NEW ORLEANS – Life wasn't supposed to end this way for Sgt. Paul
Accardo: alone in chaos. He wrote a note telling anyone who found him to
contact a fellow officer. He was precise, and thoughtful, to the end.
Then he stuck a gun into his mouth and killed himself.
Accardo, 36, was one of two city cops who committed suicide last week as
New Orleans descended into an abyss of death and destruction caused by
Hurricane Katrina. He was found in an unmarked patrol car Saturday in a
downtown parking lot.
His funeral was planned for Wednesday.
Back when life was normal and structured, Accardo served as one of the
police department's chief spokesmen. He reported murders, hostage
situations and rapes in measured words, his bespectacled face benign and
familiar on the nightly news.
"Paul was a stellar guy. A perfectionist. Everything had to be just
right," recalled Sgt. Joe Narcisse, who went to police academy with
Accardo and worked with him in the public affairs office.
Uniform crisply pressed, office in order, everything just right on his
desk. That was Accardo.
"I'm the jokester in the office. I'd move stuff on his desk and he
didn't like that," said Capt. Marlon Defillo, Accardo's boss. "He was
ready to call the crime lab to find out who messed with his desk."
Maybe, Defillo reckoned, he killed himself because he lost hope that
order would ever be restored in the city.
A public information officer, the captain said, turns the senseless –
murder, rape, mayhem – into something orderly for the public. "It's like
dominoes scattered across a table and putting them in order."
But in New Orleans for the past week, the chaos seemed endless.
Like the rest of the department, Accardo worked long, difficult days –
sometimes 20 hours. He waded through the mass of flesh and stench in the
Louisiana Superdome. He saw the dead in the streets.
Defillo remembered how bad Accardo felt when he was unable to help women
stranded on the interstate and pleading for water and food. One woman
said her baby had not had water in three days.
He even wanted to stop and help the animals lost amid the ruin of New
Orleans, Defillo said.
Unable to stop the madness and hurt, Accardo sank into depression.
Narcisse remembered being on the telephone with him, complaining about
the flooding when his old academy buddy cut him off midsentence: "Joe.
Joe. I can't talk to you right now." He couldn't handle it anymore,
Narcisse said.
"It was like you were having an awful conversation with someone who died
in your family," he said.
Accardo – who also lost his home in the flood waters – looked like a
zombie, like someone who hadn't slept in year, Defillo said. But so did
so many on the 1,600-member force.
Officials said Monday that between 400 to 500 officers were unaccounted
for, many tending to their homes or looking for their families, and some
dropping out. To lessen the stress, officers were being cycled off duty
and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta, where they also
would receive counseling.
Said Mayor Ray Nagin: "I've got some firefighters and police officers
that have been pretty much traumatized."
Police Superintendent Eddie Compass didn't know how many had abandoned
their jobs outright, but denied that it was a large number.
"No police department in the history of the world was asked to do what
we (were) asked," he said.
But Defillo said he never thought Accardo would kill himself.
"We kept telling him, 'There's going to be a brighter day; suck it up,'"
Defillo said. "He couldn't shake it."
According to the obituary in the Advocate of Baton Rouge, Accardo left a
wife, Anne; his mother, Catherine; a brother; a sister; and eight nieces
and nephews.
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