The most recent murder, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was of a young wife in the pleasant middle-class Fauborg Marigny district. The woman and her husband had a two-year-old son. Police found the husband, shot three times but still alive, clutching the infant near the front door of the house. The wife had been killed by a gunshot wound to the neck. The husband has survived.
These were educated white liberals--they had been dormitory mates at Harvard--who had returned to New Orleans after Katrina to do good works in "the community." The husband, a doctor, ran a clinic that turned no one away. The wife... well, let the Times-Picayune tell it:
Hill wore thrift store garb and made experimental films, a craft she sought to share with other women, holding "film-making bees" in which they made rudimentary films... Gailiunas [i.e. the husband] sang songs about love and leftist politics in a solo act called Ukelele Against the Machine...
The couple also ran a feed-the-homeless enterprise named Food Not Bombs. You get the picture. These were not Republican voters.
What happened to this young couple was unspeakably horrible, and there is of course no excusing such barbarism. It is hard, though, not to shake your head at the couple's unworldly naivety. What kind of people did they think they were going to encounter when they got down and dirty with "the community"? The Times-Picayune story quoted a neighbor of the couple saying this: "They would never do it, but they should have answered the door with a gun." Hard to disagree with that--either part of it.
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