20359: (Hermantin)Sun-Sentinel-Photographer vows to return, maybe still carrying bullet (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Photographer vows to return, maybe still carrying bullet

by jonathon king
staff writer
Posted March 14 2004

Yes, he will go back to Haiti. Back to the very street where he was shot.
Back, perhaps, with the bullet he took still buried in his shoulder.

"I'll go back," said Michael Laughlin, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
photojournalist who was shot while covering the unrest in downtown
Port-au-Prince last Sunday. "There's a family there that took a chance
hiding me in their house that I need to thank."

>From a hospital bed in the Ryder Trauma Center in Miami last Wednesday,
Laughlin recounted how the "carnival" atmosphere during a rally of Haitians
quickly turned violent, how he believes he and other journalists were being
targeted by gunmen, and how, as a journalist, he won't let his being wounded
stop him from covering a story he believes in.

"I'm not some adrenaline junkie," Laughlin said. "But I will accept some
risk for an important story, and I think this is important. The people in
Haiti deserve to have their stories told."

Through his photos, Laughlin was telling the story last Sunday of a rally in
support of the anti-government rebel movement in Haiti and the ouster of
former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

He photographed children in the huge crowd, a group of men pulling down an
Aristide billboard, citizens treating marchers to water as they walked to
the Champ de Mars plaza in front of the National Palace.

"I walked the 12-mile route with the crowd and it was a sort of Mardi Gras
atmosphere," Laughlin said. "It was hot and people were out on their
balconies throwing buckets of water down on the marchers to cool everyone
off. It was incredible since water is such a scare commodity there."

It wasn't until after the march ended and the crowd began to disperse that
Laughlin and other news photographers were drawn to a knot of trouble.

"There was some scuffling and arguing among a group of guys who were
accusing one man of being a chimère [a pro-Aristide militant]."

Minutes later, a truckload of police in SWAT uniforms pulled up and started
on foot down a side street. A group of photojournalists followed. Caught at
one point on the same side of the street as the police, Laughlin crossed
over to where his fellow journalists were. The reporters figured that if
anyone were targeted, it would be the police on the other side of the
street. When gunfire started ripping the air, they were proved wrong.

"My first thought was who the hell is shooting? And what are they shooting
at?" said Laughlin, who took cover behind a small wall. The police returned
fire and moved forward. Two other photographers were 20 feet in front of
Laughlin.

"I wanted to catch up to those guys. I thought I was safe. There were no
cops on my side of the street. Nobody else was around me. I took one step
from behind the wall, and that's when I was shot."

A bullet grazed Laughlin's cheek. He was also hit in the neck, and a bullet,
thought to be from an AK-47, slammed into his shoulder, breaking his
shoulder blade.

"My first reaction was I was stunned," he said. "I had blood all over me, my
shirt, my hands, my arms."

A Haitian man appeared, Laughlin said, "and started pulling me into his
courtyard, saying, `Come on, come on.' I sat down at this table and the
other photographers joined us."

But outside, the police team retreated. Now, the photographers were the only
targets left.

SEEKING COVER

"We ran inside the house and I sat in the kitchen and this family gave me a
cloth to put on the wound and ice on my head and we started using our cell
phones to try to get somebody, the Marines, anybody, to come and get us."

He heard more gunfire. Then Peter Bosch, a photographer for The Miami
Herald, ran inside and said: "They shot two more photographers and one is
dead," Laughlin said.

José Ricardo Ortega, a New York-based correspondent for the Spanish
television station Antena 3, was pulled back into the house, bleeding from
chest wounds. The other man Bosch thought was a photographer turned out to
be the owner of the house, Francois Joseph, who was shot in the leg.

"I mean, the guy got shot, helping me," Laughlin said.

Freelance photographer Daniel Morel then left the house and was able to flag
down an ambulance -- a station wagon with a red cross painted on its side.

"They packed us into the ambulance and there were already wounded inside,"
Laughlin said. "Ricardo was next to me. He was still breathing. I put my
hand on his knee and just kept saying, `Hang in there. Hang in there.' It
wasn't until we were a few blocks away that I finally felt we were going to
get out of there."

They drove to Canapé-Vert Hospital, where Laughlin's wounds were assessed.
But Ortega, he said, took priority.

"They brought him in on a stretcher. The floor of the room was covered in
blood and they put his stretcher down right on the floor and started working
on him," Laughlin said.

Ortega died a short while later, the first foreign journalist to be killed
in Haiti in at least a decade.

Return to Haiti

Laughlin says he doubts that anyone will truly know why the gunmen on the
street decided to fire at a group of journalists carrying only cameras and
wearing press badges. But he says he will not hesitate to go back even with
the bullet that doctors have decided to leave in his shoulder for now. The
stories, he says, are too important. He made that clear in conversations
with Sun-Sentinel reporter Sandra Hernandez, who was on assignment with
Laughlin in Haiti.

"The last thing I told Sandra [at Canapé-Vert Hospital] was to find my
pants. All my discs were in them with all the stuff I shot," Laughlin said.

"I wanted to make sure they got that. All that work would have been gone.
Hey, there were stories in there. I didn't want to lose it."

Jonathon King can be reached at jking@sun-sentinel.com or 954 356-4691.

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