When she noticed the human waste on the floor of the trendy women's shoe boutique she manages, Lindsay Foret suspected looters had soiled the store out of spite.

"I was like, 'This is horrible. There's brand new bathrooms and they couldn't even go there?"' Foret said. "I went back to the bathrooms and they were perfectly fine."

As she spoke to fellow merchants along trendy Magazine Street, on the edge of the Garden District, Foret quickly learned she wasn't the only one who found such unseemly messes while trying to reopen a looted store.

Around the city, merchants returning after Hurricane Katrina who expected their worst problems to include storm damage or stolen merchandise have found numerous examples of vandalism, some of it vile, that apparently was meant to upset store owners.

"I can confirm some stores were vandalized -- and soiled, to some degree," city police Capt. Marlon Defillo said. He was not sure if it was widespread and said he could not comment on motives, but he suggested a lack of running water may have been a factor at times.

Sociologists say it may speak to the anger of a disenfranchised segment of the population and how -- at least during the chaos that ensued shortly after the storm -- they reveled in ruling certain places they may have previously perceived as snobby or out of reach.

"It is asserting a kind of power," Tulane sociology professor Martha K. Huggins said. "People who have their house broken into often say they feel violated, and defecating on the floor is the ultimate way to violate somebody.

"People who've been marginalized and excluded from the economic system and social system and don't feel they have any stake, it's not surprising that some are going to behave in a way that shows they have absolutely no respect for and no stake in the system," she added.

Human feces was found in a number of stores around town, from the independently owned shops uptown to the chain stores at the upscale Canal Place shopping mall downtown.

"I was like, 'These animals,"' said Jack Sutton, who owns a fine jewelry store that was looted inside the Canal Place mall.

Sutton found his store had display cases smashed and broken well beyond what was necessary to steal the goods inside. Looters overturned furniture and dumped out boxes of files. They even drank champagne he kept in a small refrigerator, as if to celebrate. He did not find human waste in his store but saw it in several others in the mall.

"There definitely were toilets around," Sutton said.

Myron Goldberg, owner of M. Goldberg menswear store in uptown New Orleans, said those who broke into his store smashed open a gum ball machine and ground gum into recently refinished hardwood floors. "We had to get the wood floors redone," he said.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)