Lakewood Office Space

“That’s when me and my sister went out looting,” Jemison says, voice cracking. “It was the only way for us to get food and water.” She cannot talk about this part without tears.

“We were walking through that water, seeing dead animals and at least one dead man. I was crying. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own eyes.”

The stench was intensifying, and reports of violence were spreading.

“I knew people were fighting over food, killing even,” Jemison recalls. “Looters were getting shot.”

Her 16-year-old brother, Chris, learned that the hard way. He told his sisters to stay inside. It was too dangerous in the streets for the girls. Chris joined others at a nearby store pillaging for food and supplies when a man who he believes was the shop owner opened fire.

“He was running away when the guy shot him in the leg,” Jemison says. She says Chris was rescued by helicopter from rising waters and wound up in a Dallas shelter.

He told people it was a cut on his leg, she says, because he was ashamed and scared to admit he had been shot while looting.

Back inside the apartment, over a small transistor radio, broadcasters instructed the stranded to place a white flag in a window to signal rescuers.

“We hung a white shirt, and they came,” Jemison says.

She climbed from the balcony into a tiny basket attached to a rope dangling from the helicopter. “They pulled us up, one by one, and when we asked them where we were going they said, ‘We don’t know.’”

The helicopter deposited the women on a stretch of sun-soaked land near the airport.

After a lengthy wait, they boarded a bus to a shelter at a military base in Fort Chase, Ark.

“There, it was a mess,” Jemison says. “Hundreds of people in this big room. There was a guy on the cot next to me holding a big gun. I was so scared. I did not sleep the whole time there.”

They reached a family member who had spoken to Chris — he was alive.

Jemison’s mom used a small amount of salvaged money on bus fare to Dallas, where altruistic strangers from a local church helped them find her brother.

They lived several weeks in the pop-up shelter. Dedicated volunteers there helped them secure a Lake Highlands-area apartment, funded in part by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

She entered 10th grade at LHHS and school brought a new set of troubles.

For one thing, Jemison had been wearing the same clothing for weeks. “I wore the same thing every day to school and, you know how kids can be, they said negative things.”

LHHS students teased Katrina evacuees and told them to “swim back to where you came from,” she says.

Katrina students were easily baited, says Jemison, because they were hurting, vulnerable and ready to snap back.

The dynamic led to fights and that big brawl between groups of students; Jemison remembers staffers locking the Katrina students in a foyer until things calmed down.

“They treated us like animals, some of them,” she says.

But for every hateful interaction there was a loving one. One Lake Highlands resident took Jemison and her siblings shopping for a new wardrobe. Others donated school supplies and toiletries.

Over time, many of the unwelcoming or aggressive Lake Highlands students got to know their new classmates and grew more sympathetic, Jemison believes.

She battled cultural and academic shock and a lengthy period of depression. But by senior year she was so popular her peers voted her 2008 homecoming queen.

“Yeah,” she says, “I guess that was progress.”

Today she works at a Richardson company called OneExchange and is an aspiring actress who has landed notable roles.

In “Treme,” an HBO show about her old neighborhood, Jemison played a bystander at a parade that erupts in violence.

She played a gang member in the movie “Get Hard” starring Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell. Most recently she had a nonspeaking part in “Hot Tub Time Machine 2.”

Because she survived Katrina during her formative years, she says, the event shaped the way she sees everything.

“Katrina made me real humble. When you have everything taken, you can’t help but get humble. I understand now that you can have everything taken from you at any time.”