Justice may finally be imaginable for Edna Glover and her family. The charred remains of her son Henry were discovered in the burnt hulk of a car on a levee overlooking the Mississippi River a week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. But she’d never gotten any answers. When A.C. Thompson began to investigate the suspicious death for The Nation two years later, Edna had yet to be contacted by the New Orleans police or any other law enforcement official.
But Thompson’s year-and-a-half-long probe, led by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute with additional support from ProPublica, sparked an FBI investigation last spring that is finally bearing fruit. An article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune today by Pro Publica’s Thompson and the Times-Pic‘s Brendan McCarthy and Laura Maggi, reveals that a former NOPD officer, David Warren, is under investigation for the murder.
As Thompson originally reported, back in January 2009, Glover was shot outside of a Chuck E. Cheese in a strip mall in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans four days after the storm. Three local men — Glover’s friend Bernard Calloway, Glover’s brother Edward King, and passerby William Tanner — rallied to save Glover’s life, lifting him into Tanner’s car and driving him to a local elementary school, where an NOPD SWAT team had set up a temporary base. There, rather than rush Glover to the hospital, NOPD officers threatened Glover’s rescuers with guns, handcuffed them, and beat them. Meanwhile, Glover bled to death in the back of Tanner’s car.
Now, four and a half years later Warren is being investigated for the shooting and, as the Times-Pic reports, two members of the SWAT team, Capt. Jeff Winn and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann, are under investigation for setting Tanner’s car on fire with Glover’s remains inside. The scorched car was found (and later photographed by The Investigative Fund) just blocks away from the NOPD’s 4th District station.
