Project Hope a beacon after storm
Katrina victims offered emotional, practical aid
Craig Schneider - Staff
Thursday, December 22, 2005

Getting angry at her son after he forgot a workbook at school was bad enough. But when Deborah Grimes cried uncontrollably in front of her kids, she knew she needed help.

Grimes and her two sons had escaped Hurricane Katrina, but any sense of relief didn't last. The single mother from New Orleans made it to an apartment complex in Sandy Springs, but she was spending hours every day on the phone trying to salvage her life. With little success.

Her mortgage debt was mounting. Phone numbers ping-ponged around her head --- six insurance adjusters, the federal emergency agency, Georgia assistance groups, New Orleans utility companies. She called them again and again, sometimes just to get past the busy signals and message machines.

The stress brought out hives on her left arm, robbed her energy and gave her dreams of drowning. Her patience wore so thin she stopped helping her third-grader with his homework, afraid she would snap at him.

Then she learned that an elderly woman she sat with in church had died in the floods. "I can't cry," Grimes told herself. "I'm afraid if I start, I won't stop."

That's just what happened, right in front of her children.

"I was out of control," Grimes recalled. "I could no longer control my emotions."

Project Hope helped.

The Georgia Department of Human Resources created Project Hope to help Gulf Coast evacuees cope with the damage done to their lives, and to move on. The program helps people with both emotional and practical needs. A crisis call line counsels people in despair. Outreach workers guide people through their challenges, showing up at their door with lists of agencies, churches and charities that help with rent, light bills and even holiday gifts. So far, the program has helped upwards of 800 hurricane victims.

Evacuees have called the crisis line --- 1-800-273-TALK --- tearful, frightened and, in some cases, saying they'd be better off dead, said organizers.

"These are normal people reacting to an abnormal situation," said Pamela Schuble, vice president of Behavioral Health Link, an Atlanta crisis center hired by the state to oversee the program. Using an $870,000 federal grant, the state has contracted with counselors in 10 counties, mostly in metro Atlanta where most of Georgia's estimated 100,000 evacuees are living.

Schuble said the hurricane victims are grieving the losses in their lives ---their homes, possessions, pets, churches and loved ones.

"They've lost their position in the world," Schuble said. "Their job, their sense of community. In a way, it's a loss of identity."

Apart from shoring up their losses, evacuees must figure out the future. They need, as much as anything, someone to talk to, Schuble said.

Project Hope, which started around Thanksgiving, isn't waiting for people to call. Most contacts have come from crisis workers sent to hotels and apartment complexes where evacuees live, and to churches and charity groups that are helping them.

Grimes met a man from Project Hope a few weeks ago at a support group for Katrina evacuees at Roswell United Methodist Church. Shortly thereafter, two crisis workers came to her apartment, and they talked for three hours.

The mother of two --- Octavious, 8, and Gary, 18 --- felt alone. She was far from any relative, and most of her adult conversations were over the phone with insurance companies and aid workers, and the maintenance man who came to fix the heat.

Grimes had felt terrible standing in line for food stamps, and worse when she was rejected because her income was too high. She had been working as a bankruptcy collector at a bank when the storm hit, and she owned two cars and three homes, two of which she was readying to rent. The houses suffered varying degrees of damage.

So many things she thought would help, turned out badly. When she first reached Atlanta, Grimes and her sons had been taken in by a family of strangers who volunteered to house hurricane victims. But after two weeks, Grimes disagreed with the wife over what Grimes should be doing in the aftermath of the storm.

So the Grimes family moved to Sandy Springs, hoping money would come soon from the insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But Grimes said a woman had used her address in filing a federal aid application. That set off a FEMA investigation, and Grimes said she hasn't seen a dime from the agency.

The Project Hope counselors helped Grimes move from a pervading sense of dread to identifying her options. Most importantly, they helped her remember what is most important in her life.

"My health, my strength, my kids are what are most important to me," she said.

The crisis workers also pointed her to nearby churches and charities that helped her find clothes and food, and pay the rent and utilities.

Grimes had never sought counseling before. She always thought of herself as a strong person, having started college and her first job at age 16. Project Hope, she said, helped her find clarity among the chaos.

"It helped clear the cloudiness in my head," she said. "Now I'm thinking five thoughts at a time, not 25."

She acknowledges she's still stressed. But the hives are gone from her arm.

Her energy is back.

And she's helping Octavious with his homework.

Stress After Katrina 'Recipe for Suicide'

By ALLEN G. BREED, Associated Press Writer

With a newborn daughter, an autistic child and a fledgling music business, life was chaotic enough for Jerome "Slim Rome" Spears and fiancee Rachel Harris.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit, chasing them from New Orleans, throwing both out of work and putting Spears' plans to "dominate" the hip-hop scene on indefinite hold.

