Workers struggle to ID Katrina victims

[rodeodance]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061216/ap_on_re_us/katrina_s_nameless_dead

Workers struggle to ID Katrina victims

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer 39 minutes ago

NEW ORLEANS - Water is unforgiving to the dead and by the time the crews arrived, the men were missing their eyes.


Carefully, the workers slipped them into black, zippered bags, placed them inside a van and drove them 70 miles to an emergency morgue which had been set up inside a refrigerated tent. Over the months that followed, investigators cut them, prodded them, photographed them, X-rayed them and removed pieces of their DNA, all in an attempt to coax their bodies into spitting out names.

In neat rows beside them are the coffins of 27 other anonymous souls, their bodies stuck in a forensic purgatory — unknown, unclaimed and unable to be buried more than 15 months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

There were those among Katrina's dead who succumbed alongside people they knew; slips of paper or damp cardboard, inscribed with their names, were tucked into their clothes. But many more drowned alone, their bodies drifting in the black water, getting snagged on fence posts, coming to rest beneath freeway overpasses, in the rubble of uprooted homes.

It's a fate which continues to torture the living as they struggle to give the dead what the dead are owed.

[malaise]

1. This is too sad

No peace for these men or their families. I will take the aftermath of Katrina to the grave.

[applegrove]

2. The tragedy continues...

[partylessinOhio]

3. Do you believe the Decider ever gives a thought about these unnamed dead?

[EFerrari]

4. Do you believe this whole country is allowing this to go on?

I swear, I read these things and feel disoriented -- like I've been transported to "Raised by Snakes" planet.

Often, I can't do more than kick the thread because there is nothing you can really say about these atrocities that really matters.

[jus_the_facts]

5. Yet they're spending military money to attempt to find mountain climbers who put themselves in harms

...way ON PURPOSE....what the FUCK is WRONG with this picture?! :puke: