The Houdini Suicide

What’s going on in southern Louisiana?

Photo: Jimmy Emerson, DVM

This is rough reading, but required.

The police said that Victor White III, while detained in the back seat of a locked police car, his hands shackled behind his back, had committed suicide by shooting himself in the back with a handgun that an officer had not found during an earlier search. New Iberia, a small city surrounded by sugar cane 100 miles west of New Orleans, is bisected by railroad tracks. North of the tracks, where residents are predominantly white, most believed that Victor White III committed suicide. In the largely black neighborhoods south of the tracks, most residents shared the Whites’ conviction that their son was executed by the cops. In the months of heartbreak and rage that followed, New Iberians tended to believe the official account of the “Houdini suicide” to the extent that they approved of the performance of Louis Ackal, the sheriff of Iberia Parish.

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