LAT: Families Lose (Katrina bodies) -- in a Bureaucratic Mire

[DeepModem Mom]

Families Lose Loved Ones Again -- in a Bureaucratic Mire
By David Zucchino and Nicholas Riccardi, Times Staff Writers


BATON ROUGE, La. — When he could finally leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped east of New Orleans to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father. Slogging through the muck, he found his father's corpse face-down in the hallway.

As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had the body. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won't return it to Reysack for burial, he said, they won't even confirm that they have it.

Reysack's family published an obituary and held a memorial service — all without a body....

***

A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones' bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses.

Many of those bodies don't have names, the remains so badly damaged by floodwater that fingerprints and other methods of identification are useless. But although authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses, they are still holding onto them — to the dismay of family members scattered across the country....


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bodies2oct02,0,5171979.story?coll=la-home-nation

[Kaylee]

1. Disgusting....

Only 900 dead from Katrina, my foot. How do they think they will get away with this. Most if not all of the bodies have family members that are looking for them. These aren't dead Iraqi's that America "doesn't care about", these are our parents, brothers, sisters, and children.

[shadowknows69]

2. apparently too many Americans

don't care about much except themselves anymore or there would be massive outrage on a daily basis.

[nashville_brook]

9. i have to disagree. if the story was "out there" the public would go

apeshit.

i was talking to my husband this morning about the loss of "institutional knowledge." yoou know, where older folks like myself (at a ripe old age of 39) are too "experienced" for most jobs -- read: our salaries don't have a place on the ledger anymore.

journalism is the essence of institutional kknowledge. it's a rare graduate who escapes The Academey with an appreciation for investigative reporting. it's a rare newspaper that still has a budget for real investigative reporting.

but it's not extinct.

this is a ready-made story. the kind of thing legend is made of. it is my hope that there are real journalists working this angle. but it might also be possible to help them along from our little laptops.

hey mods -- might we gather up all the DU threads on this and formulate a letter for email blasting to "city" newspapers to trumet the need for letting families BURY THEIR OWN DEAD!

it seems like the last bastion of human dignity. it seems like a no-brainer. the KEY is information sharing...which is what we do best.

[shadowknows69]

10. hope you're right brook

and that's why i do what little i do in my little corner of cyberspace. hardly hard news but it keeps my skills sharp. I dedicated my coverage of the DC march to my journalism professors. three guys who still got it and shared it with the class of 1992 at SUNY Morrisvile.

[nashville_brook]

12. wow -- we're about the same age then (i was in grad school in 92)

am i "reading" correctly that you aren't working in your field full-time? i sure am not.

but being in school in the early 90s...do you remember the wonder and excitement the a free exchange of information could bring. the internet. we hardly knew what to make of it. macintosh computers that allowed us to be our own marketing firms, publications, and masters of our work. we were HIGH with "what could be the future."

here we sit in that future and i refuse to work in the "marketplace." i feel it's a total waste of my time. there HAS to be something more efficient. and there is. sitting on my porch, reseaching, blogging and emailing. i don't get paid for it, but i can manage my life better from here -- cooking, doing house projects, caring for things -- and luckily we can exist on one income.

we're still learning what we're capable of -- here from our laptops. the more i think about it, this is a story made for our kind of information trasmission. questions we can answer from here:

--- advocacy for lost dead
--- research on how "lost dead" impact society
--- family narrative for those who have lost dead relatives (would be nice to have an online blog or forum where people who have lost family could sign in and memorialize. that would give a creepy body. what if 4,000 families signed in with tear-jerking memorials?
--- records investigations...what is going to happen to all the property in the east. who owns it. who lives there. how is the property being transferred. when. and to whom.
--- clearinghouse for reports of lost dead

[shadowknows69]

16. went to school for print journalism mainly

ended not doing anything in that field (they forgot to tell me there were no jobs) but eventually got into radio and now after being downsized from a nice position at what I thought was going to be my career I started my own advertising agency which has been abysmally unsucessful lol so I run a newsletter type website on the side. mainly human interest video features and interviews.

