At least 19 injured in New Orleans Mother’s Day shooting

Déjà vu all over again: Just when you thought it was safe to go in the streets of New Orleans on Mother’s Day, May 19, most benign and loving of holidays, a shooting happens.

It reminds me of the title of my last piece on the Tsarnaev Brothers and the Boston Marathon, The making of mayhem. So, too, has mayhem been made again, this time in New Orleans, swept in like Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest, most destructive Atlantic hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.

I guess the old saying. “There’s no peace for the weary” holds for this smaller but hurtful disaster. At least 19 people were injured on Sunday when a gunman or gunmen opened fire on a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans, police said. The Mother’s Day shootings in New Orleans, like the Boston Marathon tragedy, do not seem like random acts, but planned events.

Instilling constant terror is what it is all about. The net-net is the feeling that nowhere or place in this country are you free of the possibility of a terror-inducing event, even where 400 peaceful marchers were gathered to honor motherhood. This in spite of whether or not the FBI, CIA, or DHS label it a random event.

You’ll see the FBI and CIA did a questionable job in Boston my article. In that case, the perpetrators, the Tsarnaev Brothers, along with their loud-mouthed Uncle Tsarny, who changed his name to distance himself from the family, covered up the fact that he had been married in 1999 to a woman named Samantha Fuller, the daughter of a top CIA agent, Graham Fuller. The brothers also had ties to Chechan terrorist groups that neocons like former CIA-director James Woolsey supported.

Fortunately, in this case a 10-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl were only grazed by bullets and were in good condition, New Orleans Police spokesman Garry Flot said in a statement. But others, men and women were not so lucky and were in surgery Sunday evening. Fortunately, there were no fatalities and most wounds were not life-threatening, police said, somewhat minimizing the meaning of this in context with the Boston Marathon, the Aurora shootings, Sandy Hook, and a string of past homemade terrorist events aided and abetted by the FBI: from the shoe bomber to underwear bomber (Christmas Day) to the car bomber in Times Square, New York City, probably one of the most peopled areas in America.

Fortunately, the last three bombs fizzled owing to a lack of blasting caps, but it was the intent of the perps and their handlers to frighten the larger population to cry out for more police protection. My guess is that it’s the police from whom we need protection. They’ve got more guns than anyone. But that sentiment leads to the kind of “lockdown” or Martial Law that we saw inflicted on Boston as some 9,000 law officers from various U.S., local and state agencies poured into Watertown, Massachusetts. It’s authority overkill and generally manages to do just that.

As to the shooter or shooters, several people were spotted suddenly running towards the crowd and shooting then turning from it to escape the parade in progress on North Villere Street in the 7th Ward neighborhood at 1:45 p.m., the middle of the day. At least one suspect was described as a man between the ages of 18 and 22. His name turns out to be Akein Scott, 19 and he apparently has a long rap sheet. There’s a $10,000 reward out for him.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas reiterated there may have been as many as three shooters, and that two different types of weapons were likely used. What two kinds of weapons? What did the three shooters like look, white, black, Latino, tall, short, fat, skinny? How were they dressed? We are a bit short of detailed reporting so far.

The UP Report is a plethora of non-information. And those from the networks are not much better. Plus, the story came in on Russia Today first on Sunday night in captions on ongoing scenes, with RT.com with anchormen also commenting on it. I checked other major news channels and found no other mentions. Monday morning there was still no mention on NY-1, the local station for New York City.

We do know the victims were marching in what is known as a second line parade, which is common in New Orleans: A brass band plays while marching in the streets, while a “second line” of people follows the band, celebrating.

Officials said the parade was two blocks long and included about 400 people. The crime scene was about 1.5 miles from the heart of the French Quarter and near the Treme neighborhood, which has been the centerpiece for the HBO TV series “Treme.” Maybe they did it to give the TV show some panache of cinéma vérité.

Police Superintendant Serpas said, “These are unusual circumstances. We have second lines which occur in the city of New Orleans virtually every weekend at this time of the year.” He added, “We had a full complement of police officers. It appears that these two or three people just for a reason unknown to us, started shooting at towards or within the crowd. It was over in just a couple seconds.”

Let me guarantee you, Superintendant Serpas that these “couple of seconds” will consume pages and hours of media time, in print and on TV. They will become a new media cycle. Say goodbye to short media statements like the following: “Police say a dozen people were shot at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans,” MSNBC’s Craig Melvin reported.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu, thinking bigger, said the shooting was part of “the relentless drum beat of violence” on the streets of New Orleans. It’s not just “the streets of New Orleans,” Mayor Landrieu. For the last three weeks, it’s been Boston’s Watertown suburb. Before that it was Sandy Hook for months. Before that, it was Aurora, Colorado, for months. Connect the dots Mister Mayor. Somebody is screwing with America’s peace of mind. These ops are ongoing and hell-bent on creating a paramilitary police surveillance state.

And yes, “It’s a shame and it’s got to stop,” he told The Times-Picayune from outside New Orleans’ Interim LSU Public Hospital. He went on to say, “You see it cascading across the country but we have more of it than anyone else.”

I didn’t know New Orleans had more street gun violence than anyone else. I’m sorry to hear that. Is the problem racial bias, drugs, alcohol, the excessive availability of guns (with or without background checks) do you think, or something else? Is it the FBI, CIA, or even DHS feeding New Orleans some more disaster, as if it hadn’t had enough.

Detectives were conducting interviews and retrieving surveillance video from around the scene. And Landrieu made the standard appeal, urging anyone with information about the shooting to come forward.

He added: ”These kinds of incidents will not go unanswered. Somebody knows something. The way to stop this violence is for you all to help.” The way to stop this violence is for our intelligence agencies to stop cooking them up and trying to disarm and lull the people of America to sleep in the arms of the lawless law.

Second line parades have been targets for violence in New Orleans in recent years. Then why wasn’t there a larger police presence? In the past, shooters have targeted a specific person in the crowd, which authorities say may have been the case Sunday as well. Well, who were some of the past shooters who targeted a specific person in the crowd and who were those persons? But Landrieu dismissed the notion of outlawing the Louisiana tradition. This, Mister Mayor, I might suggest is a larger problem than outlawing the Mother’s Day Parade or second-line parades in general. This is some organized cadre trying to terrorize New Orleans’ people, perhaps to drive them out like Katrina did for the valuable real estate it possesses.

“It’s not the second line that did the shooting,” he said. “The cultural events are very important to us. It’s like calling for an end to Mardi Gras because someone takes an opportunity to shoot someone during one of our parades.”

“Second lines have been with us for a long, long time,” Landrieu added. “They are an important part of our culture and our heritage.” And here comes the capper . . .

Mary Beth Romig, a spokeswoman for the FBI in New Orleans, told the Associated Press, “That federal investigators have no indication that the shooting was an act of terrorism.”

“It’s strictly an act of street violence in New Orleans,” she said. What’s the difference, this writer asks. The net effect is to frighten people, to make them afraid to walk or march in their streets or be safe in their homes, and on Mother’s Day. It could have happened in any city. Reducing it to “strictly an act of street violence” doesn’t make 19 people shot or injured okay. That is exactly what terrorism is all about: depriving the victims of feeling safe and so inhibiting their sense of freedom. Why not wait a few minutes to start the cover-up, Ms. Romig?

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.