Isame Faciane’s Katrina nightmare: destruction, tragedy before redemption

The sleeve tattoo that covers most of the left arm of Isame Faciane is a grizzly mural and a daily reminder of everything he and his family endured nearly a decade ago.

A flooded graveyard. An upside-down house. A submerged car. A truck stuck in a tree. His grandmother’s old house, the one he grew up in, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Lake Ponchatrain Drive, the artery of the area Faciane grew up in and the one that suffered some of the worst damage of the storm. And lastly, a symbol of Mardi Gras, symbolizing the outsiders not from New Orleans who hadn’t gone through what he went through.

“That was just a reminder to never forget where I came from and what I went through,” Faciane said.

The tattoo sums up Faciane’s course in the aftermath of Katrina, which was the first domino of a series of life-changing events in 2005 that he believes led him to where he is now — a circuitous route that started with heartache, took a turn for the worse but one that has come, Faciane said, full circle toward redemption.

The name Isame comes from the ancient Quran, meaning “connection,” “bond,” and “promise,” derived from the Islamic word “refuge,” and though it appears many times throughout the holy book, one famous mention tells the story of Noah warning his world of impending doom with the great flood to come.

[But] he said, “I will take refuge on a mountain to protect me from the water.” [Noah] said, “There is no protector [refuge] today from the decree of Allah , except for whom He gives mercy.” And the waves came between them, and he was among the drowned. (Quran 11:43)

The Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman is fighting to preserve a career playing football now, but he wonders if he even would be in this position had that storm in the late summer of 2005 not ripped its way through the Slidell neighborhood he only knew as home. He found himself as a modern-day Noah trying to salvage his life and that of his family amid disaster, asking why him, why then … just why.

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Living in his grandparents’ house — the same one his grandmother, Dolores Beard, grew up in when she was young — Faciane, then in eighth grade, remembers coming home from a Friday night jamboree at his school to find his grandfather, Ellis, not liking what his sixth sense was telling him.

“He said, ‘Man, we should get out of here. This storm is going to be serious,’” Faciane said. “It looked like every other storm that had blown through there, and my grandmother said, ‘Nah, we’re staying.’”

But by the following day, they had changed plans and started heading to Jacksonville, where Faciane’s uncle lived. The problem: The interstate was backed up all the way from Mississippi, and there was no chance to get out.

By 2 a.m. Sunday morning, Aug. 28, 2005, the torrential wind and rain knocking out the power in the Slidell area became too forceful to ignore. Faciane, his sister and his grandparents — who had been his caretakers since he was three months old — woke up to find out that the hotel across the street from the one they were staying at had been blown down completely.

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Cell phones were down. Power remained out. But the storm had passed, the water had receded and the family started to make its way back to the house. After checking on family members across town, finding out everyone was still alive, the reality was that very little else around them was spared. On the five-mile walk home, Faciane said that the destruction made Slidell look like a third-world disaster zone.

“Mud everywhere. Ditches dug up that hadn’t been there before. The roads littered with trash and furniture. Cars trashed,” he said.

And when they finally got to his grandmother’s house, the water had reached six feet, five inches — one inch taller than Faciane would eventually grow to be as an adult — up the walls, destroying everything inside.

“We lost everything,” he said. “That house was the one my grandmother grew up in when she was a kid. It was an old house, and it meant a lot to her.”

They cleaned everything out, all the ruined furniture, family pictures, all their clothes and possessions, and rolled out tarps on the floor, ran space heaters, tried to insulate the walls as best they could as the weather grew colder that fall and slept on air mattresses.

Then, not even a month after Katrina hit, Ellis Beard’s behavior had started to change bizarrely. Worried about his health, the family ordered him to see a doctor. A CAT scan revealed that Beard had a brain tumor, and though the 13-year-old Faciane didn’t know it at the time, his grandfather was given two to six months to live after brain surgery.

“I was just numb,” Faciane said. “I didn’t know what to feel. It was just so hard, and [there was] no sign of relief. My grandfather did everything for me and everything with me before that. Before Katrina, he was my rock. Then he and our lives were being taken from us.

“It took a lot out of me.”

The family would live in that squalor, with the head of their household on borrowed time, until a silver-lining Christmas gift arrived in late December: a FEMA trailer for them to move into.

But Beard suffered multiple seizures, lost his mental clarity and kept taking more turns for the worse as the family just tried to clutch to anything they had. Hope was rare. Money was even more scarce. And the man who had done so much for everyone else now had to be taken care of himself. Ellis Beard lasted an incredible two years after his brain surgery before dying.

Faciane had to grow up overnight, but he admitted that his outlet was to act out in school as a release to the enormous pressure that had built up in his fractured life.

“At home, I had a lot of responsibilities, so I started getting into a lot of not good things at school. School was my free time,” Faciane said. “But the only reason I started taking things seriously was when my [high school] football coach threatened to take football from me. If I had lost football, with everything else I already had lost over those two years, I wouldn’t have had anything left.”

In the Quran, the Noah story is meant to convey that each person is responsible for the consequences of their actions. Although Faciane wasn’t following a religious roadmap, nor did he know the root of his name or the Noah story, he subconsciously got back on the right path, earning a scholarship at Florida International and eventually ranking sixth in school history in tackles for loss (26) over his four seasons as a defensive lineman.

In his final year at FIU, Faciane was coached by Andre Patterson, who later joined the staff of the Vikings and convinced them to give Faciane a shot after he went undrafted in 2014. It was the lifeline Faciane needed.

Although he was cut at the end of training camp last season, he spent the year on the Vikings’ practice squad. After switching positions — from D-line to O-line, which he hadn’t played since high school — this offseason, Faciane has been uprooted again in his quest to earn his foothold in the NFL. Unexpected change is nothing new for Faciane.

“It takes a lot more thinking, a lot more to learn and process, to play offensive line,” he said. “I’m getting more comfortable with it every day. It’s still unnatural to me.

“But it’s not like I haven’t been challenged before in an uncomfortable way.”

And when times are tough, Faciane said, he’ll give a quick glance down at his arm depicting the madness and horror of 10 years ago. It’s both his steadying beacon and his source of strength.

“It made my spirit stronger. It made my heart stronger. I didn’t want the responsibility at first at such a young age, but I had no choice,” he said. “I was forced into it, and it made me grow up a lot sooner than I thought I had to. It matured me real quick.

“That tattoo represents everything we went through, everything I went through, and it lets me know there isn’t anything I can’t withstand.”

Still to this day Katrina is with Faciane, and it’s more than just a tattoo.

“It’s almost an everyday thing,” he said. “Little things will remind me of that time. Anytime the wind blows hard or the rain starts pouring down, you can’t help but be reminded. It never leaves you.”

The connection bond — just as his Islamic name would suggest — between Faciane and Dolores Beard remains strong, and he visits her whenever he cane. She was the one who taught him growing up how to cook, a skill Faciane is quite proud of (“Oh, I can throw down in the kitchen,” he said), and it’s the kind of skill he thinks he can lean back on when his playing days are over.

Maybe, he mused, Faciane will even open a restaurant one day in his old Slidell neighborhood, as just another sign that his community — and he — have come a long way in a decade.

“I’m doing everything I can to make a name for myself and make her proud,” he said.

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm