[Dialogue] Suicides higher among Katrina victims.

[jim rippey]

Companion to previous Compassionate Conservatism posting.  Compassion is warranted.
--Jim ippey,. Bellevue, NE 
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      Published Saturday
      January 28, 2006 in Omaha World Herald

      Katrina stress a 'recipe for suicide,' coroner says

       

     
      THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
     

With a newborn daughter, an autistic child and a fledgling music business, life was chaotic enough for Jerome "Slim Rome" Spears and fiancee Rachel Harris.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit, chasing them from New Orleans, throwing both out of work and putting Spears' plans to "dominate" the hip-hop scene on indefinite hold.

This week, in an Atlanta-area rental home hundreds of miles from the Big Easy, Spears shot his fiancee to death, severely wounded her 4-year-old son with a bullet to the back of the head, and then killed himself. The couple's 5-month-old daughter, born amid the Katrina chaos, was unharmed but is now an orphan.

Suicide is complicated, experts say, and exactly what role the hurricane played in the tragedy is unclear. But New Orleans' coroner says he has seen enough to know that the stress caused by Katrina "is a recipe for suicide if I've ever seen one."

"You can imagine how it feels to lose your house, to lose your job and to lose a loved one," says Dr. Frank Minyard, who attributes seven suicides in his flood-stricken city alone to Katrina-related stress.

Calls to the National Suicide Prevention hot line more than doubled in the month after the Aug. 29 storm that swamped more than 80 percent of New Orleans, ripped up the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, and claimed more than 1,300 lives.

Aftereffects 

. Eight New Orleans gang members who arrived in Houston after Hurricane Katrina were arrested in connection with 11 recent killings and other violent crimes, police said Friday. Crime in the Houston area spiked in the last few months of 2005, and police attribute some of that to Katrina evacuees. The city took in an estimated 150,000 people. 
. Tropical Storm Cindy, the third named storm of last year's record hurricane season, has been upgraded, putting the 2005 Atlantic hurricane count at 15. Forecasters re-examining radar data from Slidell, La., found that a small area of sustained winds had reached 75 mph - just above the 74 mph-threshold for a hurricane, National Hurricane Center forecasters said. Previously, the 12 hurricanes recorded in 1969 had been the most recorded. Cindy made landfall July 5, causing an estimated $160 million in insured damage along the Gulf Coast, but it paled in comparison to Katrina. 
. Last year added five events to the nation's list of weather disasters that did a billion dollars or more in damage, the National Climatic Data Center said Friday. Four hurricanes and the Midwest drought joined the agency's register of costly calamities, bringing the total to 67 since 1980.




Contact the Omaha World-Herald newsroom
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