was born on Easter.
"Now that we have him back, and he got through the storm, he will go with us everywhere we go," Heintz said.
Then he thanked The HSUS for all it did to save Gomez. He was truly appreciative. But as the reporter continued to ask questions, Heintz begged off, perhaps out of emotional exhaustion, perhaps because he wanted to comfort Hoover.
But his excuse for leaving was far more practical: The couple's cat was locked in the car in the Louisiana heat.
Tim Carman is managing editor of hsus.org.
