In the quiet of a Tuesday evening in New Orleans, a family home on Pebble Drive turned into the scene of an unimaginable tragedy. Around 9:59 p.m., officers from the New Orleans Police Department’s Seventh District responded to a reported aggravated battery by cutting. Inside they found an unresponsive man suffering from at least one fatal stab wound and two other adult victims with stab wounds.
The man who died was identified as Samuel Eweni, Ph.D., associate professor in the College of Business & Public Administration at Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO). Two of his daughters were found injured in the same home and rushed to hospital — one has since been released and the other remains hospitalized but is expected to recover.
The suspect: Dr. Eweni’s son, Chukwuebuka Eweni, age 27, who was quickly identified by homicide detectives and now faces an arrest warrant for one count of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder. After the attack, police believe he went to a hospital in New Orleans East where he had sought treatment previously, was transferred to another facility in Jefferson Parish, and was taken into custody Wednesday morning.
For those who knew him, Professor Eweni was more than a faculty member. At SUNO, he was known as a passionate mentor, dedicated educator and a guiding light for his students. As the SUNO chancellor said: “Dr. Eweni was more than an educator—he was a mentor and a guiding light to so many of our students. His contributions to the university’s mission of transforming lives through education will be remembered and celebrated.”
Neighbors say the evening began like any other: quiet, ordinary, peaceful. But in an instant, something snapped. Family members revealed to media that Chukwuebuka had long struggled with mental-illness, though they insisted he had never shown signs of violence before. “It was just a normal evening. No one could have imagined something like this happening,” one relative shared. The suddenness of the act has left the community grappling for answers.
The local SUNO community and the neighborhood of Little Woods, where the home is located, now find themselves wrapped in grief, shock and sorrow. In the aftermath of the loss of someone so respected and warm, discussions are already turning to mental-health support, family crisis services, and how a person with illness moves to a violent act so suddenly.
As the investigation continues, authorities say fingertips remain on establishing exactly what triggered the violence, even as they emphasise that all persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty. In this quiet neighborhood, the reverberations of a family’s tragedy ripple outward—and the memory of Dr. Samuel Eweni, a teacher who poured his life into others, hangs heavy.
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