It is a cruel and almost insufferable indignity for those who already have suffered so much.
Thousands of frustrated Hurricane Katrina victims who lost their homes, possessions and livelihoods have yet to retrieve bodies of loved ones lying anonymously in crowded morgues, still unidentified more than five weeks after the disaster struck.
Officials in Louisiana underscored just how long many families will have to wait when they announced Thursday that the bodies of only 73 of Katrina’s 988 Louisiana victims have been released to relatives. It could take up to a year to identify the dead and return the bodies, authorities acknowledged.
The process is especially slow in Louisiana, where officials are performing full autopsies on most bodies. They are dealing not just with drownings, heart attacks and strokes but also with possible homicides, suicides and the potential threat of litigation.
“You wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy here,” said the frustrated Orleans Parish coroner, Frank Minyard.
At two gigantic and heavily guarded makeshift morgues in Mississippi and Louisiana, a grueling eight-station process of body identification has been going on for weeks.
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Detailed photos of the bodies are taken, including tattoos or other identifying characteristics. Personal effects such as jewelry are collected. There is an external examination, a full-body X-ray, fingerprinting and dental exams. And a DNA sample is taken.
Clothing is then placed on the body, and it is put in a casket where a “tracker” assigned to the body signs off on it. Only then are relatives informed of the body’s whereabouts, officials said.
In Mississippi, where the process is taking place in tents outside Gulfport in a parking lot next to a water park, identifications have been faster.
There have been fewer bodies to identify–221 so far–and authorities there are performing full autopsies on a limited basis. Instead, specialists look over the bodies for signs of unusual trauma and so far have performed relatively few autopsies.
“Our goal is to provide closure to the family members,” said Douglas Yauch, commander of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team in Mississippi.
In Louisiana, however, that closure has been hampered by bureaucratic snafus, bickering and the decision to autopsy a large proportion of the victims.
Minyard said pathologists and others in St. Gabriel are working “under the most adverse conditions.” He said his temporary trailer office at the encampment did not receive a telephone line until Wednesday.
Minyard, who ultimately must sign off on the death records of those who were found in New Orleans, said he wants to see full autopsies–rather than just an identification examination–done on “almost everybody.”
But with fewer than 15 autopsies typically being performed each day, the bodies remain stacked up in refrigerated semitruck trailers. He said about 300 autopsies still must be done, and he has requested more help from other states.
Minyard spoke openly about tensions between local and federal officials, saying only five autopsies could be done Thursday morning because the federal response team finished its identification work early in the day and closed the morgue.
Some identification efforts also have been slowed, he said, because paperwork that is supposed to show where the bodies were recovered was lost or not completed.
“People lose their loved ones in the system,” he said. “About every 20 minutes there is a new problem.”
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state official in charge of the morgue, said “presumptive” identification has been made on about 340 bodies.
But he said identification has been further hampered by glitches in a computer system that was supposed to link morgue data with details about clothing, jewelry and other information provided by family.
Forty-one percent of the dead at the morgue are black, while 35 percent are white. No race has been determined for about 23 percent, and ages have not been determined for nearly two-thirds of victims.
Most died of natural causes such as strokes and heart attacks triggered by stress from the storm, Cataldie said. Eight bodies have been recovered with gunshot wounds, but officials said those cases have not been classified as homicides because the circumstances are unknown.
“Yes, it is going horribly slow,” he said of the identification process.
But families already broken in spirit are seething at the pace.
Displaced in Marion, Ark., Marcelyn Puig has tried anything she can think of to find the body of her father, Edward Dugas.
Dugas, 79, had the misfortune of needing kidney and colon surgery two days before Katrina swamped New Orleans. When his family last saw him before evacuating Aug. 28, Dugas was clinging to life in a New Orleans hospital.
For weeks, the Dugas family lived with relatives and in hotels because they were unable to return to their flooded St. Bernard Parish. They phoned hospitals, friends, law enforcement and relief agencies to find out what happened to their father.
Eventually they received confirmation that Dugas died after surgery in another sweltering New Orleans hospital to which he had been moved.
But to this day, the family does not know where his body lies.
Two weeks ago, Puig and a sister went to Louisiana and provided DNA samples in the hope that coroners could find a match.
They have yet to hear back, Puig said. If they could only get admittance to the morgue, the sisters say, they could find their father quickly because he sported a tattoo emblazoned with “Olga,” his wife’s name.
“Why does this have to take so long?” Puig asked. “And why are we kept so much in the dark?”
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Puig recently returned to her house in St. Bernard Parish for the first time, finding it caked with mud and the family’s belongings trashed.
One of the few things the family can salvage is their father’s body, Puig said, so he can at least be cremated.
“I’d feel a lot better if I could find my dad’s body,” she said. “If I have to, I will carry him around with me every day until he can get to a right place. … I just want him close to me, to hold him and say a proper good-bye.”
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