No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

This story is somewhat disheartening.

Katrina rescuer is sued by boat owner

A Broadmoor man who said he rescued more than 200 residents after commandeering a boat during the flood after Hurricane Katrina is being sued by the boat’s owner for taking it “without receiving permission.”

Mark Morice, who by the Wednesday after the storm said he “couldn’t get more than a block or two without people screaming to me for help,” took the boat “out of necessity. . . . I did it for my neighbors.”

Among them was Irving Gordon, a 93-year-old dialysis patient who Morice carried from his flooded home, placed in the boat and rescued from distress.

“I don’t know where we would be today if it weren’t for him,” Molly Gordon, Gordon’s wife of 65 years, said Friday.

The lawsuit contends that boat owner John M. Lyons Jr. suffered his own distress, in the form of “grief, mental anguish, embarrassment and suffering . . . due to the removal of the boat,” as well as its replacement costs.

E. Ronald Mills, Lyons’ Metairie lawyer, who filed the suit in 24th Judicial District Court in Jefferson Parish earlier this month, on Friday accused Morice of “hubris.”

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