A shooting on Southdown Mandalay Road in Houma left one person dead and another hospitalized late Friday night, according to the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office. Deputies responded to reports of a shooting just before 11 p.m. and found two adults who had been shot, with one pronounced dead at the scene and the other taken to a hospital.
The Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office reported the double shooting occurred in the 4000 block of Southdown Mandalay Road, an area of unincorporated Terrebonne Parish near Houma, according to KQKI News. Sheriff Tim Soignet confirmed the timeline of deputies' response, though authorities have not identified any suspects, and no information about the surviving victim's condition has been released. As reported by WDSU, the case remains under investigation with no arrests announced.
A String of Violent Nights in Terrebonne Parish
This is not the first serious gun violence to hit the parish this month. Just two weeks earlier, on August 11, an 18-year-old man was arrested on a second-degree murder charge after a fatal shooting in the 3700 block of Grand Caillou Road in Houma, a case Hoodline previously covered in a report on that AR-15 case; in that incident, the suspect surrendered to deputies after ditching an AR-15-style rifle in a nearby cane field. Earlier this month, on August 2, deputies also responded to a shooting, carjacking and high-speed chase that left three people injured across the parish, according to the same account, with three suspects subsequently taken into custody.
The pattern echoes an earlier case from September 2025, when Terrebonne Parish deputies investigated a similar double shooting at an apartment in the 700 block of Bayou Gardens Boulevard in Houma. That incident, detailed by the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office, killed a 19-year-old man and critically injured an 18-year-old woman, with three suspects later apprehended across multiple jurisdictions. And in July, a 14-year-old was arrested after an argument between teenagers led to a shooting near downtown Houma during Juice Fest that wounded three bystanders, including a 12-year-old girl and an 18-year-old woman.
What Louisiana Law Says About Potential Charges
Should investigators eventually bring homicide charges in the Southdown Mandalay Road case, the stakes would be severe. Under Louisiana Revised Statute 14:30.1, a conviction for second-degree murder carries a mandatory penalty of life imprisonment at hard labor without the benefit of parole, probation or suspension of sentence, per the Louisiana State Legislature. Judges in the state have no statutory discretion to reduce that sentence below life without parole.
If charges instead target whoever shot the surviving victim, Louisiana law on attempted second-degree murder requires proving specific intent to kill and carries a statutory penalty of 10 to 50 years at hard labor without benefit of parole, according to the Bloom Legal Network. That distinction hinges on intent to kill rather than general bodily harm.
Investigating Agency and How to Help
The Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office operates under Sheriff Timothy Soignet, a Marine Corps veteran who took office after 22 years in the Marines and more than a decade in parish law enforcement. The agency employs nearly 300 personnel spread across criminal patrol, detective, SWAT and corrections divisions.
Federal crime data offers some regional context: the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting statistics recorded 954 violent crimes and 19 murders across the Houma-Thibodaux metropolitan area's roughly 212,000 residents in 2016, with the city of Houma itself reporting 167 violent crimes and 4 murders that year. Anyone with information on the Southdown Mandalay Road shooting can contact Bayou Region Crime Stoppers, which offers cash rewards of up to $1,000 for tips leading to an arrest or grand jury indictment, submitted anonymously by phone or through the Bayou Tips mobile app.
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