Black residents were rescued during Hurricane Ian — then Florida officials dumped them in a parking garage
Black Naples residents trying to evacuate their flooded homes say they were left by the city to fend for themselves in a parking garage while Ian raged.
NAPLES, Fla. — As Hurricane Ian sloshed through the Sunshine State in late September, Curtis Williams was out in the storm, moving neighbors' cars to higher ground at a gas station in his South Florida community when the water started rising.
And all of a sudden, he said, it surged.
What had been knee-high water was now a sucking, waist-high flood. He and some of his neighbors pushed a final few vehicles to a resting place at a gas station and 7-Eleven combo in Naples, then walked to collect anybody left in the neighborhood.
They needed to evacuate.
Williams said he and about 20 or 30 other residents of River Park — a predominantly Black neighborhood in Naples — walked back to the 7-Eleven, a block or so away, and called 911.
There they waited.
They waited outside two-and-a-half hours for help, while the hurricane made landfall, beating structures with wins as high as 150 mph and flooding Naples with more than 7 feet of storm surge. The water steadily grew higher.
When first responders arrived in a high-water rescue vehicle, spiriting residents out of the waist-deep water, they didn't take the evacuees to a shelter. Instead, they dropped them in a Dillard's parking garage more than a mile away.
They were told to fend for themselves.
Williams said he was shocked and dismayed at the treatment residents of the historic African-American neighborhood received that day.
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"What is that?" he asked the day after the storm. "The city don't give a hoot about this community. It's bad."
Collier County NAACP President Vincent Keeys said he would have expected the first responders to drop evacuees at a shelter. If not, he said, he expected someone would follow up with supplies and help.
"It was without mindful compassion for human life," Keeys said. "Because anything could have happened to them."
Naples officials did not respond to repeated attempts for answers to why the residents were taken to a parking garage instead of a shelter and whether any other residents had been dropped at the same spot.
The city says North Collier Fire Rescue was called on to help it accomplish its goal – get the River Park residents to higher ground – and that the hurricane prevented its own first responders from helping residents further while the storm raged on. Questions to Naples Mayor Teresa Heitmann and the city council also went unanswered. Heitmann referred questions to the Naples Police Department. Public information officer Lt. Bryan McGinn said the department could not comment on the River Park evacuations since they were not the responding party.
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River Park is a small neighborhood consisting of about 70 single-family homes on riverfront property, a park, a church, and a small apartment complex. Most residents are Black; many have lived in the neighborhood since its inception in the 1970s.
The morning of the hurricane, Williams' wife, daughter and grandchildren left with his son when the water began rising, he said. He and his son-in-law stayed behind, wanting to help people who wouldn't or couldn't evacuate just yet.
Sometime that morning, he said, they got a call via landline telling them to evacuate, which he thought to only be a partial measure.
"How many people you know have landlines?" he asked.
"If they were sincere about it, they should have sent the police down to the neighborhood," Williams said. "Everybody wants to pacify the truth of what happened, but it was a mess-up. Own up to it."
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After the group gathered at the 7-Eleven and called for help, North Collier firefighters arrived. They piled evacuees in the back of their high-water trucks and drove them about a mile-and-a-half north to the Dillard's parking garage at the Coastland Center mall, where flooding had yet to happen. There, the firefighters dropped the residents off and told them to find rides to safety.
Soon, they said, it would be flooded, too, Williams recalled. "They told us we had to leave before it got worse.
"They should have taken us to a shelter," Williams said. Instead, he said, about 20 or 30 people milled about the parking garage, calling family and friend for rides while trying to get warm.
"The wind was blowing, and we was cold and wet from walking in the water," he said. The fact that they were evacuated from the 7-Eleven in an open truck bed didn't help matters, he added.
Williams estimated he was at the mall parking garage for about two hours before he was ready to leave with his son. He could have left earlier, but he wanted to make sure everyone got out safely.
A few people stayed and slept on the floor, cold and wet, he said.
"They didn't have no place to go."
In past hurricanes, Williams said, the mall has been used as a relay center that helps residents get to a shelter or some other safe place. This time, there was nothing, even though Williams said rescue personnel said they'd been instructed to drop them at the mall. He did not know who told them to do so.
While the city confirmed Williams' account of events, a document provided by public information officer Monique Barnhart also listed dozens of instances in which the city provided help to the residents of River Park post-Ian.
"As numerous people in the area were trapped; the goal was to get everyone to safety and high ground," Barnhart said.
According to Barnhart, wind and rain began to batter Southwest Florida's shores Sept. 27, and Collier County issued a mandatory evacuation at 4:21 p.m. for the area that includes River Park.
After this article published, the fire chief for North Collier Fire Rescue admitted that his first responders left Black evacuees in the garage while the storm raged, but he stressed race had nothing to do with the decision.
Chief Eloy Ricardo said that is standard protocol in an emergency: first responders have to prioritize saving as many lives as possible, which can mean simply moving evacuees out of danger. Additionally, he said, race isn't information that is conveyed to first responders during 911 calls.
