It had been two days since Cara Nurmi was reported missing and there was still no sign of her. BB St. Roman feared the worst.
She checked with the hospitals and jail, the two places most homeless people are likely to be if they disappear for a few days. Nurmi wasn’t in either. That left one grim possibility.
“I emailed the coroner’s office to be on the lookout if someone comes in and they don’t know who it is,” said St. Roman, executive director of the NOPD’s Homeless Assistance Unit.
Three days later, on the morning of June 23, the U.S. Coast Guard pulled 34-year-old Nurmi’s body out of the Mississippi River. The New Orleans Coroner has not yet determined her official cause of death.
Sitting on a bench along the riverfront, St. Roman held a small votive candle adorned with a photo of Nurmi. She looked out over the churning brown water as a light summer rain began to fall. It had been a week since her friend’s body had been found, floating under the wharf near the Steamboat Natchez.
St. Roman smiled as she talked about Nurmi. The “zany, playful, free-spirited” woman was different from the other homeless people St. Roman met during her 13 years with the department.
“I know the harshness of it,” St. Roman said of being homeless. “I see the depression, the hopelessness. But Cara seemed to always be above that somehow. She knew she was in a miserable situation, but she didn’t dwell on the miserableness of it. She had this wonderful energy. Of course, she liked her drinking and all that.”
A few days before she went missing, Nurmi filled out paperwork to enter detox for alcoholism, followed by inpatient rehab. She had a lot to live for, including a 10-year-old daughter in Mississippi, her family and friends said. They wanted, more than anything, to believe that this time she was serious about getting her life together, following several failed attempts in the past.
But it wasn’t meant to be. On the night of June 19, Nurmi walked with several friends down to the banks of the river and under the wharf at St. Louis Street, a popular party spot for the homeless. She planned to have one last alcohol-fueled blowout before heading off to rehab, St. Roman said.
It would be the last anyone saw of her.
Body found in Mississippi River near French Quarter, NOPD says
The U.S. Coast Guard is handling the recovery of the body, NOPD said.
A free spirit
Cara Nurmi was never destined to live a normal life, said her mother, Deborah Nurmi, speaking by phone from her home in Mississippi about a month after her daughter’s death.
She described Nurmi, who was born in Colorado and grew up in Mississippi and South Carolina, as a highly intelligent, non-conformist who excelled at everything she did. She had an IQ of 150, was a member of the National Honor Society, and played on her high school’s varsity tennis team. Her life’s great passion was the arts: she was a ballerina, a painter, a singer and a photographer. But above all, she was her own, unique self, her mother said.
“Cara was compassionate, outspoken, stubborn and unwilling to be tethered by the regimens and demands of a regular life,” Deborah Nurmi said. “It’s funny because her dad and I are so boring. We don’t drink. We don’t smoke. We don’t do anything.”
Katie Stone, 32, said she always marveled at her cousin’s fiercely independent spirit and her ability to see the beauty in every aspect of life, including what most would view as the ugly or undesirable. These qualities were on full display during a trip to Sweden the cousins took while teenagers, she said.
“We let a group of homeless street performers stay in our hotel room,” Stone said. “The next morning, we gave them our room key to go eat a hot breakfast. It was Cara’s idea to give them a place to sleep for the night. She was adventurous, curious, and not afraid of anything. She had a big heart.”
After Nurmi graduated from Atlanta’s Creative Circus School, where she studied photography, she moved into a family-owned house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. She sold her handmade jewelry and photography at little shops and festivals, and worked as a waitress to “make ends meet,” her mother said. She didn’t have much, but she was happy.
Everything changed with Hurricane Katrina. The storm flooded Nurmi’s home and destroyed all her artwork. “To Cara, her artwork was sacred,” her mother said. “It was part of her soul and losing it was devastating to her.”
Nurmi’s family tried to help her rebuild the house, but during construction a tree fell on the roof causing an electrical fire. Nurmi’s home was destroyed, for the second time in less than a year.
“She got in her car that night and she took off,” her mother said. “That pushed her over the line. She got to the point where she told me, ‘If I don’t have anything, I can’t lose anything.'”
Nurmi, who was pregnant at the time of the fire, moved to Atlanta where she gave birth to her daughter, Aurora. She tried to care for her child, but seemed to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which her mother believes fueled her abuse of alcohol and drugs. Eventually, her parents took custody of their granddaughter, then 4.
