Crime cases were set back by Katrina

As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, the body of Joe Wong was found in a warehouse-district apartment behind a restaurant, a single gunshot wound to the back of his head.

His was the last homicide recorded before the storm hit.

Police dusted for fingerprints, examined the scene for signs of a struggle, collected blood samples, and checked for hairs. They found one bullet casing on the floor of the apartment. It was placed in an evidence bag and taken to police headquarters. Wong’s body was zipped into a bag and loaded into a coroner’s van for the trip to the city morgue. The crime scene was sealed.

Detectives expected to be back as soon as the storm had blown over. They couldn’t return for five months.

The onslaught of Katrina essentially shut down crime investigations in New Orleans for weeks, in some cases months. And when they were able to start up again, law enforcement officers faced unprecedented challenges.

Witnesses and suspects had moved to other cities. Evidence was damaged or lost after sitting in water for weeks. Crime scenes had been washed away or gutted.

And since the hurricane, the number of officers on the force has dropped from 1,668 to 1,424 -- leading to a perception that the department is understaffed to deal with current and pre-storm crimes.

Capt. John Bryson, deputy chief in charge of the administrative and support bureau at the New Orleans Police Department, insisted that the decreased size of the force was not impeding homicide investigations.

He acknowledged that the most challenging aspect of investigating pre-Katrina crimes was locating witnesses, family members and suspects. The New Orleans police crime lab was heavily damaged by flooding, so some corroded and rusted weapons and bullet casings have had to be sent to the FBI for ballistics analysis, Bryson said.

Law enforcement agencies in neighboring parishes have chipped in on ballistics and forensic testing, said Capt. Joe Waguespack, commander of homicide with 37 years on the force.

Some initial police reports were destroyed, and damage to evidence that had been stored at the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court has made it tougher for prosecutors to pursue some cases.

Waguespack said that since the storm, canvassing crime scenes had become more difficult, particularly in flood-ravaged neighborhoods.

“If the victim is found in three to four square blocks of deserted houses, as far as witnesses seeing or hearing anything, you’re not going to get anything on that,” Waguespack said.

When he returned to Wong’s crime scene five months after Katrina, he found that the building had been badly damaged, ransacked and looted. The building was being gutted and a new restaurant was already being built.

Upheaval upon shock

But explaining the intricacies of investigating a case offers little comfort to grieving relatives.

It was torture for Menhati Kherita Singleton to watch as her son’s body bag was shoved into the back of a coroner’s van on Aug. 27, 2005 -- the same day Wong was discovered.

Prolonging her agony is the fact that she is no closer today to knowing who gunned down Tracy Girod Bridges, 32, outside the barbershop that he owned.

On the day he was killed, the crime scene -- on a then-bustling commercial strip -- was secured, and his body was taken to the city morgue.

Friends escorted a shocked Singleton home around 7 p.m. Eight hours later, the city’s mandatory evacuation order forced her to flee before Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore.

It was not until Oct. 13 that Singleton located her son’s corpse at the flood-damaged morgue.

But she still has not seen the police report on Bridges’ death. The case has been reassigned to different detectives at least three times. And it’s up to her to contact police for developments; according to the grieving mother, no one calls to let her know about new information in the investigation.

“Even if they said, ‘This is what we’ve done, we can’t do any more, we have to close it,’ I would feel better,” said Singleton. “Instead they say if we hear anything ... we should call them. I don’t think anything is being done about it. I think my son was just clumped into [the category of] just another black man who got killed that day.”

Bryson explained that it wasn’t practical to keep every friend and relative informed of every detail.

In Wong’s case, Waguespack said, family and friends helped lead police to the woman who they believe killed the restaurant owner. She was arrested in the fall in a neighboring parish on an unrelated charge.

But the case was ultimately cracked last month thanks to technology recently obtained by the special operations division at the New Orleans Police Department, Waguespack said.

The bullet casing that detectives found at the site of Wong’s murder had sat in floodwater at police headquarters for at least two weeks, and had rusted. For several months, police lamented that it might never be cleaned well enough to compare with a weapon found in the possession of the prime suspect.

But the new technology did the trick, and the casing matched the weapon.

Police believe the woman killed Wong with his own gun. An arrest warrant was issued for her in connection with Wong’s murder, Waguespack said. Police would not release the woman’s name or any other details in the case.

Taking charge

In another case, two siblings have become self-appointed deputies -- hoping to accelerate the investigation into their brother’s homicide, which Marvin Trudeau said was progressing at a “snail’s pace.”

Marcel Trudeau, 45, was killed in his home Aug. 16 during a burglary. A heavy-duty safe containing hunting rifles and some cash was stolen, and his house, in a middle-class suburb, was set ablaze, said Marvin Trudeau, the slain man’s twin.

A nearby building’s security camera caught the image of a man standing on the corner near the home around the time of Marcel’s death, said Marvin Trudeau, who thinks the man might have been a lookout.

So Marvin Trudeau and his sister Avis had the image -- just an outline of the figure -- processed and printed on fliers, which they distributed throughout their brother’s old neighborhood.

They got some leads, and have been scouring computer databases for details on people whom local residents say fit the profile of the figure.

Marvin Trudeau said that every kernel of information they found was forwarded to the detective investigating their brother’s case -- at least the third officer to assume the job since the crime occurred.

“I never thought it would take this long just to make an arrest,” Trudeau said.

Bryson stressed that homicide investigations were by nature complex, even without waterlogged evidence, displaced witnesses and missing suspects.

But relatives of pre-Katrina homicide victims said that given the recent citywide surge in slayings -- almost 140 since the beginning of the year -- it was even more important to them that their loved ones not become just another statistic.

“You really need closure,” said Singleton, 51. “How can you explain the heaviness that you walk around with?”

She recalled her son as an ambitious and compassionate father of 7- and 11-year-old boys, whose “whole personality was about resolving conflict.”

Wong’s sisters, Anita “Maelin” Reugger and Adra Johnson, said they had to sell their restaurants because of mounting debt.

“It’s been depressing and upsetting, because his family and his friends, they used to always call on Joe,” Reugger said. “It’s hard to believe that he’s not there, and that someone did this to him.”

Meanwhile, Marvin Trudeau vowed to help catch the killers who robbed him of his twin.

“We want justice,” he said. “I won’t rest until I know that the people who did this are either dead, or in jail.”

ann.simmons@latimes.com