"During the storm, we had multiple calls that had to be triaged and put into hold," Ricardo said. "We had people going into their attics, people on top of their cars. ... We had people that the water was rushing in, and we got saturated (with) calls. So we had to listen, triage and try to get to the calls that we could."
Naples followed with a mandatory evacuation notice just over an hour later, at 5:35 p.m., sent via various methods: email, Code Red, text, Fire-Rescue App, social media and press releases to all media outlets and neighborhoods.
The county opened its shelter doors at 5 p.m. on Sept. 27. According to county evacuation announcements provided to the Naples Daily News, part of the Paste BN Network, seven different shelters opened; four allowed animals.
"The City of Naples first responders did not go door to door in any neighborhood in the City of Naples," Barnhart said.
During the storm, a fire station in the city flooded, leaving a fire truck unable to respond. With police and firefighters trapped by the rising waters, North Collier Fire Rescue responded to the call in place of Naples responders. North Collier Fire Rescue drove three high-water rescue vehicle loads of River Park evacuees to high ground at Coastland Center, Barnhart confirmed.
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Williams's house was on level ground, just a few feet from the Gordon River, which typically lies, quiet and restful, next to their backyard. But during the hurricane, the water reached waist height, the river overflowing its banks right into his home.
Retired Collier County NAACP President Harold Weeks shared photos with the Naples Daily News, as the evacuation was taking place that showed the extent of the flooding in River Park and the lives it endangered.
For those lucky enough to have a raised home, water lapped at the base of residents' porches. The streets and lawns were completely submerged.
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In another photo, residents evacuating stood in the street, looking over their shoulders. The water came up to their waists.
One day after evacuating, Williams was back home. He sat in his front yard, surrounded by nearly everything that his home had once contained. He sipped from a bottle of water, taking a break from emptying out the house. His family carried on around him.
His entire front yard was full; a peek inside the door showed very little was left in the house. It seemed nothing had gone untouched by the dangerous, unsanitary stormwater.
'They don't seem to care about this community'
Williams said he was hurt and angry at the treatment he'd received, saying the manner of evacuation reaffirmed his feeling that Naples doesn't care about the Black community living within its borders.
"They don't seem to care about this community," he said. "I can fend for myself, but what about the people that can't? That's what gets me. People talk about how lovely Naples is. Lovely Naples. But they don't talk about this section, here."
Naples’ African-American community has been shuffled around Naples for decades, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood. In River Park, these families have found a home for the past 50 years or so. African-Americans who moved to the area were originally only allowed to live in Port Royal’s Ditch Bank, named for the depression in the land where a Seminole canal used to run.
However, after the depression was fully filled in with sand and shell, the land became valuable, and was rezoned for white people. Around 1950, the African-American community was made to move to McDonald's Quarters, which had been built specifically to house Black people.
A 1949 Collier County News article preserved by the Collier County Museum notes that Fort Myers contractor J.C. McDonald estimates each unit would cost $3,000 to build.
However, by 1979, living conditions in McDonald's Quarters were so poor, a judge condemned the community as a slum. Many residents moved to River Park East, a riverfront community where they could purchase homes with as little as $300 down and a regular monthly payment.
In recent years, the area has seen many African-American residents begin to sell, however, as housing prices have surged so much that homeowners can get more than half a million for their houses -- or, more accurately, for the riverfront land they sit on.
After Ian, Williams worried more of his neighbors would sell their homes and leave the area, shrinking the last majority-Black neighborhood in Naples even further.
A month after the storm made landfall, though, Williams's perspective had changed somewhat. The city of Naples had fed, watered and helped shelter residents in River Park regularly, and sentiment was shifting.
"I think they could have done better before the storm," he said. "But since the storm, they've been real helpful. I'm just hoping this is a learning lesson, that they help people get to shelter instead of getting dumped at the mall."
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After the storm, Naples city officials worked in the community to help those displaced and impacted by the storm, Barnhart said.
Responders from the city assessed debris pickup needs, provided hot meals and ice over the next few days, began removing debris, went door to door to determine who needed shelter, placed an electronic message board at the entrance to River Park East with a boil water notice, supplied bedding, arranged for families in need to be transported to a shelter, helped distribute cleaning supplies, and more.
Barnhart also noted Naples opened a comfort center in nearby River Park West, where residents could rest, enjoy air conditioning, recharge their laptops or cell phones and pick up ice.
"While we are very grateful for the city, police and fire department's goodwill, and coordination and collaboration, we only wish that they would have had more preparation than to have dumped (residents) at the mall, especially after such a traumatizing experience in the storm," the NAACP's Keeys said.
Keeys said he would like to see the city provide its Emergency Preparedness Plan to the NAACP so the organization can collaborate and make suggestions to prevent a portion of its residents from feeling "dejected, or like second-class citizens.
"I would hope that there was no malicious intent," Keeys continued. "But I was shocked to hear they were just left there. I just expected more.
"Out of this disaster, we need to work together to make improvements," Keeys said.
He believes together, they can do better.
Kate Cimini is an investigative journalist covering Florida. Share your story at kcimini@gannett.com.