Mark “Jimmy” Essex

Monday, December 6th, 2010

The story of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower sniper, is fairly well known. I’ve discussed it before.

I hadn’t heard the story of Mark “Jimmy” Essex though, until I stumbled across it in John Plaster’s The Ultimate Sniper. It’s pretty wild.

It starts on New Year’s Eve, 1972, when the young black man decides to get back at his white oppressors by killing New Orleans police officers. He opens fire with his .44 magnum carbine during a shift change at the central lockup — and kills a black cop.

He escapes to a bad part of town and breaks into a warehouse — which is wired with an alarm. When an unsuspecting police officer shows up to check on things, Essex shoots him in the back, from ambush. The officer’s partner calls for back-up though, and soon they storm the building.

Essex is gone — but he has left a trail of dropped .44 magnum rounds. The trail is suspiciously consistent though. While the police debate whether to storm the nearby church at the end of the trail, they receive a call from their Chief of Police, Clarence Giarrusso — who calls off the search. The police are not welcome there in Gert Town, a black neighborhood.

Eventually, after shooting a white grocer and stealing a car at gun-point, Essex makes his way to a Howard Johnson’s hotel:

When Essex burst out of the Gravier stairwell into the 18th floor hallway, he startled three black housekeepers. As he ran past them, Essex told the hotel workers not to worry. He said he was only after white people. In the hallway in front of room 1829 Essex found 27-year-old Dr. Robert Steagall and his wife Betty. It was the last day of the Steagalls New Orleans vacation, and they were moments away from checking out of the hotel.

Dr. Steagall tried to stop the man he saw running down the hallway clutching a rifle. The two men struggled briefly; then Essex shot the doctor in the chest. As Mrs. Steagall dropped to the floor and wrapped her arms around her husband, Essex pushed the muzzle of his .44 carbine against the back of her head and fired.

Essex slipped into the Steagalls’ room and snatched the telephone book from the nightstand. He doused it with lighter fluid, set it on fire, then tossed it under the window drapes. As he scuttled into the hallway and past the blood-soaked bodies of the Steagalls, Essex dropped a red, green, and black African flag onto the floor beside them. Within minutes, room 1829 was an inferno.

Essex ran down the stairwell to the 11th floor. This time he didn’t knock on the fire door. He just shot the lock off. He strode down the hallway, ducking in and out of empty rooms and lighting fires.

Calls started coming into the hotel switchboard about a man with a gun wandering the hotel and shooting guests. Frank Schneider, the hotel assistant manager, rode the elevator up to the 11th floor to investigate. As soon as Schneider stepped off the elevator, he spotted the big gun in Essex’s hands and bolted for the Perdido stairwell. Essex raised his rifle to his shoulder, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The .44 Magnum bullet hit the assistant manager in the back of the head. His body fell just short of the fire door at the end of the hall.

Essex walked down to the 10th floor.

Outside the hotel, a crowd started to gather. Plumes of smoke poured from several of the upper-floor windows.

Walter Collins, the hotel general manager, started climbing the Gravier stairwell. The switchboard had received more reports of a man with a gun. The eighth and ninth floors were filled with smoke. When Collins reached the 10th floor he spotted someone through the fire door window. He opened the door with a passkey. As Collins stepped into the hallway, Essex shot him. Mr. Collins died from his wound three weeks later in the hospital.

Someone called the fire department. A few minutes later, policemen and firemen were on the way.

Essex shoots some more guests and, of course, some of the firemen and police officers who arrive on the scene. This is before SWAT, so most of the officers have .38 revolvers, a few have shotguns, and others have brought their own personal deer rifles.

Some of the spectators cheer when Essex fires.

Because Essex keeps on the move, the police assume they are facing multiple snipers.

Essex manages to hold off an attempt to storm the roof. The police do manage to secure all the floors of the hotel though.

Then it really starts to sound like a movie:

Eighth District officer Antoine Saacks had worked undercover in the French Quarter until four or five o’clock Sunday morning. Around 10 a.m. his wife woke him up and told him there was a sniper at the Howard Johnson’s. Saacks knew immediately that it was connected to the string of police shootings.

His wife got hysterical when he started collecting his gear and told her he was going to the hotel. To calm her down, Saacks claimed to have changed his mind. He told her he wasn’t going; then he tossed his weapons and equipment out through the bathroom window of their house. He sneaked outside and loaded it into his car and headed for the Howard Johnson’s. With him he brought an M-16 rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He thought that would be enough. He was wrong.
[...]
Since his arrival early that afternoon, Saacks had been across Gravier Street in the Rault Center, the location of the deadly high-rise fire two months before. He had found a position opposite the cubicle that sat on top of the Gravier stairwell. A solid cinderblock wall shielded the sniper from Saacks’ view, but he could hear the gunman shouting obscenities and firing his big gun. Saacks occasionally saw the sniper flick out still-burning cigarette butts. Less than 100 yards separated the two men. “I periodically would pepper the cubicle just to let him know somebody was close by,” Saacks says.

