Hundreds of Coast families still searching for loved ones Sep 27

[preciousdove]

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/thesunherald/12758704.htm

...Police retrieved their bodies from the garage of their home two days later. Lucas spent the next three weeks trying to find her parents' bodies, 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."...

Howell, the DMORT commander, said all information regarding missing and dead can only come from state and local officials, usually coroners.

Joanne Adams, business manager in the Iberville Parish Coroner's Office in Louisiana, said state employees based in the St. Gabriel Parish Coroner's Office are handling the process of identifying the dead. About 700 of the 885 bodies recovered so far in Louisiana are at St. Gabriel.

"They have not given us a list of those they have identified," she said. "Families call us and we're not a help. We've been told to give them the same number that people call for lost family members. The families usually call us back and tell us they got nowhere. They were just asked a lot of questions."..

(Great they have released ONE name and just held a conference on Tuesday about what to do about Katrina people reported missing. Lots more details of procedures of identifying the dead)

[Rose Siding]

1. The LAT covered other instances of this today, too

Families Lose Loved Ones Again -- in a Bureaucratic Mire

BATON ROUGE, La. — When he could finally leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped east of New Orleans to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father. Slogging through the muck, he found his father's corpse face-down in the hallway.

As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had the body. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won't return it to Reysack for burial, he said, they won't even confirm that they have it.

Reysack's family published an obituary and held a memorial service — all without a body.
.....
A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones' bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bodies2oct02,1,1209853.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

And that's how they handled one body that had been positively IDd!

[Nothing Without Hope]

2. Reported in this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4949027
Thread title: LAT: "Families Lose Loved Ones Again- in a Bureaucratic Mire" BODIES TAKEN

Is this just callous indifference, or part of a deliberate effort to keep the death toll down?