With balloons, prayers and hugs, an exhausted city tries to rise again

It's an unlikely spot for a memorial: a grassy median in front of a car wash off a busy highway in Baton Rouge, La. Right under a lawn sign for Hunt Brothers Pizza is a line of flowers and balloons.

Not far from here, Gavin Long hunted and shot six police officers, killing three of them. Monday morning, less than 24 hours later, a man in a police uniform and a middle-aged woman kneel and pray.

"It's heartbreaking what's going on in our community," says Carol Williams. "It's just so emotional."

Williams, a middle-aged African-American woman, lives a couple of blocks away. The senseless killing, she says, has left her exhausted.

It's not clear which killing she's referring to: the slayings of the three police officers or the recent killing of African-American Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge police. Or all these killings.

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Williams gets back into her car without elaborating. "I'm tired," she says, and drives away.

Next to drop off flowers is Pam Collins, a white woman in her 50s from a nearby suburb. She says she was "crushed" when she heard the news. She has relatives on the Baton Rouge Police Department.

"I was crushed. I screamed out, 'This has got to stop!' And I'm just … exhausted," she says.

The whole city seems exhausted.

Baton Rouge, a city of about 230,000, is a small, close-knit community, says Tim Epps, who has lived here for almost 30 years. He's filling up his truck just metres away from where Long stalked and killed his victims.

"We come here every day, gas up, we know everyone working inside the stores. We're friends with everybody inside the store. I see cops come in all the time, never had a problem in my years of coming here," he says.

"It's horrible that it happened. It's definitely out of character. I mean, this is a quiet place. You have a couple of incidents here or there but never anything like this."

Killing captured on camera

One of those "incidents" happened two weeks ago, less than 10 minutes away. When police shot Sterling, 37, at point-blank range as he was being held on the ground, his death was captured on camera.

The shooting sparked furious protests in Baton Rouge. And that's part of the problem, says Joseph Cius, a Haitian-American who now calls the city home.

Even though the protests were largely confined to poor African-American areas, the protesters, Cius says, stoked a fire that is now consuming everyone of all colours.

"Black Lives Matter is dangerous for the world," Cius says.

"Do they want war? They are raising the red flag with all of these protests. I'm not against the protesters. I'm against the way they do it. They don't respect law and order, the police that are trying to protect them."

With so many black people yelling slurs like "Die, pigs," he says, a tragedy was inevitable.

But Rev. David Chisham disagrees. He says he's been engaging the community, black and white, since the Sterling killing. And things seemed to be slowly getting better.

"All of a sudden this happens, and it's — oh, my gosh," Chisham says, and pauses. "What do you do? What can we do? Events like these, they can stop us cold in our tracks and leave us flat on our back."

Instead, Chisham decided to visit the scene of the shootings, hoping to mend freshly broken fences.

"And that takes time, and there were going to be setbacks along the way, but you don't lose focus; that's why I'm here," Chisham says.

The longer he spends at the memorial, the more hopeful he becomes.

Take Rea Lolley. She wanted to lay balloons at the site of the killings, but first she had to explain to her children that "the bad man wasn't there anymore."

A hug from a stranger

As she was buying the balloons, she says, a stranger came up to her and hugged her.

"And so I just really feel that what evil meant to divide is really stepping up this community and bring us together," Lolley says.

Take Bob Ossler, the man in uniform who was praying with Carol Williams and anyone else who needs comfort.

Ossler, a police chaplain from New Jersey, flew to Dallas recently to comfort the families of the five officers slain July 7. Now he's in Baton Rouge. He barely had time to unpack. He says he'll visit the families of the injured and the murdered officers.

"That's why I brought my crosses here, to dedicate them, and give it to them," he says. "Basically it's a hug-fest to let them know they're loved."

Ossler refuses to believe the officers died for nothing. Already, he says, there are signs the tragedy is forcing the community to look at police in a new light.

On Sunday night, he was eating alone in a restaurant, wearing his uniform. Suddenly a family came up to him, just to say, "Thanks." So they decided to hold hands and pray.

"Standing in the middle of a restaurant, people around me, and we all just hugged and prayed and then more people came and then more people." Ossler pauses, his voice catching.

"It was just the most amazing thing to be standing up in the middle of a restaurant and people doing a group hug as I said a prayer."

The way forward

And that's the only way forward, says Epps. What else can you do when a scared community is protected by a police force on edge?

"Pray," Epps says. "All you can do is pray, man."

And so, at the memorial that grows with every hour, that's what they do.

Ossler takes the hand of the latest visitor and they kneel beside the flowers.

"Take care of us, father," he says, eyes closed. "Our prayers are really what's going to make this happen. In your precious name, Jesus Christ, amen.

"Now give me a hug."

• Alton Sterling's son pleads for peaceful protest