Series: Day Three - Article Four

TURBULENT LIFE COMES TO A CLOSE ON TRIP TO CITY

April Savoy Scheidel, a mother of three who grew up in Lacombe, next door
to Mandeville, never made it home from the truck ride she took with two
acquaintances into the city's Lower 9th Ward, just before Easter.

Police said the trio was looking to buy drugs when something went wrong and
a gunman opened fire on the pickup. Scheidel, who was shot in the back,
died at Charity Hospital a short time later. She had cocaine in her system
and had been drinking alcohol, the coroner's office said.

After dropping out of high school, Scheidel became a certified nursing
assistant. She worked in nursing homes, did some home health care work, and
tried to make her marriage work.

Recently, though, the 31-year-old's life had taken jarring turns. Her
husband, Edmund, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty
to sexually assaulting a boy several years earlier, a child who was not
related to him. Scheidel was left with the mortgage payment on their
trailer lot, a stack of bills and no car.

When the lights were cut off, she and her children moved in with her mother
in Lacombe. Three weeks before she was killed, Scheidel and her two
youngest children, 3 and 4, had moved in with a friend in Slidell.

"She was mad at me," her mother, Merle Savoy, said. "She wanted to go and
do as she wanted. I said, I don't intend to be sitting up all night. I
would ask her, if you're going to be out late, call me."

Scheidel felt trapped, her mother said. Weight and back problems had made
nursing work harder to come by. Cash was low, her prospects bleak.

"I think she was more or less in a depressed state," Savoy said. "She
couldn't get things together. It was killing her she couldn't give
everything to her children."

But Savoy said she had no clue her daughter was using street drugs or going
to New Orleans regularly. Scheidel had stayed with her mother for a year
before moving to the friend's place in Slidell, one of the friends who was
with her when lethal gunfire rang out.

At first, their mother's absence bred anger and confusion in her 3- and
4-year-olds. Things are calmer now that they're in school, but for Savoy,
it's like starting all over at 60 to raise a family.

"We talk about her, but they don't actually ask for her anymore," Savoy
said. "They know she went to heaven."

In June, police arrested Tremell Armstead, 25, in connection with
Scheidel's murder. But at a magistrate court hearing, his attorney argued
that Armstead, a man with convictions for drug possession and a weapons
charge, was at the scene of his cousin's murder the same night Scheidel was
killed. Several witnesses testified on Armstead's behalf.

By August, prosecutors had decided not to seek formal charges, citing
"evidence problems."

No one else has been booked in the case.