“One of the interns washed my eyes out first,” Roden remembers. “They were smarting and there must have been some powder residue in them. There were powder burns on the skin of my back, burns that had gone through my coat, my shirt, and my undershirt. These were cleaned and swabbed with antiseptic. But it was not until several weeks later, after a place on my back kept festering, that I went to my family doctor in Baton Rouge, and he finally removed a small fragment of the copper jacketing of a bullet, from where it had lodged just under the skin.
“After the interns finished with me, Ty went to the Istrouma Hotel and brought me back some clothes, and I changed in the hospital. After that we went back to the capitol with General Guerre, who took me to the office of the governor’s executive counsel where General Ray Fleming, head of the National Guard, had set up his headquarters, and we talked nearly an hour or so, with me telling all I could recall. From there I went to my quarters and to bed.”
When he returned to the capitol with Roden, General Guerre had the State House hallways cleared.
“Once I satisfied myself that the Senator had been taken to the hospital and was in the hands of physicians,” he explains, “I gave orders to my men to clear the capitol’s lower floor as quickly as possible, and allow no one else to come in without special authorization from me. I put officers in charge to see that the body of the assassin was not touched until the coroner got there. Even Dr. Bird did not know who the man was till they removed his wallet and saw his identification there.”
Unaware of what had taken place in Baton Rouge, Earle Christenberry reached his New Orleans home shortly after 9:30, having driven in from the capitol without special haste. His neighbors, seeing the car turn into the Christenberry driveway, flung open a window and told him someone in Baton Rouge was trying to get in touch with him. His phone had not answered, whereupon the caller secured from the telephone company the number of the adjoining house, asking that when Earle arrived he be requested to call back immediately.
Then, adding a bit of news they had heard a short time earlier over the radio, they told him Huey Long had been shot.
Christenberry did not pause to call Baton Rouge. Without leaving his car, he backed out of the driveway and headed for the capitol. He made but one stop en route. That was at Lousteau’s combination sandwich counter and automobile agency, where the Airline Highway cut across the government’s newly completed Bonnet Carre Spillway over a bridge a mile and an eighth long, spanning the dry channel through which the Mississippi River’s flood waters could be diverted into Lake Pontchartrain. Final inspection of the structure had not yet been made; hence it was not open to general traffic. Wooden highway barriers blocked entry to it.
However, Christenberry directed the highway patrolman on duty there to open the barriers for him, since this would save at least six miles on the road to Baton Rouge. After ascertaining that Mrs. Long and the three children had not yet passed this point, he instructed the motorcycle man to remain on watch for their car, and open the barrier to let it pass over the bridge too.
Approximately seventy minutes after leaving his home, he parked at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium.
Earlier that afternoon, in New Orleans, General Ray Fleming, Adjutant General of Louisiana, had taken part at Jackson Barracks in a polo game between teams representing the 108th Cavalry and the famed Washington Artillery. During one of the late chuckers a hard-hit ball had banged against the General’s left foot, inflicting an injury not in itself serious, but so painful that before retiring for the night he borrowed a pair of crutches from the post infirmary and secured a left shoe he could cut to accommodate the swelling which had followed the mishap.