Bay St. Louis, Miss. – The last words Terry Lucas heard her 77-year-old mother say were, “This is worse than Camille.” Then the phone went dead.
It was just after 8 a.m. on Aug. 29, and Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge roared into Lucas’ house near the beach in Bay St. Louis. In a smaller house next door, Lucas’ parents, Gloria and Luke Benigno, 82, quickly drowned.
Authorities retrieved their bodies from the garage two days later.
But Lucas spent the next three weeks trying to find where her parents’ bodies ended up, at one point being told that they were listed as missing, not dead.
“I was furious. I told him we found them,” Lucas said. “We saw them taken away. We just couldn’t find out where they were.”
Lucas’ quest ended last week. But one month after Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of families in Mississippi and many more in Louisiana are still trying to learn what happened to loved ones missing and feared dead.
They confront federal, state and local authorities whose resources have been stretched to the limit.
In some cases, the storm destroyed traditional means of identifying the dead. Lists, official and unofficial, of thousands of missing persons add to the confusion.
Victoria Cubero just wants to know: Is her close friend, Joey McNabb of New Orleans, OK? McNabb, 46, lived in the Ninth Ward, a neighborhood devastated by floodwaters. Cubero, who lives in California, gave the Red Cross McNabb’s name days after the hurricane hit. She received no follow-up phone calls, so she posted his name on a website for missing persons.
“I think he could have swum out,” Cubero said, her voice catching. “I don’t think he died, but I don’t know.”
The identification of more than 1,000 people who died when Katrina struck is moving forward slowly.
In Mississippi, about half of the 220 bodies recovered so far have been identified. In Louisiana, the victims who have been positively identified are mostly those who died in hospitals and nursing homes and had identification bracelets and medical records, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.
However, because the attorney general’s office is investigating deaths at some health care facilities in New Orleans, their names have not been released.
The majority of bodies were found in homes and on the street, and many were severely decomposed, Johannessen said.
“There’s no way to visually identify them,” he said, “and fingerprints are iffy at best.”
In addition, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, storm surges “leveled coastal facilities that have records that would help answer some of these questions and confirm what family members tell us,” said Warren Tewes, a forensic dentist from Maryland working for the federal government in Gulfport.
Those same surges may have carried out some bodies that will never be recovered, he said.
Despite the long lists of people reported missing – the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s list has 1,200 names for Mississippi alone – Johannessen said he doubts large numbers of additional dead will be found.
