Citizen Crime Watch Blog

String of parade shootings decried
‘Young, brazen thugs’ to blame, Riley says
The Times-Picayune
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
By Susan Finch

New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said Monday that five parade-relating shootings that left nine people wounded ranks the 2008 Carnival season as the city’s worst in three years, even though none of the injured suffered life-threatening injuries.

Police made quick arrests in most of the shootings, Riley said during a news conference in front of the recently reopened police headquarters.

All of the shootings, Riley said, were “a result of young, brazen thugs who have run into each other” and are trying to settle disputes, some dating from before Hurricane Katrina, with guns easy to hide in baggy pants and hooded sweatshirts.

None of the alleged shooters apprehended so far are older than 19, and some have minor arrest records. Despite a strong showing of police officers along the parade routes, Riley said, these shooters “aren’t afraid of being apprehended. Anybody with reasonable common sense would not take that chance.” …

There have been no killings along Carnival parade routes since Feb. 18, 2004, when a 20-year-old woman was fatally wounded by gunfire that erupted when rival teenagers clashed along the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground.

Latasha Bell, a bystander watching the Muses parade that night, left a newborn son. Three others were wounded during the shooting.

Carlos Miller, 16 at the time, was booked with first-degree murder but acquitted at trial at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, after jurors heard from two witnesses who could only testify that they saw Miller with a gun moments before the shooting.

Without scientific evidence or direct eyewitnesses to the killing, prosecutors failed to win any convictions in Bell’s murder.

Miller lived only two years more. He was shot multiple times on Nov. 24, 2007, in the 3200 block of Behrman Highway in Algiers, and died about an hour later at a local hospital.

For the Bell killing, three of Miller’s co-defendants pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Adrian Norris, 20, was sentenced to four years in prison for negligent homicide; Alvin Wilson, 21, received six months for resisting arrest; and Ray Smith, 23, was sentenced to two years for inciting a riot.

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