New Orleans police are investigating whether a stolen car found near the intersection of St. Roch and North Villere Streets owned by a murder victim could be connected to the kidnapping of a couple that left one man dead in Gentilly and his girlfriend shot several times on Esplanade Avenue.

Wednesday morning around 1 a.m., Bobby Wozniak heard shots from his home in Bayou St. John.  “There were at least three shots.  Before the shots, I hear somebody screaming,” he said.

Wozniak heard a woman pleading for help near the corner of Esplanade Avenue and North Lopez Street.

“It was the sort of scream from a frail, dying woman,” he said.  “We had to go help her.”

Woznaik said that he pressed on the woman’s chest to stop the bleeding, keeping her alive until the ambulance arrived at Esplanade Avenue.

Sources said that it appeared that the woman may also have been sexually assaulted.

Police sources confirm that the woman said the people who shot her multiple times had just killed and dumped her boyfriend. 

“Her boyfriend was dumped near a bridge where there are a lot of abandoned cars and weeds,” Woznaik said the woman told him.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m., land surveyors found a man’s body in a similar location, in front of an abandoned house near the Franklin Avenue Bridge. 

“Detectives are conducting an investigation to determine if that incident is involved with murder that happened,” said NOPD spokesman Officer Gary Flot.

Investigators took three men in for questioning to see whether they were involved in the murder and shooting that left a police officer with an injured hand and a woman clinging for her life.

The three men were taken into custody by police. Police are looking for a fourth suspect.

The four suspects were allegedly stripping the car at St. Roch and North Villere, police said, which is why they took the three men into custody and why they are looking for the fourth suspect.

So far, there has been no word whether the men are linked to the shooting and murder.