Joel Johnson and Jacob Appelbaum continue to work on "geek aid" projects in the greater NOLA area. Along the way, they're encountering a lot of living people with guns, and a lot of dead people who haven't been buried.
Jacob shot this photo of a body they encountered in a schoolyard in a mostly black, low income neighborhood of Algiers. Late yesterday, Jacob blogged:
This man is three blocks from the house where I’m staying. Algiers is a poor area and it’s not getting the help that it needs. Do you see this body? This body has been sitting here for over a week.
(…) This area isn’t worth while to the authorities to spend time cleaning up. When a policeman saw me taking these photos he started talking with Joel. When I came back to the area where the policeman was Joel was talking about taking photos of the body in hopes that someone would be motivated to come remove it. People have been calling and telling the police for over a week!
The police officer was nice. He didn’t bother us about the photos. Then something changed, I didn’t think he was so nice after all. I realized why he didn’t care about the photos. It took me a moment but then he laughed about someone coming to pick it up when we asked. That’s why he didn’t care about the photos, these aren’t his people. These are the people from Algiers and the authorities don’t care.
How can anyone say they have respect for this community when there’s a body laying in plain view?
On September 11th we remember Americans and what America stands for.
[W]hen I woke up this morning I was motivated to bury it myself. The first thing I did when I woke up was ask Malik what he thought of the idea. He said something along the lines of: “The police said they would arrest me, I would have buried it already otherwise.”
Jacob writes today that a week after this man died, his body was finally removed:
I’d like to think it’s someone that read the blog making calls but it’s more likely it happened because they’ve finally finished with the areas they care about. Who knows? I know everyone is happy that the body was finally removed.
Previously:
Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11
Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid
Katrina account of Malik Rahim: "This is criminal…. genocide."
