John Keller was hanging out in his apartment at the American Can Company on the Wednesday after Hurricane Katrina when he heard an explosive noise at his door—slow and rhythmic.

“Boom! Boom! Boom!” is the way he recalls it.

Somebody, he figured, was trying to kick down his door.

Keller’s instinct was to outsmart the intruder. So he got the timing down and then, just as the next kick was about to fall, he flung open the door. A young man about 25 years old came staggering through it, followed by two others. They were people from the neighborhood who had been in the building for a couple of days by then, people who came to seek refuge and wound up stuck in the place.

“He fell in my door and hit the floor, ” Keller says. “Rabble-rousers, kicking down doors to get what they could get, ready to seize control.

“I marched them out of the building and told them to stay out. I followed them out to the gate. I didn’t care if they couldn’t swim.”

That moment was a turning point for Keller.

It was then he began to emerge as the man in charge at the Can Company, a solid, five-story building that normally houses about 500 mixed-income residents, many of them elderly or handicapped.
Isolated by the water that rose 11 feet and crept into the lobby the day after the storm, the building became a tiny kingdom unto itself on Orleans Avenue in Mid-City. For five days, Keller was its undisputed monarch.
- Ex-Marine John Keller shepherded hundreds to safety following Katrina