Many of the Dead Never to Be Identified

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.

<>

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

What about dental records and DNA? If they could identify the charred remains of 9/11 victims, surely most of the flood victims could be ID'd too.

If these were rich white stockbrokers instead of poor blacks, our government would be making the effort to ID each and every one.

Please, ask the media to demand answers to this question!

:kick:

they and their families. DNA matches should be at least attempted.

They could create a database and match results to close relatives. Bullshite that it's just not possible.

the rebuilding process will be very long and expensive
and it would be even more expensive to take dna from thousands of bodies and do so many tests

Would not identifying one of your family members be acceptable to you?

Jeez, we even know who's in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier!

They're not worth the investment

america will *never* live down this atrocity. The world was watching, watching as we let our poor citizens fend for themselves.

We treat our pets better than we do our poor.

Have been for some time... watching the last era of a once great empire (ringside seats here at DU ;))

It's progressing suitably, don't you think? America is "at war" with itself now?

It's a bit more difficult in the case of bloated, waterlogged, decomposing bodies, but still not impossible. Someone else here at DU posted exactly from what part(s) of the body (either deep tissue or bone, I can't recall which) the DNA samples could be obtained.

That's not where the problem lies. Okay, now you've got samples...of whom? If the family can be located, can they locate and offer hairbrushes, combs, or toothbrushes of the deceased for positive matching? If they can't, the next step is for survivors who have missing blood relatives to contribute their own DNA to a database for matching purposes. But, if there are no locatable blood relatives to match with the deceased, then there's no way to identify them.

Dental records? That'll be fine if a) they had money to go to dentists, and b) the dental records survived the floods and fires.

It isn't going to be simple. The government will make every effort to ID them, but it won't happen tomorrow...it took a long, long time for the 9/11 victims to be identifed, and a few still have not been. So, some people from the Katrina disaster may never be identified. The homeless, the folks with no blood relatives, etc.

Canada sent a forensic team to help with DNA sampling and storage after the tsunami. What with the waterlogging and warm conditions, there were some similarites. Anyway, if they are travelling with liquid nitrogen freezers, they could put aside teeth or something, before they deteriorate beyond usability (I've worked with them before, for biological samples -- they're about the size of a scuba tank, and if you're careful about how often you open them, they don't need to be plugged in).

As you say, in some cases it might just be impossible, if there are no pre-Katrina photos or surviving blood relatives. But one can narrow the pool of potential names quite a bit, with time and effort.

Perhaps there should be a formal request for assistance from the tsunami forensic teams. Their skills could be very useful.

We can afford to identify our dead.

--------

It is unfortunate that the Corps of Engineers was unwilling to try to repair the levee breech before the city flooded.

I live in Denver. Yes, assume this happened here. My only living relative (brother) lives in Las Vegas. Very few people know this. Ok, now you have my teeth...How would anyone KNOW which dentist I used? I can see how I would NEVER be identified......As a Buddhist, I will return( hopefully, as a CAT!),fear NOT.

Where will they find dental records if all the dentists offices are wiped out. It's tragic comedy in a real sense when I think of the behaviour of MSM during a similar crisis after the tsunami. They were boasting that the Asians didn't seem organized. Well they sure brought in help from all over the world and identified thousands of people.
How sad - who would have believed this could happen in the US - fuck Bush.
<edit - sp>

money on identifying poor people? No, that kinda stuff is for the rich and priveledged.

just watch...

away as well?

DNA requires a family member to match -- how many of these people were homeless who haven't seen family in ten years, whose families think they are probably already dead? What about kids who ran away to the big city, but their parents last heard they were in Seattle, no idea they were in NO? If the family members don't offer DNA to the search, that person's DNA will never be identified.

I would not be surprised if 25% were never identified.

her story had been reported before a day or so ago. I remember seeing the pics of her burial.
and now her husband's response. He painted her sheet ``Here lies Vera. God help us.'' i suspect.

how sad.
dp

The victims' names needn't be matched to their bodies.

I'm beginning to see the picture now. Military destruction and punishment are what gets their attention.

There is absolutely no plan for kindness and constructive behavior.

If this were a homicide, there'd be DNA testing, dental records, every fucking piece of dirt would be picked over. Nonstop. Total news coverage. Double duty shifts of officials to get the job done.

The conservatives are in control. Run for your lives.

for god's sakes they take DNA from thousand year old mummies. Is this a set up to down play the number of dead?

You damn right it is. And those "unidentified bodies" won't be counted because they never counted. The invisible men and women who are homeless and disenfranchised have always been "kept out of sight" and it will be quite natural to ignore the fact that they existed at all.

"While the death toll is unacceptable it is less than we expected." You watch as the spinmeisters put this in their daily headline of lies.

There's no way to not count the unidentified dead bodies. Jeez.

There would be no one to speak on their behalf.

Morgue A takes in 200 bodies. But only 140 are identified. As they come and go, who is to know which of the remaining sixty were or were not counted in the final tally of 'unidentified', particularly when the mortuary teams are out-of-state volunteers who are rotated in and out themselves. If someone changes the final count to 35 rather than 60, who would notice?

