PRESEASON: JAGUARS AT SAINTS • NOON • FOX 1C
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S u n d ay, au g u S t 17, 2025
Redefining their future Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have shaped the lives of the children of New Orleans, who have now grown up
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Cantrell ‘lamest of lame ducks’
After indictment, mayor not likely to finish her agenda BY TYLER BRIDGES | Staff writer With just months left in her second and final term, and engulfed now by a criminal indictment issued Friday, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s near-decade-long leadership of city government may be over for all practical purposes. Any progress on projects and initiatives in New Orleans will come through the efforts of others, say City Council members, business leaders and neighbor- Cantrell hood activists. They say they expect the mayor to concentrate on her legal ä Cantrell battles in the coming weeks and latest months, stay mostly out of public N.O.-area sight and do little to promote the politician remaining items on her agenda. to face Other elected officials are likely to steer clear of Cantrell, who charges. seems to have few remaining po- PAGE 6A litical allies.
ä See CANTRELL, page 8A
BY DESIREE STENNETT | Staff writer Cierra Chenier doesn’t like to leave New Orleans. Not after being forced out after Hurricane Katrina drowned the city. Not for too long. Not when so many family members, childhood friends and countless others moved and never found their way back. She was 9 when Katrina turned her whole world — everyone’s world — upside down. In the years that followed, she and thousands of other children came of age in a new kind of New Orleans where they were suddenly divorced from the neighborhoods that formed generations of identities. “My dad grew up in the 7th Ward. You can KATRINA put him anywhere on Earth and he is still from the 7th Ward,” said Chenier, a 29-yearold who was raised in New Orleans East until the storm, but thinks her connection to her childhood neighborhood is more fragile than her father’s relationship to his. YEARS “My core identity is still tied to the East, but I’m not there anymore, and the East is not the same anymore. In a city like New Orleans, where we carry these neighborhoods with us until the day we die, Katrina disrupted that,” she said. Twenty years after the disaster, more than half a dozen residents who were between the ages of 9 and 18 when Katrina hit shared stories of how the storm altered their trajectories. Katrina decided which family bonds thrived and died. It inspired career paths and artistic pursuits. And it preserved memories, or washed them away, depending upon which possessions survived.
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STAFF PHOTOS By CHRIS GRANGER
TOP: Cierra Chenier was 9 when Hurricane Katrina hit. A resident of New Orleans East, her home and nearly everything inside was destroyed in the storm. She stands in the now-vacant New Orleans East yard where she grew up playing. ABOVE: Jahquille Ross was 14 when the storm hit. School became his refuge. Now, he works in education policy for New Schools for New Orleans, a nonprofit founded after the storm to help independently run charter schools, which make up the bulk of the city’s schools today. ä For more stories on the
anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, GO TO NOLA.COM.
Will Cantrell indictment prove enough for conviction?
Federal legal experts give case mixed reviews BY JOHN SIMERMAN | Staff writer The 18-count indictment handed up Friday against Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her police officer bodyguard, Jeffrey Vappie, paints a sordid picture of the pair jetting off on city time while scheming to hide their affair from the public, a federal grand jury and the news media. Over 44 pages, Cantrell is accused of a series of illegal actions, including withholding or deleting records and lying to the feds to conceal a romance with Vappie, now divorced and retired from the New Orleans Police Department.
ä See REACTION, page 7A
ä See KATRINA, page 4A
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Business ......................1E Deaths .........................3B Nation-World................2A Classified ..................... 2F Living............................1D Opinion ........................6B Commentary ................7B Metro ...........................1B Sports ..........................1C
13TH yEAR, NO. 5
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