One woman was killed and four other people were injured after someone began shooting at their car in a Mid-City neighborhood early Sunday morning, causing it to hit a fire hydrant and flip over.
The New Orleans Police Department said two groups of people got in a fight at a business in the 4100 Block of South Carrollton Avenue. As one group drove away, someone opened fire on them, causing them to crash into the fire hydrant at Baudin and South Solomon streets.
Police responded to the call at 2:45 am, and New Orleans EMS treated four victims after the crash. The fifth person, a 29-year-old woman who had been taken to the hospital in a private vehicle, died later at the hospital.?
The sound of the crash woke Leanna Weaver and Garrett Zakrzewski, and they rushed outside of their home at Baudin and South Solomon to find a car upside-down in the middle of the intersection.
They saw several women who had been able to escape the vehicle without serious injury, while one, who had been pulled out of the wreck by her friends, was unconscious.
They began calling 911 and were joined by other neighbors who had begun to step outside. None were able to get through as the minutes ticked by.
“We had four or five people trying to call 911 and it said, ‘There is an influx of calls right now, please wait on the line,’ so we all waited,” Weaver said.
After about 10 minutes, someone loaded the unconscious woman into a vehicle and took her took the hospital, said Kristin Weaver, Leanna’s sister. As the car drove away, the first responding officer arrived at the scene.
Leanna Weaver said she doesn’t know who ultimately got through to 911.
By now, others had begun to arrive at the scene from the direction of Shamrock, the nearby bar at South Carrollton and Ulloa Street. Leanna Weaver said the women indicated that’s where they had come from.
The NOPD initially reported all the victims as having been shot, but Leanna Weaver said the women did not appear to have been wounded by gunfire. Reached for clarification, the NOPD said it only knew that four people were treated at the scene, and it said that it did not get a list of injuries from New Orleans Emergency Medical Services. It referred additional questions about injuries to EMS, which said late Sunday that there were two people involved in the crash still at the scene when paramedics arrived, but they did not need care. The others had already taken themselves to the hospital, EMS said.
‘It’s hard to watch’
Still rattled by the experience hours later, Leanna Weaver and Zakrzewski described having to stand by helplessly as the sister of the woman who would later die at the hospital wailed outside their home.
“It’s hard to watch and not be able to do anything,” Weaver said.
“It was awful now to see someone effectively die in front of our house and to know that it was from violence (that started) a couple blocks away,” Zakrzewski said.
Darlene Blanch, who lives down the street, only learned about what happened when she went outside to feed her cats and get ready for church in the morning.
“Our neighborhood is fairly quiet,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the commotion coming from Shamrock or what, but our neighborhood is neighborly.”
Anyone with information about this crime is asked to call the Homicide Section at 504-658-5300 or anonymously call Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111.
Correction: This story was changed after publication to reflect that the shooting occurred early Sunday morning.
A worker cuts a piece of pipe as crews repair the corner where a car struck a fire hydrant Sunday morning and flipped over after being fired upon by an unknown shooter. One woman was killed and four others were shot, the NOPD said.