posted September 08, 2005 05:30 AM              

By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY

(Sept. 7) - Where does it end for Linda Bowie? Happily reunited with her mother in a hospital room somewhere in Texas, in Louisiana, perhaps in Illinois?

Or in a morgue, identifying her mother's body a week or more after Bowie watched the ailing 82-year-old being lifted into a helicopter amid the post-Katrina chaos near New Orleans' Superdome?

Bowie just wants to find her mother, period. "I know she had a stroke. She can't talk. She can't tell anybody who she is," Bowie says. "If she's alive, where is she? And will we ever find her?"

Her voice hardens. "If I've got to go to New Orleans and look at 5,000 dead bodies, I'm going."

Bowie's house on Feliciana Street in New Orleans has floodwaters up to its roof. The '93 Escort she just bought for $2,300 is gone. Bowie, her sister and three grandchildren, ages, 13, 8 and 7, who live with her, fled to her mother's apartment before Katrina hit. All she took with her were two small bags of belongings and $200.

Bowie, 51, a diabetic living on a little more than $700 a month in disability assistance, has lost her purse, her bank card and access to her meager life's savings.

She caught one of the first wave of 500 or so buses that delivered hurricane evacuees to Houston's Astrodome, and from there settled into a motel arranged by a cousin who lives here. She eventually wants to get to Atlanta, where she has a niece. "I'm trying to hold myself together. I really am," she says. "Because if I break down, the children don't have anyone."

Trying to get out

Bowie has shepherded them through a week of horror.

They rode out the storm in her mother's second-story apartment in the Lafitte Housing Project, then watched the waters rise. Escape wasn't easy for anyone in the city, but it was a special challenge for Bowie's family. Her mother, Ethel Herbert, was confined to a hospital bed because of diabetes and her age. Bowie was convinced from the droop of her mom's face and her inability to communicate that she'd had a stroke.

A neighbor found a boat. He and others dismantled the bed, floated it to Interstate 10 and reassembled it atop the elevated roadway. He then went back for the mother and the others. That was Tuesday. No rescuers came. So the small band disassembled the bed and took it back to Herbert's apartment and repeated the exercise Wednesday - repositioning Herbert in her bed atop the pavement.

Desperate, Bowie and her 13-year-old grandson, Kailen, took off for the Superdome on foot. "When we walked up," she recalls, "all the ... guys, they're lined up across I-10 with AK-47s and shotguns and hand pistols. And they said, 'You can't be up here.' I explained the situation to one of the guys, and he said, 'You go talk to that guy.' When I walked up to him, he just looked at me for a while.

"I said, 'Mister, I have a serious situation here.' He said, 'What's the matter?' And I explained it all to him. I thought my mother'd had a stroke. And he said, 'Well, let her die.' "

Bowie's voice cracks. "I said, 'Excuse me, sir? You're talking about my mother.' He pumped the shotgun. And he said, 'I'm asking you to leave, now.' "

So she and her grandson trudged back up the interstate and pushed her mother's hospital bed 11/2 miles to the dome. There were no offers of help along the way.

Near the Superdome, they steered the bed to a helicopter pad and found a sympathetic soldier. He arranged for Herbert to be moved into the helicopter, and eventually she was flown away.

Inside the Superdome

Then, Bowie, her sister Denise and the three children were left to deal with the squalid Superdome.

They spent a tortured Wednesday night in the bleachers. "Everything was going on in there," Bowie says. "Fighting. Murders. Rape. There was all kinds of violence. They were selling drugs. The food they were dropping off, other people were selling it. If you didn't have money, you didn't eat."

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She arranged to buy seven hot dogs, five smoked sausages and two Cokes for $20. "Where they were getting it, I don't know. I guess they were stealing it from the dome," Bowie says. "When the girl brings me back the food, she goes, 'You do drugs? I've got marijuana, cocaine, heroin, Viagra, Vicodin.' I can't tell you all the drugs."

Bowie kept the children - Kailen, Kyle, 8, and Kaila, 7 - by her side. At 7 a.m. Thursday, they boarded a bus for Houston.

Bowie's cousin here lent her $2,000. That got her, Denise and the grandchildren into the hotel, and allowed them to buy some clothes. The rest of Bowie's time has been spent calling practically every hospital between Houston and San Antonio, more in New Orleans and even one in Chicago, trying to track down her mother.

She has said goodbye to New Orleans. "I'm never going back ... not even to visit," Bowie says.

She and the kids could be in Atlanta by the end of this week, she says. "I don't want to go until I find out if my mother's dead or alive," she says.

09/07/2005 07:12