"I'm starting to think that he [Mayor Nagin] might ought to be charged with negligent homicide."
I'm afraid Nagin is going to have to answer to a criminal court for his neglect on two fronts: 1) why he didn't ENFORCE the mandatory evacuation order; and 2) why he didn't marshal the school buses to get those out of there who didn't have the means to evacuate.
As far as I can tell, Bush made one and only one mistake in this debacle - he trusted the Governor and the Mayor to do their jobs.
What was that line in Animal House, "You F'd up, you trusted us."
This adds credence to the statement "Trust in God, question ALL others".
There was a huge fleet of city buses in addition to the school buses. The city buses would have held a lot of people.
The President called him and advised him to issue an evacuation order. The governor of Louisiana mentioned publicly the president's call. In the Mayor's own words later he said "we may have a mandatory evacuation order by morning." The director of the National Hurricane Center called him as well pleading with him to issue the order. The Mayor said earlier that he was worried about the legality of issuing a mandatory evacuation order. You can imagine what the President's response would be if the Mayor mentioned legal hurdles during their phone call.