DLR'sCock
10-06-2005, 06:21 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/national/nationalspecial/05identity.html
Weeks Later, Most Storm Victims Lie Unnamed
By Shaila Dewan
The New York Times
Wednesday 05 October 2005
Baton Rouge, LA - In a country that cherishes the names of the dead, reads them aloud, engraves them in stone and stitches them into quilts, it is odd that Hurricane Katrina's victims remain, more than a month later, largely anonymous.
There has been no accounting of their age, sex and race, nor of how they died or where they were found. As for how they lived, it is difficult to find even a Web site paying tribute to individual victims. With 972 deaths confirmed and the search for bodies declared complete, the state has released only 61 bodies and made the names of only 32 victims public.
In contrast, of the 221 dead in Mississippi, 196 have been identified, a state official said.
Like any silence, the one blanketing Louisiana's dead is ripe for interpretation - to some, including family members who wait in anguish, it is further proof of bureaucratic bungling or a lack of regard for the poor blacks who doubtless make up many of the victims. To others, it is a deliberate attempt to shield an embarrassing truth from view.
State officials, still in crisis mode, say compiling and releasing data about the dead is simply not a priority. They say several factors have contributed to delays: criminal investigations that have forced them to perform more autopsies than expected; the arrival of a second hurricane, Rita, which once again displaced their staff; and the condition bodies were in after spending days or weeks in the heat or water. The New Orleans coroner, Frank Minyard, has complained that pathologists from around the country have volunteered to help but that he awaits a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house them. But critics say that the state officials have not released bodies whose identities are obvious and that Louisiana has imposed too tough a standard on confirming the names of victims.
Tattoos, driver's licenses and physical characteristics have been used in Mississippi. But they are apparently not enough for Louisiana officials, who said last week that either a fingerprint, dental or DNA match is required.
About 370 of the bodies at the temporary morgue set up by FEMA have been "presumptively" identified but await confirmation by one of those three methods.
Nor has the Department of Health and Hospitals been willing to make public information that it has collected, from the recovery locations to the autopsy results. Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state emergency medical director, has made it clear that he is bewildered by a reporter's request for precise numbers, saying at a briefing last week that there had been "six to seven homicides" and "there haven't been that many" children.
Asked afterward how many more bodies might be out there, he appeared exasperated. "There is one out there," he said. "That's all that matters, isn't it?"
After that briefing, the Department of Health and Hospitals posted the names of 32 of the dead on the Internet, but by the next morning the list was gone.
On the edges of the disaster zone, a much clearer picture of Hurricane Katrina's victims has emerged. In Houston, the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office lists the names of 53 evacuees who have died, most of natural causes and two by suicide. In Dallas, there are 23, including twins who died of "extreme prematurity due to maternal exhaustion and dehydration occurring as a result of Hurricane Katrina."
Don Morrow, the director of operations for the coroner in East Baton Rouge, said that among the evacuees who died in his parish there were 24 males and 44 females, that 36 were white, 30 black and 2 Hispanic, and that more than 60 victims were older than 50. Six were under 21; the oldest victim was 95.
Those killed directly by the storm, which struck Aug. 29, remain the least known.
The lack of information has robbed the death toll, released each day in a terse statement from Dr. Cataldie's office, of a human face. "There really haven't been any stories of who they are," said Marian Fontana, who lost her husband in the World Trade Center and became a prominent advocate for Sept. 11 victims' families. "I think the way people really connected to 9/11 was people's lives, and I haven't heard any of that. It reminds me of the tsunami," where hundreds of victims ended up in mass graves. "It was a big giant number in a place far away."
Families of the victims have expressed frustration that the process is not moving more quickly. Memorial services and burials have been delayed indefinitely, and families must wait to file insurance claims, execute wills and settle estates. Even the few who have been are able to bury their loved ones question what is going on. One woman, Marion K. Babin, said it took weeks to get the body of her husband, Justin Babin, though he wore a hospital bracelet and medical dog tags listing his name and condition. Officials said that Mr. Babin had to be autopsied because he was found in a hospital and that the attorney general was investigating all hospital and nursing home deaths.
And some deaths unrelated to the storm have been caught up in the process. One of the 32 names released was that of Jason Curtis Zito, 30, who choked to death on a wad of tobacco on Sept. 23, his mother said.
