BATON ROUGE - On Wednesday, students at southern university released 19 white balloons—one for each year fellow student Shayla James lived on this earth. Last week she was shot to death in her bed.

Shayla is just one of 140 people in the parish who were killed this year.

"It's heartbreaking,” said her mom Shondreka. “You see it all the time, but you never expect it to hit that close to home."

Further yet, Shayla was a victim of domestic violence, which has also skyrocketed in 2021.

Homicides are so out of control the coroner called a press conference Wednesday to address it.

"2021 is the most deadly year on record in EBR Parish history,” Dr. Beau Clark said.

With two months still left in the year, records have already been smashed.

"This morning, unfortunately, I must report to you that we surpassed the all-time record of homicides in the parish,” Clark said.

To date, there have been 140 homicides this year surpassing the total for 2020, which was 136.

For the coroner and Shondreka, the solution is out of grasp.

"Things are completely out of hand. No human, no law enforcement, no judge can actually stop this today,” she said.