Staff Photo by Dan Henry/Chattanooga Times Free Press
Jahmal Burroughs, a UTC basketball player, survived Katrina by living on and under a bridge.Jahmal Burroughs saw two options – steal or die.
Many others in his situation from the Upper 9th Ward in New Orleans would have made the same choice.
But he was just a sophomore in high school, wading through knee-high water to get essential food and drinking water for himself, his best friend, that friend’s sister and her newborn baby.
They all resided for four days atop the highest point in their neighborhood – a four-lane bridge.
“We survived because we had to loot to survive,” said Burroughs, a junior basketball player for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “We had to find bread, canned goods, anything that was still good in the supermarket. We used that to survive.”