Today is January 8. In this young year, there have been no fewer than eight people murdered in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ms. Helen Hill was number seven.

...shortly before 6 a.m. Thursday, Hill died of a gunshot to the neck inside her home, where police would also find her husband, shot three times, clutching 2-year-old Francis near the couple's front door.

Helen Hill was an artist and filmmaker, an animator by profession; a community activist by avocation. Her husband, Dr. Paul , is a doctor who co-founded a clinic in Treme to help the city's poor. That clinic was lost, along with their home at Clark & Cleveland in Mid-City New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The Globe and Mail continues the story...

Dr. Gailiunas was hit four times in the cheek and arm but was released from hospital yesterday. Their two-year-old son, Francis, was unhurt. He was reportedly found in the entrance of his house, protected by his injured father.

In a city that has become accustomed to tragedy and to an endless strings of crime -- there have been a dozen homicides in the past two weeks -- this latest outrage was just too much.

"I'm so aggravated and angry," said Helen Gillet, an experimental cellist who gathered with about two dozen other friends of the couple outside their modest frame house in New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighbourhood late yesterday afternoon. "I'm outraged at what's going on in the community."

Dr. Gailiunas, who worked in a clinic for the poor run by the Daughters of Charity religious order, and Ms. Hill were part of the community of artists, poets and other creative types, refugees from the rest of the United States and elsewhere, who have been drawn to New Orleans because of its singular history and culture.

They all know that the city is bedevilled by crime, but what has happened since Katrina has shaken them to the core. There were 161 homicides here last year -- all in a city that has only about 220,000 people, half the number from before Katrina, giving it one of America's highest homicide rates.

These kind folks had left New Orleans, but returned on Aug. 28, 2006 - one year to the day commemorating the beginning of the destruction of their re-adopted city.

I probably wouldn't have even noticed this news, except for the fact that a friend of mine was a friend of theirs.

His tribute to her, "Helen Hill and the Death of New Orleans," seems quite fitting a tribute for a person I shall never meet. It is also fodder for an honest conversation:

(more after the jump)

I can hold my tongue; what I can't do is follow her example in refusing to give in to hopelessness. Because the only thing that could save New Orleans would be an army of people like Paul and Helen, willing to practice the sacrifice that mealy-mouthed politicians are by now afraid to even call for insincerely, and devoted to helping people with whom they have nothing in common, because it's the right thing to do. And armies of such people don't exist; they're so far from existing that the loss of one Helen Hill is an incalculable blow, not just to those of us who knew her personally and loved her deeply, but to the whole goddamn undeserving world. New Orleans was dealt a body blow, first by nature and then by an incompetent and uncaring presidential administration. but thanks to the corruption and indifference of many of its locals, it was already on the ropes. If what's left of the population there now is willing to tolerate an environment where barbarians prey on the few people willing to help them, to give their time and use their talents to try and [rebuild] something out of the rubble, just because it need [to] be done, then New Orleans is cutting its own throat.

Not that the police can be much of a help in such circumstances, but the fact is that the NOPD lost 188 officers in 2006. Recruiting isn't going well either.

As for how the police are faring with this spate of homicides (Ms. Hill was the 5th of 5 in a 14 hour span; all "unrelated"):

No witnesses to any of the killings has come forward, police said Thursday, begging for help to solve the most recent murders. Assistant Superintendent Steven Nicholas described the recent killings as brazen acts, often committed in broad daylight and, in one case, within a block of police officers.

The article linked in the Times-Picayune above indicates that police officers were responding to a call at a nearby bed-&-breakfast (perhaps one like this?) where a thug armed with a gun was seen wandering the halls, going door-to-door, knocking at each one. If you want to insist that those crimes weren't directly related, then you have one gun-toting predator trawling in a B&B, probably targeting reasonably well-to-do out-of-towners; then, you have another out on the street invading homes and shooting people while they hold their children. And the Marigny (where this particular crime happened) is directly east of Esplanade Ave., and immediately adjacent to the Vieux Carre (the French Quarter). I've walked all the way from the Faubourg Marigny to Congo Square at night along Rampart myself (to get from Snug Harbor to Funky Butt on foot) -- that was probably considered a dicey maneuver at the time; apparently, that would be suicidal now.

Sometimes you stay safe in your naïveté. These aren't punks who are going to bet they can tell you "where you got 'dem shoes." These are armed, desperate thugs that the cops (what few cops there are, for that matter) can't catch.

That's information you need before you decide whether or not you ever want to be personally involved in the post-apocalyptic nightmare that the Crescent City is fast descending into.

I've long been a supporter of the reconstruction effort, but I don't know that I'd put my life on the line to see that city rebuilt. What Ms. Hill and Dr. Gailiunas did was not an intellectual exercise. I've paid nothing (other than what I've donated and what I've written) in material terms. Not only did this couple lose the city that they loved and 90% of their earthly possessions in the flood, Helen Hill lost her life, Paul Gailiunas lost his wife, and their child lost her mother upon coming back. By any meaningful calculation, that is too high of a price to pay for any human being.

If Dr. Gailiunas returns to New Orleans after all of this, he's a far more evolved being than me.

For what very little that it's worth: The families of Ms. Hill and Dr. Gailiunas have my sympathy, my condolences, my frustration, and my anger.