“I wasn’t leaving,” said Lucien Mitchell, 40, who stayed behind in New Orleans for nearly a week caring for 22 carriage horses and mules after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city, destroying structures and lives, and leaving water that overwhelmed levees and produced catastrophic flooding. “If you love animals like I love animals, you’d stick with it, too. We did what we had to do to save them.”

Mitchell is a hero to many horse owners and enthusiasts after he overcame dangerous conditions to save as many of the horses and mules that he could from Charbonnet Mid-City Carriage Company last week. Twenty-seven of the animals were evacuated prior to the storm coming and the waters rising. But before the trailers could get back, 22 animals ended up stranded in chest-high water, and Mitchell and Darnell Stewart, 34, another Charbonnet employee, weren’t going to let the horses perish.

“We got them out right after the storm and kept them in the walls of the stable,” said Mitchell. On Tuesday night, Aug. 30, after realizing how rapidly the water was rising after the levee broke, Mitchell and Stewart began moving the horses out to higher ground at a nearby park, sometimes swimming along with the horses in the rapidly rising water.

“After the storm passed, the water was up, and we were hauling animals, one at a time, in chest-high water to the park. He’s short, I’m short…it was really rough,” said Mitchell. “It took us hours–a couple of them stayed in the stalls because they were the biggest horses–they are Percherons–until the next day. Darnell’s personal horse, (Brandy, a tobiano Paint that had been moved to Charbonnet from another stable before Katrina to be evacuated with the others), was also left in the barn, so we turned him loose (into the courtyard)