[maddezmom]

3. OMG...how incredibly sad

:(

[zann725]

4. They're not returning bodies...because of "negligent homicide" charges

against Admin. if autopsies are performed. The DELAYED aid, and failure to properly reinforce levee's caused many of the deaths. And lord knows how many dead were shot by Blackwater "security" forces. If the Admin. lets the bodies decomopose enough, or disappear...no evidence...no criminal charges against them...or so they hope.

It's a sin. A real sin.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

6. On top of that, the NeoCons don't want anyone to know the true....

...number of people that died as a result of Katrina. What better way to keep that number secret than setting up a bureaucratic maze?

[Selteri]

5. How about we start to solve this problem by putting together

An organization - NO MIA/KIHK - New Orleans Missing in Atrosity - Killed in Hurricane Katrina

A group that works for one thing, to help make sure the bodies are identified and returned for proper burial for all the affected families. This disaster only illustrates how we are not only being lied to, but how we are considered to be less than statistics.

[nashville_brook]

7. there HAS to be some sort of action in this area -- love the idea, but

can't get my brain around how to help from the laptop. surely NOLA times-picayune has investigative reporters on this.

what would be great is to have a data dump on this --

maybe we if we can amass enough juicy bits we can do media blasts. this should be over-the-fold stuff in every major newspaper in the country. maybe we can't sway the networks, but the newspapers...seems like there would lots of interest there.

[Gnostic]

8. This is about the most

Disgusting thing I've ever seen.

Someone in a position of authority should grow a pair of cajones and DEMAND the release of bodies.

[sattahipdeep]

11. New Orleans funeral director

....
Malcolm Gibson, a New Orleans funeral director, said he has tried
for more than two weeks to recover the body of his 83-year-old
uncle, who died in his home during the storm and whose remains were
delivered to the morgue by state police.

But authorities would not confirm that they even had the body, he said.

[nashville_brook]

13. 8 stages of genocide (don't know why, but your post made me think of

this. stage 8 is DENIAL -- where the dead are hidden and forgotten. )

http://www.genocidewatch.org/8stages.htm

8. DENIAL:

Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.

[nashville_brook]

14. NPR -- "On The Media" has this story on right now

Remembrance of Those Passed
After September 11th, The New York Times created "Portraits of Grief," biographical sketches containing personal anecdotes supplied by the victim's family. The full accounting of casualties from Hurricane Katrina will likely be months away, but for writers of the New Orleans Times-Picayune the process of reckoning with the dead has already begun. Editor Jim Amoss talks with Brooke about how to portray the lives lost.

http://www.onthemedia.org/

[SoCalDem]

15. Privacy laws will prevent us every knowing how many died..

Every family who lived in New orleans would have to be contacted and required/asked to list every family member who is "no longer with them".. Then those names would have to be traced to see if they are just in another shelter/state/town. Things like this take TIME, and the offices who would have a record of those people are probably forbidden from giving those names out.

The witnesses are scattered over 48 states, and are so traumatized that they may never return.. Small pockets fo families may be in touch, but the large extended families are fratured, and may be for YEARS..

The "missing" relatives may be "assumed" to be alive and well somewhere else.. the families themselves may want to think that.. To think that those missing are dead, may be too painful for them to accept..

It's a win-win for the government, so they will have no 'rush order' to find all those families.. The ones who were on assistance, and have now vanished are not going to be "missed" by the government, and the families who miss them, may not be eager to find out that they are indeed, dead:(

We will never know how many perished..

[anitar1]

17. Read that as Thousands of bodies.

I've never bought the "few hundred" bodies they claimed to have found. They will not issue death certificates for unidentified bodies , there fore if they are badly decomposed they are not on the official list of dead by Katrina. Another lying farce by this cabal.Now they have to figure out a way to disappear the corpses without calling attention to it. Someone will let the cat out of the bag eventually.

[Sven77]

18. funeralgate

look up bush funeralgate and SCI. you'll find some interesting things.

