On Dec. 12, a woman walked into the 8th District police station in the French Quarter to report that her ex-boyfriend had threatened to kill her on a 2 a.m. drive into New Orleans East.
“Love kills,” Kody Severin said as he pointed a gun at her face, she told police a week later.
She revealed more: Severin kept a cache of firearms at her Uptown apartment and made and sold “Glock switches,” she said. The thumb-sized widgets quickly turn handguns fully automatic, capable of rapid, often erratic fire with a single squeeze.
Agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives soon joined New Orleans officers in a search of the apartment. They turned up five pistols; a privately made “ghost gun”; silencers; more than 100 “machine gun conversion” devices; and an “industrial milling machine covered in metal shavings,” court records show.
Severin, 25, is now locked up in the parish jail, booked on counts of aggravated assault of a dating partner, domestic abuse and being a felon in possession of a firearm. But his troubles don’t end there. Last week, Severin was ordered held on federal gun and drug charges.
He’s only the latest in a slew of criminal suspects facing federal weapons counts in the New Orleans area.
Federal weapons prosecutions shot up last year in the 13-parish Eastern District of Louisiana to their highest numbers in at least 15 years. Prosecutors in U.S. Attorney Duane Evans’ office lodged about 70 new cases in which the lead charge was a firearms offense, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, or TRAC.
That’s by far the most since 2007, when the feds stepped in to fill a void after Hurricane Katrina.
Carjacking, meanwhile, is the lead charge in at least eight federal prosecutions over the past two years in the Eastern District, after none for four years, the TRAC data show.
“I don’t recall ever seeing a year like this past one where such a high percentage of federal criminal filings are adoptions from state court,” said Claude Kelly, the federal public defender for the district.
Orleans Parish has most gun cases
Evans, who has served as interim U.S. attorney for two years, declined to provide figures but confirmed the surge in gun cases, saying his office launched more weapons cases last year than at any time since 2004, at his urging.
In an interview, Evans said he set out in 2021 to assign gun cases to “damn near every unit” in the criminal division, as murders and carjackings surged.
“Our intent has always been to prosecute the worst of the worst,” he said. "Those individuals that repeatedly are members of the revolving door in the justice system. Those individuals with many priors or who have been identified as having committed the bulk of crimes in a particular geographical area.”
Evans said most of those cases are coming out of Orleans Parish. Federal prosecutors made 61 requests to adopt cases from DA Jason Williams’ office last year, up from about 40 cases in 2021, according to Assistant District Attorney Bob White, a liaison to the feds.
“The overwhelming majority of adoptions, in both 2021 and 2022, involve a combination of guns and drug distribution, or crimes of violence committed with a firearm,” he said.
White said the DA’s office didn’t track them before Williams took office two years ago. Williams welcomes the federal requests, White said.
“Federal agencies have much greater resources for investigation, location, and prosecution of suspects,” he said.
Evans said decisions to adopt state cases are based on which office “can get the biggest bang for the buck.” Part of that, he said, is determining “which jurisdiction is there the greatest likelihood the person will be detained pending trial.”
Kelly, the federal public defender, said the heavy volume of Orleans Parish cases going federal is a result of perceptions that “people won’t be prosecuted in Orleans Parish, or that judges won’t hold people in jail.”
Accurate or not, Kelly said, “I don’t think law enforcement has a lot of faith in that system, and where there’s dual jurisdiction – like guns and drugs – they are choosing to bring them federal."
Drug prosecutions also were up in the district last year, though not as sharply as new weapons cases, the data show.
City has regained murder capital status
The heightened federal appetite for gun and carjacking cases in New Orleans amounts to a localized response to the rabid shooting that plagues the city, which has regained the mantle of the nation’s murder capital after an 11-year hiatus.
Nationally, federal gun prosecutions were down 11% last year. In the Eastern District, they were up 85%. Federal weapons crimes tend to carry stiffer prison terms than their state corollaries.
Kelly called it an “ironic result of the recent criminal justice reform movement in Orleans Parish – may be the law of unintended consequences.”
The push by Evans’ office on illegal guns began to take shape early last year with an indictment charging Tyrese Harris with carjacking and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.
Harris was the alleged author of a string of violence that included the fatal shooting last January of 12-year-old Derrick Cash, the city’s first slaying victim last year. Harris also stands accused of carjacking a local real estate agent at the Costco gas pumps, fracturing her skull.
A superseding indictment added a conspiracy charge and two felony counts against Harris, who also faces a state murder charge in Cash’s killing, among other state counts.
In another case, Devonte Smith attracted the attention of the feds during a search last March for Tyrone Steele, who was 18 and suspected in a triple killing in Gentilly and another murder, all in the previous week.
Using crime cameras, investigators found Smith and Steele together in the 1800 block of Touro Street, according to a federal complaint.
Police tracked Smith, Steele, and a third man in a Chevy Silverado to Rocheblave Street, where they hopped out and opened fire at people in front of a house as officers surveilled them, the complaint states. No one got hit.
Police arrested several people and executed a search warrant at the Touro Street house. Inside Smith’s backpack, they found a “drop-in auto sear conversion device,” designed to make a machine gun of a semi-automatic rifle, the complaint against him states.
Smith, 23, now faces an April federal trial date on gun and drug-dealing charges.
'Spray and pray'
Kurt Thielhorn, special agent in charge for ATF’s New Orleans Field Division, called the rise in Glock switches and other conversion devices “an enormous problem.” He echoed experts who say they’re prone to inaccurate sprays of bullets, at a rate of several hundred rounds per minute.
“We’re seeing more of these on the street. Those rise to the top. Any of these conversion devices, we’re always going after those,” said Thielhorn.
“Before, you might get six, seven rounds, or casings to retrieve,” he added. “Now, you’ve got shootings going off and there’s 30 or 40 casings on the ground.”
The lack of accuracy results in what Thielhorn called “spray and pray. They’re just spraying bullets hoping to hit their targets.”
A spokesperson for NOPD said the department doesn’t keep statistics on aftermarket add-ons to firearms. But according to ATF, recoveries of guns modified with auto sears rose nationally from about 300 in 2020 to 1,500 in 2021.
State and federal law restrict possession of machine guns largely to police or military personnel. Weapons outfitted with them are classified as machine guns and are generally illegal for non-licensed civilians under the National Firearms Act.
Evans said his office may pursue 30-year minimum prison sentences under federal law for people caught using or carrying a machine gun during a violent crime or while dealing drugs.
Evans acknowledged that the push to prosecute more federal gun cases hasn’t appeared to produce results, judging by a raging pace of shooting and killing.
“The impact is minimal, if not nothing at all, due to the fact that fiscal year 2022, the murder rate went up,” he said. “We acknowledge that. But we are only one player. We by ourselves are not the solution.”
