Shortly after the hurricane ravaged New Orleans in 2005, the man, Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., 55, fired a shotgun at the three men because they were black and entered the neighborhood in which he lived, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana said in a news release.

The men, who were all injured in the shooting, had been trying to reach a ferry landing that state and federal agencies were using as an evacuation site.

According to court documents filed alongside the defendant’s plea agreement in October, Bourgeois and other white men who lived nearby decided to forcibly prevent people they called “outsiders” — including black residents — from entering the neighborhood of Algiers Point, which borders the Mississippi River. The white men used fallen trees to barricade the streets near their homes and patrolled the streets with guns, the documents said.

One day at the beginning of September, the three black men crossed the barricade on their way to the ferry landing, prompting Bourgeois to open fire. After the men fled, Bourgeois bragged that he had “got one” and promised to kill the man, referring to him with a racial slur, according to the court documents.

Bourgeois also told a neighbor, “Anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot,” the documents said. One of the men was struck in the neck and back, while the other two were hit in the arms, back and legs.

The court documents said Bourgeois showed others a baseball cap with blood on it that had fallen from the head of one of the injured men.

Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 storm, killed more than 1,800 people and left much of New Orleans in ruins. In the days after the hurricane, a narrative based on rumors emerged, in many cases blaming poor black residents and looters for the chaos and violence. But in the months and years since, the fuller picture of the aftermath involved white vigilante violence, police killings and official cover-ups.

“Hurricane Katrina was a tragic chapter in the history of our city,” Peter G. Strasser, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, said in the news release. “Hopefully this plea brings some measure of finality to those directly affected by this crime and to this great city that endured so much in the days following this calamity.”

When Bourgeois was indicted in 2010, he claimed that he shot at the men because he suspected them of looting. He later admitted in court documents that they were not looting and did not pose any threat to him at the time.

Bourgeois’ lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday evening.

Federal prosecutors said the court proceedings took a particularly long time — nearly nine years since the initial indictment — because Bourgeois was repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial. His competency has been evaluated six times since 2010, and he was eventually declared competent in 2018.

In 2010, federal prosecutors charged Bourgeois with five felony counts, and the maximum penalty was life in prison. As the time of the plea agreement, prosecutors dismissed the original indictment, and in October, Bourgeois pleaded guilty to two of the counts: interference with the rights of the men he targeted and use of a firearm during a violent crime.

He was sentenced to five years in prison for each of the two counts, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman. He was also sentenced to five years of supervised release.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.