Denise Butler woke up with a start early that Sunday. The television was showing the latest shooting in a bloody year for New Orleans. This one was a double homicide in front of a 7th Ward store.

The store looked familiar. It wasn’t until the next day, however, that Butler discovered that one of the victims was her son.

All too many loved ones had to grapple with similarly grim news in 2016. Shootings in New Orleans rose by nearly 25 percent in 2016, while homicides climbed by 7 percent to 176 as of noon Saturday, marking the second annual increase in a row.

Crime analyst Jeff Asher, who compiled those numbers, said the city’s per capita murder rate will likely rank as the fourth-worst among large American cities this year.

Last year, New Orleans was No. 5, its best rank in many years.

The rising death toll has city officials searching for ways to reverse the trend, but easy solutions have proven elusive in New Orleans, where poverty and violence remain endemic. Authorities believe the rise in all shootings this year is tied to a resurgence in the heroin trade and a spike in retaliatory attacks.

Police Superintendent Michael Harrison can point to success in other crime categories. Armed robberies are down 10 percent, the rates of other major crimes remain more or less steady, and 911 response times have been cut from their 2015 highs. Despite a mass shooting on Bourbon Street on Nov. 27, gun violence remains rare in the French Quarter.

For Butler, the bad news will linger forever. So far, police have made no arrests and named no suspects in the double homicide that claimed her son.

“This is really a broken heart. I try to be me, but I’m not really me,” Butler said. “I don’t have no closure, or nothing of what happened to my child.”

The numbers

The 176 homicides recorded in New Orleans were up from the 164 killings the NOPD reported to federal authorities in 2015. Meanwhile, shooting incidents — instances in which at least one person was hit by a bullet — rose much more steeply, going from 391 in 2015 to 485 in 2016.

“It is going to be more people engaging in that drug market as entrepreneurs and not necessarily in the name of gangs," Harrison said of the increase. "It’s going to be the retaliation factor from previous shootings or previous bad acts related to the drug industry. And it’s going to be arguments between people who know one another and got into arguments that turned into fights that turned into shootings."

City officials say that gang-related killings remain down from where they were in 2012, when Mayor Mitch Landrieu launched NOLA for Life, his signature murder reduction program.

The multifaceted program has mostly targeted young men involved in gang or group-related violence with a carrot-and-stick approach of indictments and social services. The NOPD believes that through Tuesday, 45 of 2016's murders were gang or group-related, compared with 89 such killings in 2010.

Detectives believe they have ascertained the motive, although not necessarily made an arrest, in 99 of 2016’s homicides, or just over half. Twenty-two killings appear to have sprung from arguments, a 38 percent increase, and 46 resulted from retaliation, a 318 percent increase. Police said that domestic killings, on the other hand, were down 54 percent from 2015.

This is the second straight year in which New Orleans has experienced an increase in murders. Police reported a 9 percent rise in 2015 over the year before.

“I don’t know that anybody would not be concerned with that,” Harrison said.

The chief said the department will continue its efforts to target individuals at risk of becoming either a shooting victim or a perpetrator or, through NOLA for Life, to offer them social services. Online crime reporting may free up more time for officers to go on patrol, and crime analysts due to be hired next year will help district commanders make smarter deployments, he said.

Harrison noted that homicides have been rising across the U.S. The Brennan Center for Justice said in a report that murders were on track to rise 14 percent in the 30 largest U.S. cities in 2016.

“I think the department is becoming more effective every day, more efficient every day, and you’re going to see us accomplish a lot more with what we have,” Harrison said. “As long as we keep doing that, you’ll see us make a dent in it. But this is not unique to New Orleans; that’s why we don’t look at it necessarily as a local trend.”

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The victims

A man killed in the 7th Ward in November represents just one of the nearly 600 people shot in New Orleans in 2016, but his story illustrates how devastating the fallout from every one of those incidents can be. Leslie Butler’s mother will never be able to erase his death from her memory.

Butler and Arthur Caldwell, both 31, were sitting in the front of an SUV outside the D&M Discount store at 2037 N. Broad St. about 11 p.m. Nov. 5 when someone opened fire on them, police said. Both men died at the scene.