“It wasn’t for a lack of love,” Deborah Nurmi said of her daughter giving up custody of Aurora. “It’s because she was afraid of losing something she cared for and she was safer with me. Cara just couldn’t keep it together.
“I think with Katrina, they only counted the dead bodies, but there are other people who took a little longer to die.”
Shortly after her parents took her daughter, Nurmi moved to New Orleans where she would become a fixture among the French Quarter’s homeless population.
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New Orleans
St. Roman met Nurmi three years ago on Bourbon Street after someone called to report a homeless woman in need of assistance. Nurmi said she was tired and needed help getting off the streets. She made an immediate impression, St. Roman said.
“From the beginning, she was a happy-go-lucky person who never got angry about anything. She really kept herself elevated from being pulled down by some of the issues of being homeless,” St. Roman said. “She just had a pleasant spirit about her all of the time.”
St. Roman put Nurmi in touch with a homeless agency that found her an apartment on Poydras and South Prieur streets. But it would not last. She still spent most of her nights sleeping in the French Quarter, St. Roman said, and when she was home, she would invite all her friends from the street to stay with her, which caused problems with her landlord and eventually led to her eviction.
Though Nurmi seemed to revel in the perceived freedom of life on the streets, she seemed tired at times and restless for change, St. Roman said. In late 2015, Nurmi enrolled herself in the Odyssey House detox program, followed by inpatient treatment. She was excited about the prospect of getting clean, St. Roman said.
But about a month into the program, changes in how Medicaid operated on the state level resulted in the temporary denial of care for drug addiction services, said Dr. Arwen Podesta, chief medical officer at Odyssey House. Nurmi was forced to leave rehab about a month earlier than scheduled and it frightened her, St. Roman said. “She didn’t feel strong enough to be out on the street. She knew she would be weak out there.”
Later that same year, Nurmi’s boyfriend, 40-year-old Jaime Deslatte, was found dead of an aneurysm behind an Athlete’s Foot store near Elysian Fields and St. Claude avenues, St. Roman said.
“She and Jamie were so happy together. They were so in love,” St. Roman said. “All these people live such hard lives. It puts so many years on them to be out here on the streets.”
Nurmi’s face showed the weather of nearly a decade of hard years. Though she maintained the same kind eyes and smile of her youth, she lost all her teeth, making her look older than her age and all but unrecognizable to those who knew her before Katrina.
Nurmi’s family tried to visit their daughter several times in New Orleans, but they grew weary of searching for her in “doorways and dumpsters,” Deborah Nurmi said. Still, despite the self-imposed physical separation, Nurmi called home nearly once a week.
“For 10 years she was a wandering soul with little responsibility besides trying to survive,” her mother said. “I was blessed that she always found a way to call her momma. I will miss those calls terribly.”
The last time Nurmi called was on Father’s Day, June 18.
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Their bodies are found on bare mattresses in abandoned homes or in sleeping bags underneath highway overpasses, with few people taking notice of their passing, except the paramedics and police officers who respond to the scene.
Body found
On the morning of June 19, Nurmi’s then-boyfriend walked into the 8th District police station on Royal Street and reported her missing. He told the police he had been drinking with her and some friends under the wharf along the Mississippi River, just past the Steamboat Natchez, St. Roman said. At some point during the party, Nurmi jumped in the water, as she was known to do.
“Police officers would get called out to someone swimming in the Mississippi and they would say, ‘Oh, it’s Cara again,'” St. Roman said. “They didn’t mind. They all loved her.”
Nurmi’s boyfriend pulled her out of the water, but she jumped right back in.
“She was laughing, playing, having fun,” St. Roman said. “They pulled her out again. They assumed she was going to settle down and sleep for a little bit, so they went off to the Quarter to get something.”
When they came back, Nurmi was gone.
Five days later, her boyfriend walked back into the 8th District police station. He found his girlfriend’s body, he told them, floating in the water under the wharf.
“Her boyfriend said Cara was saying she was going to drink as much as she could before she went to rehab,” St. Roman said. “That’s how she was, all this great energy, she just needed more focus.”
Two months after her friend’s death, St. Roman reflected on her passing, describing it as a “tragic story,” though not atypical among those with great creativity.
“These gifted artists waver between the heaven of lofty imagination which causes them to soar and the hell of everyday hardships which drag them down,” she said. “Sadly, Cara didn’t have the strength in her young life to fly above the current which ultimately pulled her down.”