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It’s about 1 a.m. Sunday at the Waffle House on Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard in Houma, and the rush hasn’t hit yet.
A few workers sit on a parking lot curb, smoking cigarettes while they can, before their hands are too full with plates of eggs and hash browns capped or covered, smothered or chunked and sturdy cups of steaming fresh coffee to even think of the nicotine urge.
The parking area is mostly empty, except for two customer cars. And then there are the two white cruisers with the gold, star-shaped decals. The cars and the uniformed deputies who drove them there, Charles Cook and Kyle Dunning, are a new element in the social choreography of closing time on Sunday mornings in Houma. Paid by the restaurant to work this detail outside of their regular patrol hours, the two deputies are assigned to keep traffic moving in the parking lot, and help ward off trouble like the near-disaster that occurred one week before.
A proactive police presence – in part negotiated with Waffle House management – is how Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter is hoping to stem future acts of violence as all-night eateries fill up with revelers after bars close on Sunday mornings. Larpenter put his foot down after a Sept. 18 fracas in which two people suffered gunshot wounds in the Waffle House lot, as partiers filled its lot beyond capacity. Detectives have run into roadblocks in that investigation, primarily due to lack of cooperation from witnesses. But the probe continues.
“If there were no shootings and people were just going to eat it would be no problem,” Larpenter said of the directed patrol effort. In addition to the shooting in the lot, Larpenter and his upper ranks of supervisors were particularly distressed after video of the Sept. 18 crowd showed a man casually walking around with what appeared to be an assault rifle strapped to his back. “Some people don’t like each other and a lot of it has to do with drugs. The majority of people out there are good people, but you get the gang-bangers mixed in with the good people, and with the drugs you get people fighting over territory, and then you have guns drawn and shots fired and innocent people get hurt.”
At about 1 a.m. Saturday there were four customers inside the Waffle House, a sampling of the eclectic late-night potpourri such eateries are known for. In a corner booth, dressed in glittering formal wear, a young couple stole more time together after attending Terrebonne High School’s homecoming. Two casually-dressed women seated nearby gushed over the performance they had just seen given by Beyonce’ in New Orleans, sharing details of their concert experience with black-clad servers as they geared up for the rush.
It came at 2 a.m., right on schedule. Within minutes of that hour cars seeking spots in the restaurants compact lot spilled out onto MLK, as Cook and Dunning shooed away those that wouldn’t fit. Dressed in their Saturday night best, some partiers sought spaces in nearby lots of other businesses.
The two paid detail deputies were backed up by roving patrols who kept after-parties from blossoming in the lots of closed businesses on Houma’s MLK commercial strip. Some potential diners, viewing the parked patrol cars, didn’t try at all, but made U-turns and headed for the IHOP further up MLK. Among them was a small fleet of muscle-cars – maybe eight in all – who turned one after another and converged on the Target parking lot. Hard-pressed tires emitted Valkyrie shrieks and plumes of white smoke that clung to water droplets in the air, giving the flashing blue lights of responding police cars a surreal appearance. There was nothing surreal about the firm order to disperse, which was immediately heeded.
Both front and back lots of the IHOP rapidly filled, and a deputy with his canine partner waded through the overflow. Nothing aroused the dog, and relations between cops and the crowd appeared cordial.
One by one the patrol cars peeled off from the exercise of monitoring the crowds, called to assignments in other parts of Terrebonne Parish.
Larpenter considers the show of force a success, though he is not certain how long it will stave off future violence.
“It will happen again,” Larpenter said, noting that he can’t indefinitely commit scarce patrol resources to one hub of a parish whose geography features remote bayou communities cut off from each other by marsh and swamp. “It takes a lot of manpower to do this when at that hour of the morning people should be home. It will go well until people move to another spot we don’t know about. Waffle House is not going to pay for the detail there forever. Hopefully people will just go to places to eat and then go home.” •
