On April 9th, just before 11:30 P.M., three cars got into an accident at the corner of Sophie Wright Place and Felicity Street, a residential block in New Orleans’s Lower Garden District. An orange Hummer H2 rammed into the back of a silver Mercedes-Benz G63 S.U.V. which, in turn, surged forward into a gray Chevy Impala. The drivers of the Mercedes and Hummer got out of their vehicles. One was Will Smith, a thirty-four-year-old former defensive end for the New Orleans Saints and a local hero. The other, the driver of the Hummer, was a 28-year-old named Cardell Hayes. The two men exchanged words, things escalated, and Hayes opened fire with a .45-calibre pistol, shooting Smith eight times, including seven in the back. Smith’s wife, who had been with him in the car, was also shot once in each leg. Smith died at the scene, slumped half in and half out of the front seat of his car. Hayes waited for the police to arrive.

Smith’s death was the thirty-first murder of 2016 in Orleans Parish, but New Orleanians reacted to the news with special horror. The Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010, when Smith served as a defensive captain, and it would be difficult to overstate the place that team holds in New Orleanians’ hearts, and in the city’s narrative of rebounding from Hurricane Katrina. Smith was also known as one the few professional athletes who stuck around after retirement. He married a woman from Lafayette, Louisiana, and he participated visibly in the life of the city. Hours before his death, Smith had been posting Instagrams from French Quarter Fest, the sprawling, free event that kicks off New Orleans’s festival season.

By contrast, little was initially known about Hayes. He had been a local prep-football star, a decade ago. It was reported that his father had been killed by police, in 2005, and that Hayes and his family had later filed, and settled, a wrongful-death suit against six city police officers. More revelations followed. On Sunday, it came out that less than an hour before his death, Smith had been dining at a sushi restaurant with a retired police officer named Billy Ceravolo—one of the six officers named in the Hayes family’s suit. Hayes was charged with second-degree murder, but his defense attorney publicly suggested that it had been Smith, not Hayes, who had been the aggressor after the accident; the police later announced that a gun—loaded but unfired—had been found in Smith’s car, too. Meanwhile, a local TV station stitched together surveillance videos from a street near the where the accident took place. The video, taken just minutes before the crash at Sophie Wright Place, appeared to show Smith’s Mercedes rear-ending Hayes’s Hummer, and then barreling off.

With much left to be discovered, one thing was clear: aside from the profession of the victim, Smith’s murder was a tragically normal crime for New Orleans. A 2011 report on crime in the city, prepared by university researchers with support from the Justice Department, expressed frustration that conventional prevention tactics had proved only so effective. “What appear to be different about homicides in New Orleans are the circumstances of the events—they are in residential areas and outdoors and do not involve the kinds of drug and gang involvements found in other cities,” the report’s authors wrote. “In reading the narratives of the offenses, one is struck by their ordinariness—arguments and disputes that escalate into homicide.” That analysis rings true among locals. “That’s the New Orleans profile: tiny shit that leads to something huge—a card game, a car accident,” Katy Reckdahl, a reporter who has covered crime in the city for more than a decade, told me. “On the one hand, it’s big and shocking. On the other hand, that’s the shape of crime here.”

Many explanations have been offered for the prevalence of this kind of crime: the unusually free flow of alcohol in the Crescent City; an especially deep and arcane set of territorial boundaries in a small geographical area; or an impenetrable “culture of death and violence,” to use Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s words. The nature of these murders also conforms to what we know about the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. “We know that in cases of untreated trauma, the fuse to act can be very short,” Dr. Denese Shervington, a onetime regional medical director with the Louisiana Office of Mental Health and now the C.E.O. of the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, told me. “So what seems to us to be a small thing can be very intense.” The technical term for this is “hyperarousal”.

A generation of New Orleanians, of course, witnessed the near destruction of their city following Katrina. They included Cardell Hayes. Then four months after the storm, on the day after Christmas, when large swaths of the city were still apocalyptic landscapes, police officers, including Ceravolo, responded to a call about an agitated man leaving a Walgreens on St. Charles Avenue and Felicity, just a few blocks from where Smith died last weekend. They encountered Anthony Hayes, Cardell’s father, whose family later said had a history of mental illness. He was carrying a small knife. Police pepper-sprayed Hayes several times. In a video broadcast on the news at the time, Hayes can be seen reeling and backing away as a line of officers, too many to fit in the frame, advanced on him with guns drawn. Eventually, three of the officers fired at least nine times, killing Hayes.

That Smith had dinner with one of the officers involved in Hayes’s father’s death (though he was not one of the shooters) is an extraordinary coincidence, but the main local reaction seems to be, “Well, it’s a small town.” There had been sixteen cops involved in the 2005 shooting, somebody told me, her point being that the number easily crossed the threshold beyond which it was possible that any New Orleanian would be dining with at least one of the cops on any given night.

There is a musician I know in town who tells a story about being robbed at gunpoint by masked men while he was coming home from a gig, many years ago. The musician begged for his life and begged for his horn, both of which the robbers ended up leaving intact. Five or six years later, the musician was at dinner at a cousin’s house when some strangers showed up to join the party. With his sensitive ear, he recognized their voices. “You robbed me,” he said, and told the story. “Oh, yeah!” they said. “How you been?” And then they ate dinner. He ends the story with something the old men in the neighborhood used to say when he was growing up: “In New Orleans, you always meet people twice.”