Mayes, whose license was suspended in 1997, says driving to work was a terrifying, daily experience, with every police car representing the threat of being pulled over, handcuffed and thrown in jail.
"She said she had just gotten out of jail a day or two ago. That's where she was all those months. She said, 'I'm clean and sober. My body had a chance to clean itself up. I feel good about life,'" said Brooks. "We just hugged and embraced."
The leading cause of death among these 44 men and women was drug overdoses and substance abuse, accounting for half of the cases in which the coroner made a final determination.
The average age of death for these 44 people was 47 years old, decades less than the average U.S. life expectancy of 78 years. The oldest person among the homeless deaths was 63, and the youngest 28.
All of the 50 men in this classroom have broken the law. Some have killed a person and likely will never leave Louisiana's state penitentiary in Angola.
Shania said by all rights she shouldn't be alive, that she had a lot of close calls, a lot of guns pressed against her head during a time when she spent most of her days robbing people and selling drugs.
"He has these fits of rage where he gets real angry. But we know underneath all of that he's hurting because of his mother and his father's situation," Delone said in an October interview inside Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he was serving a life sentence for armed robbery.
The Richardson children tell their father about their lives 15 minutes at a time.
Sitting at a short blue table in a kid-sized yellow chair, 8-year-old Jonathan Guillory Jr. colors Care Bears drawings, his head tilted in concentration. Across the table, his father, Jonathan
Ladd, 31, was arrested for possession of half an ounce of marijuana in 2011 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
I didn't have a childhood growing up. I was on an adult line," Sharika said of her early years. "I'm watching sex go on in this room. I'm watching gambling go on in this room. I'm watching dogs fight each other in this room.”
They have done no wrong, committed no crimes, yet thousands of children in Louisiana are being punished for their parents' mistakes.
"I've been through a lot. But you can't fold. You just can't fold, because when you fold that's when you're gonna end up in jail or dead," he said
The same day as Pennington's inauguration, officer Len Davis ordered the murder of 32-year-old Kim Groves. She had filed a brutality complaint against him the day before, after seeing Davis pistol-whip a teenager.
He'd steal glances through the curtains and soak it all in -- the men in the slick clothes, shooting dice, driving the flashiest cars, always surrounded by the prettiest women. It seemed magical.
He avoided the temptation of the drug dealers and the pull of prison. He even went to college. He was one of the rare ones. He had a future. And yet there he was, lying on the floor of Club X-Posure in Baton Rouge with a gun pointed at his head.
The dispute illustrates the hoops through which businesses must jump to operate in a protected historic district as well as the dogged determination of French Quarter interests in defending the character of their neighborhood.
Bridgette Kinard remembers the men in the "white suits." They came to her apartment in the B.W. Cooper housing development in the 1990s, wrapped head to toe in specialized clothing to protect them from hazardous materials.
"(Investigators) described a situation to where anything goes," Hebert said. "Basically they give you a menu: Sex? Drugs?"
Eight years later, as the city approaches the 10th anniversary of the storm, the massive brick buildings that made up the old housing developments are all but gone, replaced with the multicolored pastel houses and fourplexes of Marrero Commons, Columbia Parc, Faubourg Lafitte and Harmony Oaks, among others.
Standing in front of the vacant and blighted Moton Elementary School on Abundance Street, Arturo Blanco listened as several people peppered him with questions. But he had few answers to offer the remaining residents of the Agriculture Street Landfill.
More than 5,000 people who lived and worked in a community the city of New Orleans allowed to be built on top of a toxic waste dump were recently awarded $14.2 million as part of a class action lawsuit.
"The people who are responsible for the Agriculture Street Landfill have never apologized, have never said, 'We're sorry you guys lived here and you didn't know and some of you have health problems.' You never hear nothing from nobody that knew that this landfill was toxic and it was cancer.”
Many now see the attorneys as the enemy. They accuse their legal representatives of getting rich off the shattered remains of their lives and the corpses of their departed loved ones.
One day a waiter walked into the adult novelty shop that used to be next door - Bourbon Strip-Tease - and asked the manager if he wanted to make some money holding a spot for one of Galatoire’s wealthy clientele.