Gary T. Hargrove, the coroner of Harrison County in Mississippi, said he was "quite surprised" to read that Louisiana had identified so few of the dead, and speculated that the lag was because of the state's blighted body retrieval effort, which began a week after the storm.
"We started recoveries on the Monday afternoon after the storm, as soon as the winds dropped below 60 miles per hour," Mr. Hargrove said, adding that 65 of the county's 88 bodies have been identified and 63 have been released.
But advanced decomposition does not entirely explain the discrepancy. Just as in Louisiana, Mississippi's bodies were too decomposed to be viewed by families - but many could be identified by physical characteristics. In Jackson County, 9 of 12 identities were confirmed, mostly by scars, tattoos, prosthetics or implants, said Vicki Broadus, the coroner.
Still, forensic experts who have dealt with mass casualties cautioned that every disaster presents distinct challenges.
"Every single disaster I've ever worked this comes up, like maybe they're doing too much," said Dr. Mary Jumbelic, the medical examiner for Onondaga County in New York, who worked on the tsunami last year, the aftermath of Sept. 11 and several plane crashes. Medical examiners have to pre-empt fears that families received the wrong remains, Dr. Jumbelic said. "That will be the question three months from now if the standards are not adhered to."
Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner of New York City, whose office handled the dead after the World Trade Center attack, said Louisiana, where parish coroners are responsible for issuing death certificates, had geographic and jurisdictional issues that did not arise with Sept. 11, where the disaster spanned only 16 acres and the bulk of the surviving family members were not dispersed throughout the 50 states.
Still, Dr. Hirsch said, with most bodies intact, forensic specialists had many more identification options available than after 9/11, when many of the remains were fragmentary. "If you can get DNA, with modern technology, you can probably make identifications in a week or two," Dr. Hirsch said.
The health department has collected 246 DNA samples from relatives. One morgue worker has been traveling to New Orleans to salvage dental records.
Dr. Cataldie has acknowledged that the process is painfully slow, but said he had to be certain of its accuracy. Among the difficulties, he said, was the fact that bodies, and sometimes even medical records found in New Orleans, must be decontaminated when they come in to the morgue.
"If I had a child in that morgue, it'd be horrible, absolutely," he said. "I don't know any way to make it faster."
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Weeks Later, Most Storm Victims Lie Unnamed
By Shaila Dewan
The New York Times
Wednesday 05 October 2005
Baton Rouge, LA - In a country that cherishes the names of the dead, reads them aloud, engraves them in stone and stitches them into quilts, it is odd that Hurricane Katrina's victims remain, more than a month later, largely anonymous.
There has been no accounting of their age, sex and race, nor of how they died or where they were found. As for how they lived, it is difficult to find even a Web site paying tribute to individual victims. With 972 deaths confirmed and the search for bodies declared complete, the state has released only 61 bodies and made the names of only 32 victims public.
In contrast, of the 221 dead in Mississippi, 196 have been identified, a state official said.
Like any silence, the one blanketing Louisiana's dead is ripe for interpretation - to some, including family members who wait in anguish, it is further proof of bureaucratic bungling or a lack of regard for the poor blacks who doubtless make up many of the victims. To others, it is a deliberate attempt to shield an embarrassing truth from view.
State officials, still in crisis mode, say compiling and releasing data about the dead is simply not a priority. They say several factors have contributed to delays: criminal investigations that have forced them to perform more autopsies than expected; the arrival of a second hurricane, Rita, which once again displaced their staff; and the condition bodies were in after spending days or weeks in the heat or water. The New Orleans coroner, Frank Minyard, has complained that pathologists from around the country have volunteered to help but that he awaits a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house them. But critics say that the state officials have not released bodies whose identities are obvious and that Louisiana has imposed too tough a standard on confirming the names of victims.
Tattoos, driver's licenses and physical characteristics have been used in Mississippi. But they are apparently not enough for Louisiana officials, who said last week that either a fingerprint, dental or DNA match is required.
About 370 of the bodies at the temporary morgue set up by FEMA have been "presumptively" identified but await confirmation by one of those three methods.
Nor has the Department of Health and Hospitals been willing to make public information that it has collected, from the recovery locations to the autopsy results. Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state emergency medical director, has made it clear that he is bewildered by a reporter's request for precise numbers, saying at a briefing last week that there had been "six to seven homicides" and "there haven't been that many" children.
