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New Orleans serial shootings unsolved, unhindered
Last summer, Bayou Justice identified 60 potentially related shootings on two New Orleans interstate highways.
There is an on going thing in New Orleans, weekly reports of random drivers being killed by a sniper. I don't follow the news all that much, but according to people who do, there isn't a lot of coverage about this story of so many random people, from off duty officers to children, being shot while traveling on this strech of road. One article likens it to a "shooting gallery."
-RobertLast summer, Bayou Justice identified 60 potentially related shootings on two New Orleans interstate highways.
Today, every news outlet in the state reports nightly on the attacks making the highways around Crescent City a shooting gallery. However, New Orleans officials remain tight-lipped, refusing to admit they may have a serial sniper in their city.
On Valentine's Day, The New Orleans Police Department found a man shot multiple times in a vehicle on the Pontchartrain Expressway near the I-10 Slidell exit. Wednesday, Feb. 2, around 11 p.m., an unidentified sniper shot 24-year-old Christian Honore as he drove westbound on Interstate 10, causing him to crash his vehicle near Louisa Street.
WDSU, Channel 6 in New Orleans, said after the Valentine's Day shooting, officers told a reporter they had responded to dozens of interstate shootings so far in 2022.
Shootings which Police Superintendent Shaun D. Ferguson initially called unrelated gang-on-gang and road-rage activity today count police officers, honeymoon couples and school children among the victims.
In 2020, New Orleans saw an average of two interstate shootings per month, and on January 12, a news release from the New Orleans Police Department detailed more than 30 interstate shootings in the Crescent City in 2021.
Six days later, they added four more victims to their list.
Just before 3 p.m. on Jan. 18, a Tuesday, a sniper killed 34-year-old Whitney Watts as she traveled eastbound on Interstate 10. Police realized something was amiss when the victim's black car crashed into a guardrail at the Crowder Boulevard exit in New Orleans East. The coroner found Whitney's assailant shot her multiple times.
Bullets busted the car's back window, and police found one visible gunshot near the back-passenger window, just above the head of Whitney's daughter.
According to Whitney's sister-in-law, when the young girl phoned her dad from the car, Whitney's husband asked if Whitney had a seizure. Their daughter replied, "No, Dad, she was shot."
Earlier that morning, another I-10 gunshot hit a man on Michoud Boulevard, and the Saturday morning before that, Jan. 15, the interstate sniper killed a 52-year-old man and wounded a 45-year-old woman on I-10 at Esplanade Avenue.
It is time police admit that some if not all drivers and passengers found shot fell victim to the same shooter or shooters.
On Jan. 24, District Attorney Jason Williams asked Gov. John Bel Edwards to deploy more state troopers to aid NOPD, and he said Gov. Edwards responded to his request.
That night, Williams explained why to the city council in a public meeting.
"…So that we can deter those shootings and hopefully save the life of an innocent person who's trying to get from point A to point B. We need to make sure that if somebody shoots a gun from a moving car on the interstate, we have law enforcement presence on that interstate to follow that car," he said.
A representative of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office agreed, saying the problem extends far outside the city limits of New Orleans and explained how someone shot two people on the North Causeway on-ramp onto I-10 East.
The two victims received non-life-threatening injuries, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office officials said. One received a gunshot wound to the leg, and a bullet hit the other man's buttocks.
Sunday morning, Sept. 24, someone shot a man on Interstate 10 East at Franklin Avenue. The New Orleans Police Department said the victim was driving I-10 when a car pulled next to him on his passenger side and began shooting, wounding the man twice. Fortunately, he lived after driving himself to a nearby hospital.
On Aug. 31, a Tuesday night, as an off-duty NOPD officer drove I-10, an interstate sniper shot him in the head. According to Superintendent Ferguson, the wound grazed the officer's skull, leaving him responsive and in stable condition.
Ferguson said in a news conference he did not know why someone shot the officer. "He was in an unmarked unit, not your typical police car," Ferguson said. "We cannot say he was targeted because he is a police officer."
The police superintendent said the unnamed off-duty officer was driving on I-10 westbound near the St. Bernard Avenue exit around 8:30 p.m. when the shots blew through his windshield. The officer did not return fire, according to Ferguson.
Like the other monthly cases, police have no suspects.
The month prior, someone shot a man driving in a westbound lane on Interstate-610 near Paris Avenue, and another random shot struck a man traveling eastbound on I-610 near the St. Bernard Avenue exit, and an unidentified assailant shot a woman on Interstate-10 on the Pontchartrain Expressway, somewhere between the Crescent City Connection and the Orleans-Jefferson Parish Line.
Ironically, the United States' most infamous highway snipers killed only seven people, far less than the multitude of attacks recounted here. If NOPD can connect even half of these shootings, the wound count of this new I-10 Sniper surpasses that of the D.C. Beltway Snipers.
In 2002, firing rifles from a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan, assassins John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo shot 10 people, including John Gaeta, an Albany resident who graduated from Amite High School in 1969. Muhammad and Malvo shot Gaeta in the Hammond Square Mall parking lot. Today, Malvo resides in Red Onion State Prison, and Muhammad died by lethal injection in 2009.
The possibility that some, if not all these shootings were perpetrated by the same sniper or group, is not fiction. It has happened before and is likely happening again.