[ninkasi]

25. Isn't that the company

that Bush was connected to, the one who was just dumping bodies? Ok, I did a quick Google, and this is one that came up

http://www.hereinreality.com/funeralgate.htm

From the website

"Here's a new chapter in an old scandal involving a Bush contributor and longtime family friend, Robert Waltrip. This time it's the desecration of dead bodies, and George W. Bush is directly linked to this scandal (as is former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, GW's Chief of Staff while governor of Texas). According to Fox News, Waltrip's company, a cemetery company called Service Corporation International (also known as Dignity Memorial) was "recycling" graves, removing the bodies that were there originally and throwing them in the woods to use the space to house new customers at two Jewish cemeteries in Florida. "

"Bush's connection to the story is that he was subpoenaed in 1999 but refused to testify in a lawsuit by an ousted Texas state employee as to what his involvement was in halting an investigation into SCI's embalming practices, among other things."

This is heartbreaking. After going through the hell of Katrina, and being abandoned by their government, now the survivors are subjected to having the bodies of their loved ones used as yet another payback to yet another Bush crony. It just doesn't end, does it?

[Danmel]

19. That is just horrific

Are there any religious requirements in Christianity for burial? I know in Judaism and Islam, burial is supposed to take place within 24 hours or if that is not possible, as soon thereafter as is possible. They surely are violating someone's religious beliefs/.

The whole thing is just disgusting. I wonder if we'll ever get any genuine information about how many people died. Even now. how many kids are still separated from their parents? How many are dead? And why isn't CNN showing their pictures anymore? Is this story OVER?

[Kailassa]

20. This needs a web-site to collect info.

How would the relatives of missing people know for sure their loved ones are dead if they can't get the bodies? It was policy when people were being evacuated to not tell people where they were going until after the bus/plane they were packed onto had left. So most families have no way to know whether someone is dead or just unable to get in touch.

The only way to get any information will be to have a website that people can email information to, and have some volunteers compiling it. You would have to rely on word of mouth and friendly websites to point people in the right direction, and hope some charities involved agree to co-operate by letting people know of the site when/if it is set up.

Perhaps a leaflet telling of the site could be put on the site for people like us to print out at home and take to places where it is likely "visitors from NO" will find them.

[earth mom]

21. OH! This makes me SO DAMN ANGRY & SO DAMN SAD!

:grr:

:cry:

I agree with others who say that we must do something! Suggestions? Ideas?

Here's a website that has news about NOLA. I'm going to email the story to them and Michael Moore.

http://www.nola.com/

[preciousdove]

22. Katrina Body recovery Thread (Link to original and comments)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4727901&mesg_id=4727901

DMORT individuals are forbidden to give out any information on numbers. They are saying that the state has to notify families. LA State and local authorities say they are getting only a tiny amount of information from DMORT and refer families back to DMORT. (They only serve for 1 to 3 weeks and then go home.)

A DUer this week with inside information says that they have already used the first 10,000 body bags and bodies continue to be found.

MS dead numbers do not add up either based on early reports from law enforcement who stacked bodies for retrieval.

An attempt was made to grab census (names ages) of every resident of the NOLA area before it disappeared at the time Katrina hit by some folks here on DU but I do not think that they included the whole Gulf region. They went on to help set up the missing persons effort that went on here.

Classic tyranny with bodies left rotting in the streets and the names of the dead withheld. For a time there were people, mostly young AA men, who were known to be stuck in NOLA and evacuated who did not show up in shelters at the other end. I don't know if all of them have been located. :cry:

[Nothing Without Hope]

23. Link to an earlier thread on this LAT article:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4949027
Thread title: LAT: "Families Lose Loved Ones Again- in a Bureaucratic Mire" BODIES TAKEN

[Javaman]

24. Culture of death, land of the ghouls...

this is our gov't.

colossal racist failure*.

[donkeyotay]

26. People cannot even bury their dead

It's beyond words. The other part of this is just the question: how many dead? Once again the media seems complicit in covering up anything that would be embarrassing to the gang in power. I never cease to be amazed at the power of propaganda. They can sell war and disaster as easy as soap.

[dflprincess]

27. New Orleans has a large Catholic population

and the Catholic church has some rules on how remains should be cared for. Cremation is permissible as long as the ashes are buried but not scattered - mass cremation when it was possible to identify and bury the indivudal would not be. Bush better be careful or "proflife" or not he'll have the church after him for the disrespectful handling of the dead.