Stories

The Boston Globe

June 1, 2006

By Keith O'Brien
Globe Correspondent

NEW ORLEANS -- Terron "Pee-Wee" Jackson died in April in a thicket of weeds near a rusted chain-link fence in a part of New Orleans known as Central City.

His body was riddled with bullets. It appeared to neighbors that Jackson, 27, tried to run from his killer and jump the fence just before he was gunned down.

Police said the retaliation was swift. The man suspected of killing Jackson was murdered just blocks away the next day.

The killings shook Central City a neighborhood where skiffs and flat-bottomed boats still sit on street corners, left behind by Hurricane Katrina's flood waters. This was not supposed to happen post-Katrina. After the storm nine months ago, New

Last fall, embattled New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin repeatedly declared that the city had become one of the safest in the country. People trickled home, protected by patrolling National Guard units, and they were surprised by what they found.

"Peace," said New Orleans resi dent Dixie M. Chissell, recalling that time. "Just peace of mind."

But with hurricane season set to begin today, New Orleans residents are worried not just about whether the levees will hold but also about a more familiar problem: homicides.

Violence has returned to the city. There have been 44 homicides so far this year, including 13 in April and 10 in May. While these numbers are well down from the 109 that had occurred by this time a year ago, the city's population is down as well. An estimated 221,000 people live in New Orleans now. Using that estimate and current murder totals, the city would be on pace for 43 murders per 100,000 people in 2006. In 2004, the city had 57 murders per 100,000, making it second to Camden, N.J. (The FBI will issue numbers for 2005 next month.)

Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans, said the city is indeed safer than it was before, but not by much. New Orleans today would still have one of the top 10 highest murder rates in the country. And many residents fear it will get worse as more criminals return to lay claim to old drug turf in the place they still call home.

"You have to know it's not safe right now," said Sammer Abualia, a Palestinian woman whose family owns two convenience stores in Central City. "I'm going to try to sell my business. I'm going to try to sell my other store. I'm going to sell my house, too. We want to go somewhere else."

Abualia's son, Fadi, 20, was fatally shot in the neighborhood in May 2002. Six months later, the man charged in his murder was gunned down as well. This cycle of violence made New Orleans one of the most dangerous cities in the nation.

The storm held the murder rate in check for a while. Only six murders were reported in New Orleans between Aug. 29, when Katrina hit, and the end of 2005. This year started out quiet as well. There were 17 murders in the first three months of the year. But this spring, familiar sounds returned to the streets of New Orleans.

"We hear gunshots every day, every night," said Keith Myers, a general contractor who works and lives in Central City. Gone are the days, he said, of falling asleep with the doors unlocked something he acknowledged he did shortly after returning to New Orleans last fall. Violence is back in the headlines.

Last week, a New Orleans police officer was shot and critically wounded during a traffic stop. The next day, there was a murder in the upper Ninth Ward, and the day after that in the Seventh Ward. The Ninth Ward victim was found on a street so desolate and ravaged by the storm that the doors of many homes there swing in the wind.

Other shootings have unfolded in populated areas, including the French Quarter and the Faubourg Marigny, an area near the Quarter that suffered no flooding. In March, in that neighborhood, a man was shot in the chest with a shotgun and killed as he handed over the contents of his wallet.

"Are we surprised that crime has returned? Not exactly," said Darlene Cusanza, the executive director of Crimestoppers, a local nonprofit that works with police to prevent and solve crimes. "Regrettably," she said, "old habits die hard."

Police attribute much of the recent gun violence to drug dealers trying to reestablish themselves in New Orleans. Officers have stepped up patrols in some neighborhoods, including Central City. There, in April, three men were killed in four days beginning on April 18 with the murder of Terron "Pee-Wee" Jackson.

Jackson was the sort of person New Orleanians hoped would not return. He was arrested nine times as a juvenile and 11 times as an adult. Convicted twice over the years for manslaughter and for possession of crack cocaine he served brief prison sentences each time. He evacuated to Texas last fall for the storm, family members said, only to return to Central City this year.

"We see crime going up," said Steven Nicholas, assistant superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department. But he cautioned that the perception is worse than the reality. Crime rates were bound to rise, he explained, since the city was empty at one point and crime was practically nonexistent.

Nicholas conceded that the police force still faces many challenges.

The department is down about 200 officers since the storm, and many of those on the force are still struggling to get their families home or their houses livable. Jail beds are in short supply, public defenders overwhelmed, and more people are expected to return to the city this month as the school year ends and federal rental assistance runs dry for thousands of displaced people now living in Texas.

"If they're going to be homeless, they're not going to be homeless in a strange city," said the Rev. John C. Raphael Jr., a former police officer and preacher in Central City. "They're going to come back to New Orleans to be homeless."

That worries Raphael, a towering man who in years past stood on some of the most dangerous street corners in the city, preaching peace, wearing a T-shirt that read "Thou Shalt Not Kill," and almost daring the thugs to run him off.

In recent months Raphael, 53, and others from the New Hope Baptist Church have returned to the streets.

Last week, Raphael darted through rush-hour traffic near his church, handing out Bibles in the heat. Within minutes, sweat was dripping down his face and off the bill of his baseball cap. But he kept at it until all the Bibles were gone.

"I really see us going through some rough times this summer even without the hurricane," he said.