Shake the devil off : a true story of the murder that rocked New Orleans
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

Even though the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall has passed, much of New Orleans remains obliterated. Entire neighborhoods -- homes and schools, corner stores, churches and barbershops -- got washed away and have not been rebuilt. Outside the relatively higher ground of the French Quarter, and off the beaten path, it's impossible to escape the lingering trauma of the flood. Given the bleak conditions, it's no surprise that the murder rate in New Orleans has skyrocketed. In one sense we will never get an accurate toll of the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the criminal (in my opinion) governmental mismanagement that followed it. In "Shake the Devil Off," journalist Ethan Brown takes a close look at two lives tragically lost in Katrina's wake. Zack Bowen was a personable and popular 28-year-old Iraq war veteran and a fixture of the city's quasi-bohemian world. By all accounts, he was a charming, stand-up guy and a good friend well loved by his neighbors and former Army buddies. He lived with his volatile girlfriend, Addie Hall, whose "dark humor, wild creativity, and eagerness to fashion an existence away from some presumably more ordinary or otherwise undesirable past made her an ideal fit for the French Quarter bar and club scene." During Katrina, the two of them remained in New Orleans in defiance of Mayor Ray Nagin's forced-evacuation order and survived the storm, in part, by looting. In fact, they turned the almost-empty city into a private playground. "The immediate aftermath of the levee breaks -- mass power outages, eerily abandoned streets, and a silence that descended over the entire city even during the daytime hours -- had a cleansing effect on Zack and Addie," Brown writes. "The disaster seemed to have washed away their pasts -- his tour in Iraq, her sexual abuse -- and created a world of their own in which they could fall in love." Fourteen months later, however, Bowen leapt to his death from the top of a hotel at the heart of the French Quarter, but not before he brutally strangled Hall; according to a suicide note, "after sexually defiling the body a few times," he had chopped it up over the span of a few days, cooked some of the pieces in the oven of her apartment and then spent a week partying with friends in the Quarter.

Not AR rated.