Corpus Christi Caller-Times (Resgistration hassle required.):
Deborah and David Cole still wake up in terror more than a week after being forced from their New Orleans home.
Visions of floodwaters rising against their trembling bodies mark their already restless sleep.
"I wake up and see water all over the floor," David Cole said. "You have to actually put your foot on the floor to make sure."
The couple and six other family members have called Ben Garza Gym home the past five days.
After receiving what they say was less-than-cordial treatment from the U.S. marshals who forced them from their home, the Coles were happy to be back together in Texas.
They thought they'd be able to ride out the storm, so they didn't evacuate before Hurricane Katrina hit.
Deborah Cole said the marshals forced her 88-year-old grandmother out of the house in her bathrobe and loaded her elderly aunts into boats that transported all the women to a makeshift landing pad where a helicopter whisked them away. David was left behind with a promise that authorities would return soon.
"I didn't know what to do," Deborah Cole said. "I was just so hurt."
David Cole was hurting, too. He spent hours waiting anxiously for information on where authorities had taken his family.
It wasn't long before he too was on a flight out of his
hometown.
But David Cole's plane did not land in Texas, as he had hoped. Instead he and other evacuees were taken to Phoenix. Three days later, on Tuesday, David caught a flight to Corpus Christi.
Deborah, her grandmother and her aunts, made their way to Ben Garza Gym on Saturday. It wasn't long before Deborah was able to contact David. Her son and two grandchildren joined her on Tuesday after being evacuated to Houston. She expects her daughter and another grandchild, who were evacuated to Fort Worth, to join the family in the next few days.
She and her husband say they will never return to New Orleans. The family is looking forward to a new beginning in Cincinnati, where Deborah expects to find work at the restaurant chain where she worked in New Orleans.
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