Four dead in drug-related murders
Published 5:26 pm Thursday, June 29, 2006
Two adults and two teenagers were killed in a suspected drug-related shooting spree at a trailer park outside this small city on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and the sheriff said he fears violent crime may be spilling over from nearby New Orleans.
Sheriff Jack Strain said Tuesday night’s crime scene was one the worst crimes he’s seen in 25-years of law enforcement in St. Tammany Parish, one of the “North Shore” parishes encompassing broad rural areas and several New Orleans bedroom communities.
The trailer park was just north of Slidell, which is connected to New Orleans by the five-mile-long Interstate 10 bridge spanning the eastern edge of the huge brackish lake. At least two of the victims were former New Orleans residents — one of had moved into the trailer after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city last August, Strain said.
Strain said two people are believed to have been involved in the shootings, but he had no identities and little in the way of a description.
The shooting echoed the June 17 early morning slayings of five teen-agers on a New Orleans street corner, although there is no indication that the incidents were related.
After the New Orleans shootings, 300 National Guard members and 60 state police were sent to beef up New Orleans patrols. Strain said the state should have taken a more regional approach and that the beefed up patrols in New Orleans are likely contributing to crime in surrounding areas.
“If you send 500 armed men into a zoo, the animals are going to crawl out of the cage,” Strain said in an interview.
He said the state should consider assigning more state police to his area, which lost four troopers to the beefed up New Orleans patrols.
Nobody was immediately available to respond to a telephone request for comment from the governor’s office Wednesday evening.
The St. Tammany shootings happened around 8:45 p.m. All four victims were shot at least once in the head. They were identified as Roxann Agoglia, 36; her boyfriend, Eric Perreand, 39; their daughter, Erica Agoglia, 16; and Perreand’s nephew, Andrew Perreand, 15.
Another woman and her daughter who were in the trailer survived unharmed and were being questioned. Strain said the woman made the 911 call to police.
Strain said Roxann Agoglia had moved to the trailer park before Katrina hit. Eric Perreand had joined her after the storm.
Stacy Teal, 15, was in a trailer next door to the crime scene, babysitting her brother Derrick’s three children, when the shooting happened. “At first, it didn’t sound like gunshots because it was inside. It sounded like someone banging on wood,” she said.
She kept watching television, but went outside later when deputies showed up and she heard screaming, several minutes after the shooting.