NEW ORLEANS — Sixty days into the year, New Orleans has seen at least 27 people killed since Jan. 1. All but one were shot to death.
Most of the killings took place in January, but 11 people were murdered in 10 separate incidents throughout February.
The month started quietly, with a weeklong gap between the last murder of January (Jan. 31) to the first in Febrary (Feb. 7). According to the NOPD, 57-year-old Freddie Callaway Jr. was shot in the head in Algiers that morning. It wasn't immediately clear from police records if anybody had been arrested for Callaway's murder.
Just like the last month, February's deaths were clustered together. The peaceful week at the start of the month before Callaway was killed, a weeklong stretch between Jan. 11 and Jan. 18 and an eight-day stretch around Mardi Gras were all punctuated by violence.
The murders appeared loosely clustered around the weekends, with seven of the nine shootings taking place on Saturday or Sunday.
Almost all of the people killed were victims of gun violence, but the first fatal stabbing of the year happened on Feb. 19. A man, who has not been identified by the Orleans Parish Coroner, was stabbed in the neck under the I-10 overpass dividing the CBD and Central City around midnight. After running from his attacker and collapsing on a nearby street, the man was taken to the hospital where he died.
His murderer was listed as unknown in an initial police report about the incident.
But that isn't uncommon, according to a public records request for information about the murders in January from WWL-TV. A vast majority of the time, police list no suspect information in their initial reports for the murder investigations.
In 14 of the 15 reports reviewed by WWL-TV, no suspect information was available after investigators finished their preliminary investigation into the murders.
Police announced arrests in two January murders – one of whom was arrested at the scene. That case was the only time police indicated they had identified a suspect in their initial report.
February will likely follow a similar pattern. According to initial information released about the 11 killings, no suspect information was available for any of them. NOPD officials did not announce any arrests for 2019 murders in February.
But despite the number of apparently unsolved crimes, February saw a decrease in the total number of people killed. Five fewer people died in the second month of the year, dropping the projected average for the year by about 30 from January's projection of 192 murders in 2020.
If the current rate of killings continues through December, New Orleans would see about 162 murders in 2020, bucking the trend of lower murder rates released by the NOPD in the past few years.
Crime analyst Jeff Asher's records show 120 people were killed in 2019 according to The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate.
New Orleans has been regularly listed on lists of the deadliest cities in the U.S. Since the city was first cited as the "murder capital of America" in 1994, the number of reported by NOPD has been historically high. For a span of nearly two decades, from 1994 to 2013, the city averaged more than 250 murders annually.
The data for this story comes from public records and NOPD officials, who generally report murders to media outlets through press releases and daily summaries of major crimes.
Read the first part of our project counting the murders in New Orleans here:
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