Eventually, the sniper tossed a crumpled red and white cigarette pack onto the roof. “I shot the pack a couple of times and bounced it around on the rooftop,” Saacks says. He was trying to send the sniper a message: He wasn’t the only one who knew how to shoot.

Then Marine Corps Lt. Col. Pitman volunteers to fly a helicopter within shooting range of the rooftop sniper:

Because of the wind, the rain, and the low clouds, Pitman had to make his approach from the south. He came thundering in below the tops of the buildings then swept up over the roof of the Howard Johnson’s. Once he was over the hotel, Pitman fixed his searchlight on the Gravier cubicle but couldn’t see anyone. Saacks and the other police sharpshooters figured the sniper was either hiding just inside the stairwell or in one of the two alcoves on either side of the door. They opened fire.

During several passes over the cubicle, Saacks used his M-16 to cut gaps in the cinderblock walls. Although the policemen couldn’t find the sniper, he didn’t have any trouble finding them. Each time Pitman pulled away from the hotel, police officers in nearby buildings reported seeing the gunman run out of the cubicle and fire at the helicopter.

When the policemen ran out of ammo, Pitman had to set the Sea Knight down so they could get more. They made a second flight over the roof at about 7:30 p.m. Essex fired at the helicopter as Pitman made his approach, but again he vanished as the aircraft roared over the roof. The policemen in the back of the helicopter continued to blast away at the cubicle.

Soon, they needed to land again for more ammunition. Saacks had burned through the 1,000 rounds he’d brought from his house. As Pitman dropped away from the hotel, the sniper again popped out of his hole and started shooting at them. “It was obvious the helicopter was getting hit,” Saacks says. “You could feel the strikes.”

At 8:50 p.m., Pitman lifted off from behind City Hall for a third time. Reloaded, Saacks and the other officers were ready for another confrontation with the elusive sniper. On the approach to the hotel, the helicopter again took fire, but as they rose above the roof, the sniper had once more disappeared. Pitman hovered just over the rooftop and tried to hold his searchlight steady as the policemen fired into the Gravier Street cubicle.

Essex was in the back of the alcove on the right-hand side of the Gravier stairwell. A metal water pipe ran up along the back wall of the alcove. Each time the helicopter passed overhead, Essex shimmied to the top of the pipe and clung there. As they looked down onto the top of the cubicle, the marines and policemen inside the helicopter couldn’t see him. It was an almost perfect hiding spot.

As Saacks fired into the cubicle, trying to open even bigger holes in the cinderblock walls, he noticed that the water pipe at the back of the alcove was shaking. He stopped firing and tapped Officer Tom Casey on the shoulder. When Casey looked over, Saacks shouted above the roar of the engines, “I think he’s on the pipe.” Casey nodded that he understood, and Saacks said, “Put some fire on his ass to try to get him to drop.”

Saacks fired several rounds into the roof just outside the alcove. He was trying to skip them high up along the back wall near the pipe. One of the shots from the helicopter hit the water pipe and shattered it, sending a torrent of water down on top of the policemen in the Gravier stairwell.

In the cockpit of the helicopter, Pitman was aware that the policemen had discovered the sniper’s hiding place. He eased the big helicopter away from the roof as if he were pulling out. It was a high stakes game of cat and mouse.

With the pipe under him split open and the helicopter again flying away, Essex dropped to the floor of the alcove and picked up his rifle. He charged out onto the roof to fire another couple of parting shots at the retreating aircraft. Then the searchlight hit him.

After dropping away from the hotel, Pitman had reversed direction and slipped back over the building. He swept his searchlight across the roof. “I saw him come out of the dark,” Pitman says. The gunman was caught out in the open, 30 feet from the Gravier cubicle. The sniper snapped his rifle up to his shoulder. Pitman saw a flash and a red-hot ball rocketing up toward him. The gunmen’s round slammed into the transmission housing just above the cockpit. Pitman knew the helicopter had been hit. He didn’t know how badly or even how long they could stay in the air, but he held the big bird steady over the hotel as the policemen in the back adjusted their line of fire. They were 10 feet off the roof and less than 50 feet from the sniper.

“We were looking eyeball to eyeball at him,” Saacks says. With a fresh magazine in his M-16, Saacks opened fire. “I just walked the bullets right into him.”

When Pitman’s searchlight finally caught Essex out in the open, the elusive enemy that the police had been chasing for a week was finally exposed. Policemen who’d crouched for hours in open windows and on rooftops all around the Howard Johnson’s started shooting.

Mark Essex’s body convulsed beneath the fusillade of police bullets and collapsed onto the roof. His Ruger .44-caliber Magnum carbine lay beside him, broken into pieces by the hail of gunfire.

“He was hit a number of times,” recalls Pitman, in a bit of understatement. An autopsy later revealed Essex had been struck by more than 200 bullets.

Police later find ever inch of Essex’s apartment covered in anti-white graffiti.

Comments

  1. James James says:

    That would make a good movie. Coming 2016?

Leave a Reply