Tuesday, March 06, 2007
"The first time I was back since the storm ... drugs were everywhere" - Salon
With much of New Orleans still uninhabitable, drug dealers are deluging neighborhoods. Violent crime is surging -- and so is anxiety about the city's recovery.
In midwinter in New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood, the weeds in some yards along Olive Street are 6 feet tall. A few blocks from the golf links of the New Orleans Country Club, abandoned buildings with open doors and windows face the street like blank skulls. Much of this 17th Ward neighborhood still looks as it did 18 months ago after Hurricane Katrina struck and it was submerged in 9 feet of water.
Ronald Jones, 34, who grew up in Hollygrove, comes by several times a week to visit his mother, who is living in a FEMA trailer while her home is being gutted and repaired. But as the 17th Ward and other areas devastated by the flood struggle to come back to life, an almost daily litany of violence and death has become the city's latest crisis. Jones has seen four friends from Hollygrove buried in the past year, all young black men between the ages of 22 and 26, all of whom he says were killed in drug-related murders.
...
On Feb. 7, 17-year-old Clarence Johnson gunned down Robert Dawson, also 17, outside a po-boy shop on Clio Street in Central City. According to the Times-Picayune, a witness told police that Johnson's mother, Vanessa, 44, handed her son the gun he used and told him to "get them all." According to the report, Dawson's mother, Dorothy, said they had just returned to New Orleans that day after being exiled in Dallas following Hurricane Katrina. The boys were in a fistfight a few hours before the shooting. Inside Vanessa Johnson's apartment, police found cocaine and a photograph of her son holding a pistol and a wad of cash. Clarence Johnson has since been charged with second-degree murder, and his mother, Vanessa, who was convicted of possession of cocaine in 1999 and sentenced to probation, has been charged with accessory to second-degree murder. ...
With much of New Orleans still uninhabitable, drug dealers are deluging neighborhoods. Violent crime is surging -- and so is anxiety about the city's recovery.
In midwinter in New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood, the weeds in some yards along Olive Street are 6 feet tall. A few blocks from the golf links of the New Orleans Country Club, abandoned buildings with open doors and windows face the street like blank skulls. Much of this 17th Ward neighborhood still looks as it did 18 months ago after Hurricane Katrina struck and it was submerged in 9 feet of water.
Ronald Jones, 34, who grew up in Hollygrove, comes by several times a week to visit his mother, who is living in a FEMA trailer while her home is being gutted and repaired. But as the 17th Ward and other areas devastated by the flood struggle to come back to life, an almost daily litany of violence and death has become the city's latest crisis. Jones has seen four friends from Hollygrove buried in the past year, all young black men between the ages of 22 and 26, all of whom he says were killed in drug-related murders.
...
On Feb. 7, 17-year-old Clarence Johnson gunned down Robert Dawson, also 17, outside a po-boy shop on Clio Street in Central City. According to the Times-Picayune, a witness told police that Johnson's mother, Vanessa, 44, handed her son the gun he used and told him to "get them all." According to the report, Dawson's mother, Dorothy, said they had just returned to New Orleans that day after being exiled in Dallas following Hurricane Katrina. The boys were in a fistfight a few hours before the shooting. Inside Vanessa Johnson's apartment, police found cocaine and a photograph of her son holding a pistol and a wad of cash. Clarence Johnson has since been charged with second-degree murder, and his mother, Vanessa, who was convicted of possession of cocaine in 1999 and sentenced to probation, has been charged with accessory to second-degree murder. ...
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