Bodies remain unidentified decade after Katrina

Tania Dall | WWL-TV, New Orleans

Show Caption Hide Caption 30 victims remain unidentified decade after Katrina One decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, 30 people have yet to be identified. Those who survived the storm say their families deserve closure.

NEW ORLEANS — A decade after Hurricane Katrina hit this city, 30 bodies remain unidentified, according to records obtained through a public records request to the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office.

About 1,833 people died in the storm in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Reginald Washington's daughter was one of the dead, bu the didn't know that until months after the storm.

When he returned to the Lower 9th Ward months after the storm, he could barely find his daughter's home. All he could see was a 200-foot long barge with a steel hull.

"This is the very first time," he said. "Haven't been back here since."

Even though he lives just a few streets away, he still avoids this block.

"All they had was a barge there and they were cutting it up," he said. "It made me think about my child, what she went through. The way she drowned made me feel that I wasn't there for her."

The infamous barge and a relentless flood flowed through a massive breach in the Industrial Canal Levee, inundating the Lower 9th Ward not far from where Pam Washington and her fiancé, Darryl Milton, rented a brick single-story house on Jourdan Avenue.

"I can't really say why she didn't want to leave," Washington said. "But I told her I was staying. I really thought I'd come get her and bring her by my house. At least we had an upstairs."

Like thousands of others, Washington and his daughter chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina.

The 61-year-old said he spent three days with no food or water trapped at home until a boat came. He wound up at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome with only $275 in his pocket and a cellphone. He eventually went to Texas to stay with family.

When he returned nine months later, he received a heartbreaking call.

" 'I'm calling to inform you that they found your child through DNA,' " he said he was told. "At first I thought it was a hoax, then she said she was mailing me something. Papers and information."

His daughter's body was found five blocks away from her home. Family members confirm it took about eight months for DNA tests to come back confirming her identity.

On the fifth anniversary of the storm, 80 bodies were laid to rest at a memorial on Canal Street designed, as the engraving on it said, to "evoke" the shape of a hurricane.

"I just thought we should honor our dead in a better way than putting them in Potter's Field," said Frank Minyard, the former Orleans Parish coroner.

Minyard said more extensive DNA testing is needed, but money allocated by FEMA to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals dried up.

State health officials say the department spent more than $3 million in an effort to reunite families with the remains of their deceased relatives. But the federal government only reimbursed them for $2.2 million.

In 2005, Minyard confirmed 40 people still remained.

"It's been five years, maybe it'll go 10 years, 15, 20. I mean it's ludicrous in this day and age to have people unidentified," he said.

The public records request went to current Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, who did not want to be interviewed for this story.

Autopsy reports show locations across the city where some of these men and women were found, many with little to no personal belongings or distinguishing marks.

One man identified as an unknown black male had his body recovered at Interstate 10 and Elysian Fields Avenue. He was wearing black Nike tennis shoes, black warm-up pants, a dark polo shirt, along with a black necklace adorned with a wooden African pendant and black swatch quartz.

At S. Prieur Street in Central City, an autopsy report says the body of an unknown female was discovered dressed in a multi-colored skirt, blue knit T-shirt and wearing a yellow metal earring with the letters "RMJ" on it, a single curler still in her hair.

Identifying more than 1,000 bodies was a complicated task. Dr. Louis Cataldie ran the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, which worked out of a temporary morgue in St. Gabriel. The team of medical professionals had no choice, since the Orleans Parish morgue was under water.

Inside the old warehouse, autopsies were performed, DNA was collected and X-rays taken to try to identify the dead.

But Cataldie confirms medical records lost to floodwater, badly decomposed bodies and collecting DNA samples from relatives who evacuated made that task cumbersome.

"We would take DNA from family members and relatives and try and match the family tree," he said. "That's real hard to do when you've got people who've been displaced to Texas and you're trying to get their DNA. That's one of the reasons it took so long to identify these folks. Fingerprints were pretty much useless."

Cataldie also confirms the funding for more DNA testing ran out.

Cataldie suggests that for families who still don't know where their loved ones are, they could do their own DNA testing.

"I think at this point in time, if someone was really concerned, they could probably do it privately, but it would probably be cost prohibitive to do it that way," he said.

A few months short of Katrina's first anniversary, Pam Washington was buried in her family's plot. Her fiancé was never found.

It's a painful memory for any parent, especially Washington, who said Pam's daughter Whitney is a spitting image of her mom. She evacuated with family before the storm hit.

In his mind, the teen is part of the next generation that can now set their sights on the future.

"We weathered the storm, we went through it and we made it," Reginald Washington said. "Now we're trying to go past that and move on."