Terrible Thunder: The Story of the New Orleans Sniper (Revised)

When Terror Came to New Orleans: A City Under Siege

On New Year's Eve 1972, Mark James Robert Essex, a 23-year-old former Navy seaman, began a calculated assault on the New Orleans police that would leave nine dead, ten wounded, and a city forever changed. What drove this quiet young man from small-town Kansas to wage a one-man war against an entire police force?

Peter Hernon, who covered the siege as an Associated Press reporter, spent over a year investigating this shocking story. Through extensive interviews and previously unpublished material, he reconstructs both the terrifying 11-hour hotel siege and the tragic transformation of Mark Essex--from a "happy-go-lucky" youth in Emporia, Kansas, to an embittered gunman consumed by rage.

The book alternates between the chaos of that January week--when hundreds of police officers, Marine helicopters, and volunteer gunmen battled a lone sniper while the Howard Johnson hotel burned around him--and Essex's journey through systematic racism in the U.S. Navy that left him, in Hernon's words, "a casualty of history."

This is more than a true crime narrative. It's a powerful examination of how persistent injustice can transform an ordinary person into an instrument of violence, and a sobering meditation on alienation in America. As The New York Times noted, Hernon's account "reads as fluently as a novel" while raising profound questions about society's responsibility for those it pushes to the breaking point.

A meticulously researched, compellingly written account of one of the most violent attacks on police in American history--and the broken system that created a killer.