Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.
Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.
That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.
Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.
The article also talks about looters arrested for taking food from a grocery store while electronics store looters are never arrested.
"Looters" trying to survive are not looters. How long before they get bail? The courts are shut down, as is the jail, so they are detained at the bus station. The defense lawyers and prosecutors are out of business, as are the bail bondsmen. But there's always room at the Greyhound jail for one more poor soul who was just trying to eat.
Bizarre.
