NEW ORLEANS -- Residents of the Bell Artspace apartment complex in Treme woke up to a harrowing scene Tuesday outside of their windows: A man in the courtyard wildly shooting a handgun.
Jazz Johnson and her husband Ludovico Zucconi were the first people to call 9-1-1 as they nervously watched the gunman – dressed in khaki military-style clothing and using a walker – from their third-floor balcony.
“He's pointing a pistol,” Johnson can be heard saying on a cell phone video. “It's a little handgun. This is crazy.”
It was just after 6:30 a.m. when bullets started flying.
“I recorded it and he called 9-1-1,” Johnson said. “And the neighbors on my floor, they called 9-1-1. And then we heard the shots.”
Despite the gunfire, Johnson stayed on the line and calmly provided the gunman's description.
“He's shooting. He's a white man. Beard. He has a backpack,” Johnson told the operator.
A car parked in the complex was damaged by at least eight bullets that pierced the front windshield and was later towed away by police as evidence.
Police officers responded in about four minutes and arrested the gunman without resistance. Johnson’s video shows the man raising his arms in the air as the officers gradually approach and surround him.
Michael Foster, 35, was booked with illegal use of a weapon, illegal carrying of a weapon, and criminal damage to property, arrest records show.
Nobody was hurt in the incident, but alarmed residents said things could have ended much differently.
“I was really afraid that somebody would get shot and killed by his stupidity,” Johnson said.
Zucconi, from Italy, commended the officers for keeping their cool in a tense situation. But he wondered aloud what might have changed the dynamics.
“If it would have been a person with black skin, it would have been a different kind of processing,” Zucconi said.
Foster remained in custody Wednesday after a magistrate judge set bail at $15,000.
Foster’s arrest record in New Orleans shows he was arrested in 2015 for being a felon in possession of a firearm, but that charge was refused by the district attorney’s office.