Four dead in shooting north of New Orleans

A family of four has been shot to death in a trailer park north of New Orleans in a drug-related killing, police said Wednesday, less than two weeks after five teenagers were slain in the heart of the city and National Guard troops moved in to help quell crime.

Police see the multiple homicides as signs that a lull in violence following Hurricane Katrina was over.

Katrina killed more than 1,500 people from Louisiana and flooded 80 percent of New Orleans last August.

Police believe that two men from New Orleans came to the trailer and killed a man who was a Katrina evacuee, his girlfriend and two related teenage children Tuesday, said St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s office spokesman George Bonnet.

When shots broke out, a sister and 10-year-old niece of the woman killed were in another part of the trailer at the Country Club mobile home park. They hid until the killers left and then called the police.

“In everybody’s collective recollection, this is the first quadruple homicide we have ever had of this nature,” Bonnet said. St. Tammany, located just north of New Orleans, has never had more than 10 homicides in any of the the last 21 years, but the trailer killings take the number for 2006 to eight so far.

“We believe that this was drug-related,” he said.

The trailer killings come only 11 days after five teens in a sports utility vehicle were gunned down before dawn in a central New Orleans neighborhood. That was one of the worst slayings in city history, which police believe was motivated by drugs or revenge.

New Orleans citizens demanded action after those killings amid a growing fear that murder has returned to New Orleans after a post-storm respite.

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Ten months after the storm, the murder rate per capita is roughly at pre-storm levels, and drug crime has returned, too.

National Guard Humvees driven by soldiers in camouflage fatigues are patrolling New Orleans East and two other sparsely populated parts of the city where looting is more common.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin asked Gov. Kathleen Blanco to send in the Guard so that city police could focus on the more dangerous parts of the city, which was once one of the deadliest cities in the United States.

City police made roughly triple the usual number of arrests over the past weekend, New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley said.

Most of the violence has been outside the French Quarter and other tourist areas.