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Dozens of shots fired Thursday
on troubled block, no one injured
(by Leslie Williams, NOTP)
The intended targets of a shooting Thursday afternoon were perched on the steps of a house in the 2600 block of Dumaine Street.
It is the same block in which two people were shot dead in April 2008. The targets were sitting on the steps of house, which has a no trespassing sign as well as "No sitting" hand painted on the front of the house. "Don't sit on steps" is written on the building's columns. "Nine dead" is painted on the structure. And there is the hand-painted plea: "Help us."
Shortly after 5 p.m., a group of boys began firing automatic and other handguns at people who were sitting on the steps of that house on Dumaine between North Broad Avenue and North Dorgenois Street, according to residents.
Law-enforcement workers placed at least 40 cones marking evidence in the block in view of a crime camera.No one was shot, though, police said.
None of the neighbors saw what happened to the people on the steps.
The shooting began while a handful of residents were chatting outside another home on the block, residents said
.
"God was with us that's why those little boys had some kind of heart," said a woman who was visiting her mother.
When the shooting started, she said, her older sister was in the street on the passenger-side of her truck -- and in the line of fire.
She said she pleaded for her sister's life, asking the armed boys to allow her sister to get out of the street, away from the shooters and their intended targets.
They complied.
Her sister ran, but injured herself when she slipped and fell near the sidewalk while running into her mother's house, her mother said.
She then hid behind a garbage can along the edge of Dumaine Street while relatives ran indoors.
The shooters were firing in the direction of Dumaine and Broad, residents said, in the direction of the crime camera.
Officer Hilal Williams said she does not know if the camera works. Residents insisted it does not.
A girl in the fifth grade of a New Orleans elementary school and an A-student said the shooters had "some nines and automatic guns."
Police so far have no suspects or motive, Williams said.
The fifth-grader's 52-year-old grandmother insisted the police "just need to sit around here."
"It is out of control on this block," she said, Her daughter and others who sought safety during the shooting agreed.