ADDICTION CENTRAL

A woman watching police investigate the quadruple murder at 1723 Egania St.
this week saw a reflection of herself in the carnage. "It could have been me
inside there," she told a reporter. "That's where everybody gathered to do
their thing."

Doing their "thing" is the woman's euphemism for getting high.
Everybody involved in Tuesday's slaying -- the four victims and the
one suspect police have arrested -- seems to have been deep in the
clutches of drug addiction. The massacre reveals the desperate
circumstances so many people -- and not just those in this corner of
the 9th Ward -- find themselves in.

Police say suspect Christopher Browder, 20, was looking for money to
nurse a $100-a-day heroin habit. Known to police as a petty thief and
burglar, it was assumed that the young man was more of a danger to
himself than to others.

Now police say he killed a 25-year-old mother of two who lived a block
away from the site of the homicides, a 54-year-old man who slept in
the darkened house to avoid sleeping outdoors, a 28-year-old Raceland
man who came to New Orleans two weeks ago after fighting with his
girlfriend and a 25-year-old man who apparently lived out of town.
Another suspect remains at large.

Police have been saying for years that a new, more powerful strain of
heroin is driving New Orleans' murder rate. They can certainly hold up
this crime as proof. Getting heroin off the street needs to remain one
of their top priorities, lest we keep losing our residents to the
cemeteries and to the penitentiaries.