This week, in an Atlanta-area rental home hundreds of miles from the Big Easy, Spears shot his fiancee to death, severely wounded her 4-year-old son with a bullet to the back of the head, and then killed himself. The couple's 5-month-old daughter, born amid the Katrina chaos, was unharmed but is now an orphan.

Suicide is complicated, experts say, and exactly what role the hurricane played in the tragedy is unclear. But New Orleans' coroner says he has seen enough to know that the stress caused by Katrina "is a recipe for suicide if I've ever seen one."

"You can imagine how it feels to lose your house, to lose your job and to lose a loved one," says Dr. Frank Minyard, who attributes seven suicides in his flood-stricken city alone to Katrina-related stress.

While suicides and violent deaths have yet to be fully tallied among scattered Katrina evacuees, reports of such cases are already numerous.

Five days after Christmas in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine, evacuee Ryan Peter Ruiz, facing imminent eviction from a temporary apartment, killed his wife and 14-year-old son with a shotgun, then took his own life. Houston-area officials report at least two evacuee suicides.

Filmmaker Stevenson J. Palfi, 53, whose 1982 documentary "Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together" chronicled the lives of three New Orleans jazzmen, shot himself at his home Dec. 14. Relatives say he had been severely depressed after losing most of his possessions to Katrina.

Calls to the National Suicide Prevention hot line more than doubled in the month after the Aug. 29 storm that swamped more than 80 percent of New Orleans, ripped up the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, and claimed more than 1,300 lives.

Katrina knocked out Charity Hospital, greater New Orleans' primary mental-health crisis center with 96 beds. There are waiting lists for beds, and Dr. Tony Speier has heard disturbing anecdotes of suicides among people who had "focus and purpose in their lives."

"It's definitely a crisis," says Speier, director of the federally funded Louisiana Spirit crisis counseling program. "The resources that were present that people relied on for years are severely compromised."

But as traumatic as Katrina was, Dr. Holly A. Parker says it would be wrong to blame all of these suicides on the storm.

"I can tell you that a very common myth that people have is that there was one thing, one event that pushed someone over the edge," says Parker, a psychopathologist who is part of a Harvard Medical School project assessing the mental health needs of Katrina survivors. "The reality is that people who die by suicide have what is called a suicidal career, meaning that it's not just one thing that happened."

Just what might have pushed Spears over the edge is unclear.

The 28-year-old Air Force veteran was chief executive of On Top Enterprise Management and Production, a company that promoted small-time New Orleans music acts. Plugging artists with names such as GunSlanga, Tru Thug and Menace, Spears said on his Web site that his goal was to "dominate the hip-hop, R&B and pop sectors in the music industry."

Five days before his death, Spears e-mailed co-worker and Web designer Andy Koch. A record executive had suggested Spears tone down his "gangsta" image, and Spears _ who had a 1996 weapons charge from Tacoma, Wash., on his record _ asked Koch to "remove a couple of negative things" from the site.

Bart Kelly, Spears' attorney, says Spears "sounded OK" when he called him from Georgia about a month ago.

"He had some good things that were going on and he had some troubles, much like other people who've been dealing with having to leave their hometown and everything else," Kelly says. "I think he was excited about having a baby, and my understanding was he generally enjoyed his relationship."

But late Tuesday, Spears called an aunt in New Orleans to tell her he had killed Harris, and to ask her to call police. When SWAT team members broke into the home, they found Harris dead on the living room floor, gunshot wounds to the head. Nearby, the boy, with a severe head wound, moaned as he sat strapped in a high chair that was, in turn, tied to the leg of a couch.

Spears lay dead on a bed upstairs, a .25-caliber pistol in his hand and another gun beside him. Police say he left no note.

"He seemed like a guy who might do something good with himself," Kelly says. "Obviously, he's done something very bad with himself."

In her work with Harvard, Parker has talked with more than a dozen Katrina survivors. So far, none has expressed suicidal thoughts.

"If anything, there's much more of a message of resilience," says Parker, who was married in New Orleans last year and whose own mother-in-law lost everything.

When someone commits suicide, Parker tells the survivors not to beat themselves up about that last fight or cross word. If Spears hadn't killed himself that day, she says, he might have done so a week or even a month later.

"It's possible that he might not have committed suicide absent Katrina," she says. "We can't say for sure."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.; AP writer Daniel Yee in Atlanta contributed to this report.

800-273-TALK (8255)