Storm Of Murder

Breakdown Of New Orleans' Infrastructure Escalates City's Murder Rate

(CBS)  On Dec. 28, 2006, after Hot 8 had just played another New Orleans funeral, Dinerral was on his way to pick up his wife when he got a call.

"His stepson was in some sort of trouble. He came, just to pick the son up from where he was," Kevin George explains.

His stepson was visiting a girl outside of his neighborhood, and some of the local boys didn't like it. "The stepson got into the vehicle, a gunman came out. The gunman shot into the back of the car trying to shoot the step-son, and actually shot Dinerral in the back of the head," George says.

Band members and Dinerral's family rushed to the hospital. His mother got there too late. "They had him layin' on this table and he just look like he was sleeping. And his arm was hanging down. And I just said, 'Dinerral, please wake up and tell me you love me like you did last night,'" Yolande remembers.

Dinerral' sister Nakita took 48 Hours to the street to piece together what happened that night.

What did his stepson tell the police initially?

"He just saw somebody running towards the car. And he said, 'Go!' But it happened too fast, to really see anything," Nakita explains.

Dinerral's stepson might not have seen anything but Nakita believes there were plenty of people on the street who did.

Those witnesses may be the key to finding Dinerral's assailant. But in Helen's case, there is much less to work with.

Helen's husband described her killer as a black male, believed to have entered through the back door.

Asked if police have any possible suspects in that case, Helen's brother Jake tells Moriarty, "I don't believe at this point they do but I have confidence."

Police ruled out Paul as a suspect. "And then we could all move on to finding the son of a bitch who did this," Jake says.

But when Jake met with investigators he was shocked and troubled by what he saw. "The day we arrived here, I thought I was going to the police station to meet with the detectives. And then I understood the detectives were working out of temporary facilities. And I guess I didn't quite understand what that was until I got there and they're working in trailers. It's been 500 days, you know, since Katrina. My sister was just murdered. And I'm going to meet with detectives in trailers," Jake says.

"Our offices are in a FEMA trailer in the middle of a tennis court in City Park," Lt. Mike Glasser, a cop for 27 years and head of the Police Association, tells Moriarty.

Since the storm, Glasser says police have fewer tools than ever to stop criminals. "We're operating with nothing and trying to combat an escalating problem," he tells Moriarty.

"There was something almost jarring about that, that my sister has just been killed, and it -- the United States of America, you expect there is a competent legal system that’s then gonna take charge. And then you come somewhere like this and you know, they don't have a crime lab," Jake says.

Last summer, the city finally did open a new crime lab, but the police department still struggles to replace the more than 500 police officers it lost.

Nearly three years after the storm, there are still sections of New Orleans that have to be patrolled by the National Guard. "American military patrolling the streets of an American city is not a sign of success," Glasser comments.

Helen's killer could be anyone, anywhere. Before Katrina, the house where Paul and Helen lived was in a neighborhood considered safe. But now police say a new breed of criminal roams the city: young, cold-blooded killers who have no fear they'll ever pay for their crimes.

Music professor and café owner Baty Landis had tuned out the violence, until she heard a friend's name: Dinerral Shavers. "It's one of those things that you can't believe you'd actually heard it. They couldn't be talking about Dinerral," she remembers.

Then on Jan. 4, one week later, Landis heard another name she knew: Helen Hill, her neighbor. "To hear that when I was so raw from Dinerral's death, it felt for that moment like an unfathomable statistic," Landis says.

Landis decided she had to do something. With a few friends she launched an organization called "Silence Is Violence," with a march on city hall.

She expected that a few dozen neighbors would join - instead thousands of people came marching from neighborhoods all over New Orleans. "So many New Orleanians were finding the means to express their own grief. And their own anger. And their own fear," Landis says.

"I ask that you not let the death of my brother, of Miss Helen Hill, and all the rest of my New Orleans citizens go in vain," Dinerral's sister Nakita told the crowd.

It was a cry for change that city officials, like Mayor Ray Nagin, couldn’t ignore.

"I heard everything that you said," Nagin told the crowd, "and this city will focus on murders."

There was a lot at stake as the investigations of Dinerral and Helen's murders continued. A lot of people would be watching.