A string of armed robberies stretched across the city and a man survived a volley of bullets on Delachaise Street in the Milan area in a weekend that showed an unusual amount of gunplay in Uptown neighborhoods, police said Wednesday.
The first two robberies came Friday evening, back-to-back within 20 minutes, said Sgt. Shaun Ferguson of the NOPD Second District persons-crimes division. In the 500 block of Broadway, a couple reported that a group of men approached them, showed a gun, and demanded their belongings, Ferguson said. Police found several of their credit cards in the same block that night, and found their keys nearby the next day.
The second armed robbery was not long afterward at the intersection of Fontainebleau and LaSalle, Ferguson said. In neither case was there a clear description of the robbers, but both featured a similar gun, a silver semi-automatic, Ferguson said.
On Saturday, a third armed robbery was reported in the 2300 block of Adams, where the two victims were sitting in a parked car waiting on the driver to retrieve something from the house, Ferguson said. A black Camaro drove up with two teenagers inside who demanded the keys to the car, but because the driver had taken the keys back inside, the robbers settled for snatching a purse from the center console and driving away, Ferguson said.
A series of other robberies was reported over the same general time span in several police districts farther downtown, and investigators citywide are working to determine which may be connected.
“I do believe they are related, but I don’t have a solid description, other than the silver semiautomatic and the trail from Uptown leading all the way downtown,” Ferguson said at the Second District’s weekly meeting Wednesday.
When the two back-to-back robberies were reported, Second District commander Capt. Darryl Albert said he immediately ordered all his officers to high-visibility patrols with their blue lights activated, redirecting any who were writing reports or otherwise preoccupied back into the streets. The priority, he said, was discouraging the robbers from any further attempts while investigators looked for them.
“The best thing you can do is actually apprehend them,” Albert said. “What we effectively did was move them to another area, but that’s what we had to do.”
Saturday also saw a shooting in the 1900 block of Delachaise Street just before 1 p.m. The apparent target was on foot when a group of men drove up and began firing on him, hitting him once before he could get to his own car for cover, Ferguson said.
A witness got the vehicle’s license plate number, which took detectives to St. Tammany Parish, Ferguson said. Its owner said her husband had it that day, and he told police he had loaned it to someone else, Ferguson said, noting that description of the gunman was of a man with dreadlocks, a description the vehicle owner’s husband didn’t fit. Police found four ounces of crack cocaine in his house, however, and St. Tammany officers arrested him on those charges, Ferguson said.
The husband has a criminal history in that block of Delachaise, Ferguson said, so police are continuing to investigate his role in the shooting. The victim, however, has been completely uncooperative, shutting off any contact with investigators – a problem so common in shootings in New Orleans that only solved 22 percent have been solved in the Second District, Albert said.
“Our clearances on shootings are extremely low, and I know why: it’s always thug-on-thug shooting. … It’s not because of what y’all are not doing; it’s because of the characters we’re dealing with,” Albert said, suggesting a variety of ways investigators might find the victim and convince him to cooperate. “Keep pushing on it. We’ve got to persuade him to not handle it on his own, to let us do something with it.”
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