It seems St. John the Baptist Parish is in the midst of a violent 2018, marred all the worse by a string of tragic accidents that have combined to result in four premature deaths in the year’s first month.

The St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff’s Office announced this week that 18-year-old Colay McCovery of Reserve was found shot to death over the weekend in a Reserve ditch.

McCovery’s grisly killing and recovery eerily matches that of Tameka Robinson, who was found two weeks ago dead in the road in LaPlace, herself the victim of gun violence.

Their killings mark the parish’s first two homicides of 2018, a scary number when compared to 2017, when the Sheriff’s Office reported four homicides total.

Scarier yet for local residents is this year’s two killings are initially unsolved (as of pres time Tuesday morning), with authorities only learning of the crimes when passersby alerted them to the potential of a dead body in the street.

We all pray the practice of finding dead local residents in our streets doesn’t become commonplace.

On page 3 of today’s L’OBSERVATEUR, our news team’s third part of a four-part series concerning crime in St. John the Baptist Parish is featured.

The effort is based on crime statistics released from 2017.

Today’s story examines vehicle burglaries, a growing problem in the River Region and beyond.

Part 4, scheduled to publish Saturday, highlights the importance of the Sheriff’s Office and community working together and how that led to positive results in 2017.

If January 2018 is any example, we need the community and police to work together more than ever.