You can never overestimate the callousness, greed, and political calculation of Bushco. If it serves their interest to low-ball the numbers, they'll do it.

(however meager) to be passed from prior tenants without delay to the government/Haliburton/or highest Neocon bidder. I'm also wondering if the thousands of flood victims who will be floating around on those three cruise boats (off-shore from the U.S.) will lose their right to their prior property while they live off-shore...and perhaps also, their rights as U.S. citizens, since they'll be off-shore. Kinds of like the denied rights of prisoners we transfer to foreign prisons to strip them of all rights.

And why are they shipping them to areas which characteristically are Right Wing, all white (such as Arizona and Utah)?

Which reminds me of that law which just passed denying property owners "right of way" if a developer decides the property would be better utilized for business/development. Wow, talk about timing! Now there's a whole city up for grabs. Talk about luck of the draw.

It will work just like it does when they redraw districts
for voting. Bet the Rethugs end up with more electoral votes.

Come to think of it...I wonder how these people will register to vote or will they all be scrubbed? We can count on the fact there was political motive behind what they are doing.

and at the moment more than a thousand have been relocated to Ceiba Puerto Rico at the old military base. These people and many others as you point out will never be allowed to reclaim what is theirs. There may be some paltry gov't payout to pay for their "losses" but it will require a lengthy bureaucratic procedure. Meanwhile the drooling developers will be getting zero interest loans and tax abatements to "improve" the coast.

The vultures in pinstripes will have a gentrified parade to celebrate the "urban renewal".

I don't remember the incident, but the body had been badly burned. Usable DNA was extracted from the root of a molar.

SOMEONE has to come forth to match it. People in the TWIN TOWERS all had relatives somewhere else. Most of THEIR family may also be gone. They were poor, did they go to the dentist? Did the records survive?

you are the winner.

Fuckers are trying to control the casualty rates, ala Iraq.

there seems to be a cover-up of immense dimensions going on of the number of casualties in this disaster

there is no reason not to make some decent effort at identifying the dead

this is unreal

Wikipedia s.v. "September 11, 2001 attacks"

"According to Associated Press, the city identified over 1,600 bodies but was unable to identify the rest of the bodies (about 1,100 people). They report that the city has "about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead" (AP, 23 February 2005)."

After almost four years, many millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours.

:-( They could get dna from something so they families would at least know what happened. If they can do it from 9-11 victims why not huricane? What a load of manure!

I read it in a couple articles.

It is the same in Imperial Amerika as it was in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

If Herr Bushler's Monsters say 5,000 then it's 15,000. If they say 10,000 it is 30,000.

Amerika has NEVER in all it's history been under the thumb of worse monsters than these.

of the WTC victims. Why shouldn't the NOLA Victims be treated with the same respect? BushCo wants to minimize the evidence?

STOCK BROKERS AND BOND TRADERS were almost all WHITE

In NO the bulk of the victims are not WHITE

Why can't they be identified....
I call Bull Shit one this one

is on the list of forensic dentists for the Dept of Homeland security. She spent the 2 weeks after 9-11 cataloguing teeth at Ground Zero. She has been called up and will be going to NO next week for a similar grim process.

can't be identified because they're decomposed, and seems to be an effort to float the idea and see if the public will buy it. I don't think they will because everybody watches CSI.

Bottom line is they don't want to go to the expense because they don't see these victims as important. They won't be able to USE these victims the way they used the 3,000 + victims of 9/11. (Of course there may be 10, 20, 30 times that many dead in New Orleans, and they'd rather we not know how many there are.)

Frankly, it always makes me cringe to hear talk about the "heroes" killed on 9/11. They were victims, just like the dead in NO are victims. A "hero" is someone who does something heroic, particularly something to save the lives of others. There were heros on 9/11 but the great majority were simply victims. There have been, and will continue to be, heroes in New Orleans, but most were simply victims.

We should honor all heroes and we should mourn all victims. And we should try to identify all the dead. It should actually be easier with the NOLA victims, I think, There are families who have lived in New Orleans for generations and they don't all live in the Garden District. And people who have moved away from New Orleans will know if they are unable to contact missing relatives. It should be fairly easy to come up with a list of the names of the missing and a list of family members to provide DNA samples.

If the well-off (who are more statistically Republican) escaped with their lives...and the voting Democratic poor make up a large number of the dead in NOLA, whether or not the Bush administration dragged their feet for this purpose, it happens to serve the Republican agenda for those districts.

Speaking from San Francisco, when major rebuilding efforts after an earthquake, flood, or other disaster commence..."Gentrification" is the common result. Lofts. Condos. Highrises. Etc.

And, planned or not, it means more Republicans.

Question: How many of the voting poor who were displaced hundreds of miles and states away will be back REGISTERED to vote in NOLA by '06?

People will assume the missing from that area died in the hurricane or flooding. Don't forget, he cannot be prosecuted if he kills millions of Americans because of the Real ID Act.

and all the more money to piss away in pointless wars.