Denise Butler, 55, said she had raised her son alone, drawing on help from her mother to send him to highly regarded St. Augustine High School.

Defense attorney Gary Wainwright, who lived on the same street as the Butlers near the Fair Grounds racetrack, remembered “a very polite and kind young man” who excelled at football.

“At a certain point — he was in high school — I actually told him I’d give him $10 for every A he made,” Wainwright recalled. “I think I probably ended up giving him $50 every report card.”

After Butler graduated from high school he joined the Marines, at his mother’s urging. The year was 2003. She said that he did two tours abroad in combat zones, then came back a changed man. He was diagnosed with PTSD, she said.

“He was a wild, lost boy. That’s how I feel,” Butler said. “He tried and tried and tried. He would get good jobs, but when that PTSD kicked in, he would tear this house up.”

Two years after his return, Leslie Butler was convicted of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine. Wainwright remembered visiting his former neighbor in jail.

“I could just see that he wasn’t the same person that I knew. He came back a changed person,” Wainwright said.

Despite Leslie Butler's struggles, he was still capable of great tenderness, his mother said. He doted on his 5-year-old son. He was close to his younger brother and sister, both of whom are in college.

And Denise Butler said her son had a special bond with his ailing grandmother. The last time all three were together, in late October, he whispered something to her. "The next day my mama was up in full spirits," Butler said.

Butler said life since her eldest son died has been “cloudy.” She fears that his killing will never be solved, and she wonders how his life would have turned out if he had not joined the military. She keeps the box of his cremated remains in her home.

One night recently she took the box out and showed it to a visitor, her voice cracking as she spoke.

“He’s home with me,” Denise Butler said. “People think I’m crazy, but this is all what I have of my son. This is all what I have, and it’s amazing, how people say in the Bible, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ It’s really, really ashes.”

The future

The rising tide of gun violence has proven ready fodder for critics of Landrieu, who has made reducing the city’s high murder rate his cornerstone issue. While the rate fell significantly earlier in his tenure, the number of homicides recorded in 2016 was more than the number in Landrieu’s first year in office.

Trash-collection contractor Sidney Torres, who is mulling a bid for mayor in the fall election, called for metal detectors to ring Bourbon Street after 10 people were shot there, one fatally, in November. And Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is thought to be considering a run for governor in 2019, on Thursday released a short video that flashes negative crime numbers about New Orleans.

Landry announced in July that a special task force of state agents would be deployed to the French Quarter and Central Business District during special events.

The French Quarter, given its importance to the city's tourism-centric economy, is a focal point for many critics, but shootings there are comparatively rare. Through Saturday morning, for instance, just two of the city's nearly 500 shooting incidents in 2016 happened on Bourbon Street.

Less-visited neighborhoods bear the true brunt of gun violence in New Orleans. Asher said the areas most affected by the rising numbers of shootings have been in the NOPD's 5th District, which includes the 7th Ward, 9th Ward and St. Roch, and the 7th District, which covers almost all of New Orleans East.

"There have been 137 shootings in the 5th and 7th since July 1 and 143 shootings in the other six districts combined," Asher said.

The criticisms may grow louder in 2017 if shootings and killings continue to rise. Asher fears they could rise, pointing to a rising number of 911 calls about gunshots as a leading indicator. He also says that New Orleans may have gotten lucky in 2016, in the sense that a smaller-than-usual proportion of shooting incidents resulted in fatalities.

“The last six months have had shootings sustained at a level that the city has not experienced since 2010. It leads to the question of what happens next year if the shootings stay the same but the percentage of shootings that end in a fatality returns to the expected average,” Asher said.

City officials dispute the notion that luck saved New Orleans from having an even worse year, as measured by murders. Harrison said detectives have seen an increase in the type of shootings in which fleeing perpetrators let off wild potshots, hitting their victims in arms or legs.

“It’s not a person-to-person engagement between the victim and perpetrator, which usually results in more critical injuries that result in death,” Harrison said.

But Asher fears the city could experience as many as 200 murders in 2017, a number last recorded in 2011.

“This year, I would say the canaries in the mine started to go off,” he said. “All of the indicators are there that if nothing changes, it could be a very bad year.”