Asked afterward how many more bodies might be out there, he appeared exasperated. "There is one out there," he said. "That's all that matters, isn't it?"
After that briefing, the Department of Health and Hospitals posted the names of 32 of the dead on the Internet, but by the next morning the list was gone.
On the edges of the disaster zone, a much clearer picture of Hurricane Katrina's victims has emerged. In Houston, the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office lists the names of 53 evacuees who have died, most of natural causes and two by suicide. In Dallas, there are 23, including twins who died of "extreme prematurity due to maternal exhaustion and dehydration occurring as a result of Hurricane Katrina."
Don Morrow, the director of operations for the coroner in East Baton Rouge, said that among the evacuees who died in his parish there were 24 males and 44 females, that 36 were white, 30 black and 2 Hispanic, and that more than 60 victims were older than 50. Six were under 21; the oldest victim was 95.
Those killed directly by the storm, which struck Aug. 29, remain the least known.
The lack of information has robbed the death toll, released each day in a terse statement from Dr. Cataldie's office, of a human face. "There really haven't been any stories of who they are," said Marian Fontana, who lost her husband in the World Trade Center and became a prominent advocate for Sept. 11 victims' families. "I think the way people really connected to 9/11 was people's lives, and I haven't heard any of that. It reminds me of the tsunami," where hundreds of victims ended up in mass graves. "It was a big giant number in a place far away."
Families of the victims have expressed frustration that the process is not moving more quickly. Memorial services and burials have been delayed indefinitely, and families must wait to file insurance claims, execute wills and settle estates. Even the few who have been are able to bury their loved ones question what is going on. One woman, Marion K. Babin, said it took weeks to get the body of her husband, Justin Babin, though he wore a hospital bracelet and medical dog tags listing his name and condition. Officials said that Mr. Babin had to be autopsied because he was found in a hospital and that the attorney general was investigating all hospital and nursing home deaths.
And some deaths unrelated to the storm have been caught up in the process. One of the 32 names released was that of Jason Curtis Zito, 30, who choked to death on a wad of tobacco on Sept. 23, his mother said.
Gary T. Hargrove, the coroner of Harrison County in Mississippi, said he was "quite surprised" to read that Louisiana had identified so few of the dead, and speculated that the lag was because of the state's blighted body retrieval effort, which began a week after the storm.
"We started recoveries on the Monday afternoon after the storm, as soon as the winds dropped below 60 miles per hour," Mr. Hargrove said, adding that 65 of the county's 88 bodies have been identified and 63 have been released.
But advanced decomposition does not entirely explain the discrepancy. Just as in Louisiana, Mississippi's bodies were too decomposed to be viewed by families - but many could be identified by physical characteristics. In Jackson County, 9 of 12 identities were confirmed, mostly by scars, tattoos, prosthetics or implants, said Vicki Broadus, the coroner.
Still, forensic experts who have dealt with mass casualties cautioned that every disaster presents distinct challenges.
"Every single disaster I've ever worked this comes up, like maybe they're doing too much," said Dr. Mary Jumbelic, the medical examiner for Onondaga County in New York, who worked on the tsunami last year, the aftermath of Sept. 11 and several plane crashes. Medical examiners have to pre-empt fears that families received the wrong remains, Dr. Jumbelic said. "That will be the question three months from now if the standards are not adhered to."
Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner of New York City, whose office handled the dead after the World Trade Center attack, said Louisiana, where parish coroners are responsible for issuing death certificates, had geographic and jurisdictional issues that did not arise with Sept. 11, where the disaster spanned only 16 acres and the bulk of the surviving family members were not dispersed throughout the 50 states.
Still, Dr. Hirsch said, with most bodies intact, forensic specialists had many more identification options available than after 9/11, when many of the remains were fragmentary. "If you can get DNA, with modern technology, you can probably make identifications in a week or two," Dr. Hirsch said.
The health department has collected 246 DNA samples from relatives. One morgue worker has been traveling to New Orleans to salvage dental records.
Dr. Cataldie has acknowledged that the process is painfully slow, but said he had to be certain of its accuracy. Among the difficulties, he said, was the fact that bodies, and sometimes even medical records found in New Orleans, must be decontaminated when they come in to the morgue.
"If I had a child in that morgue, it'd be horrible, absolutely," he said. "I don't know any way to make it faster."
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