Many of the Dead Never to Be Identified [View All]

Many of the Dead Never to Be Identified

Monday September 5, 2005 10:46 PM

By TIM DAHLBERG

Associated Press Writer

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - They died on flooded city streets in the Big Easy and in country homes in Mississippi. One survived seven months of combat in Iraq only to die near his boyhood home. An 80-year-old woman died sitting in a bedroom chair when a tree crashed through the roof. One man was killed when he went out to his car to charge his cell phone during the storm.

A woman known only as ``Vera'' was struck by a car after the hurricane hit, according to her husband.

Most of the dead from Hurricane Katrina don't have names yet. Many will never be identified because their bodies decomposed in the floodwaters and heat before they were found.

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Many, like the man whose body was on a wooden cart on New Orleans' Rampart Street near downtown may simply be buried in anonymous pauper's graves. The elderly man was wrapped in a child's bedsheet decorated with the cartoon characters Batman, Robin and the Riddler. He had one shoe on, one off.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5257949,00.html