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 Each metal coffin is marked with serial numbers inside and out,
should anyone ever seek to bring one of them home. The names of 30
remain a mystery, but authorities have recorded details about their
DNA and where each was found.
The unclaimed bodies were laid to rest in 2008, three years after
the storm killed 1,833 along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
On Saturday, 10 years to the day after Katrina's devastating
landfall in Louisiana, city dignitaries will gather at the burial
site, known as the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. Viewed from above, it
resembles the shape of a hurricane.
"Nobody has ever come searching for their loved one in the memorial,
as far as I know," said Dr. Frank Minyard, the longtime coroner of
Orleans Parish, who helped to build the monument before retiring
last year.
The stories of those buried inside remain unknown despite the
exhaustive efforts of coroners who conducted autopsies on some 900
bodies recovered from around greater New Orleans.
The local coroner's office was washed away in the flooding that
submerged 80 percent of the city after Katrina's storm surge
overwhelmed the local flood protections.
Bodies were taken by the hundreds to a warehouse without
air-conditioning in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, outside Baton Rouge. As
they worked under heat lamps, dehydrating medical examiners searched
for ways to identify them.
By then, many were badly decomposed, and animals had removed fingers
that might have provided crucial prints, recalled Dr. Louis
Cataldie, the former coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish, who was
appointed to oversee the statewide remains recovery effort.
Still, a rewards card from Winn-Dixie supermarkets on one man's
keychain led them to his relatives, who recognized the rings he was
wearing.
An elderly woman, found wearing slippers with holes cut around her
little toes, was brought back to family members who remembered how
she snipped her shoes to accommodate arthritis.
MISSION INCOMPLETE
Yet some people could never be identified by examiners who pored
over unusual tattoos, bone fractures and teeth that were compared to
dental X-rays recovered from moldy basement storage.
"The mission wasn't completed," Cataldie said. "If there was one
person that wasn't identified, it would still bother me."
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After several months, Cataldie's team returned to the city the
unclaimed bodies from New Orleans, where they were stored in another
warehouse. Minyard, the coroner, wanted the bodies buried in a place
where they could be easily retrieved, if anyone ever wanted one of
them.
He worked with community leaders and local funeral home owners, who
were troubled by talk of a mass burial or cremation, to raise more
than $1 million in public and private funding for the memorial
graves.
"It was just a little heartless at that point," said Sandra
Rhodes-Duncan, one of the leaders of the nonprofit that built the
memorial and member of a family that has run a local funeral home
for more than a century.
"You always have something to represent somebody's life," she added.
In August 2008, funeral homes donated more than 30 hearses to carry
the unclaimed victims to their final resting place, in what was
formerly the Charity Hospital Cemetery.
At the cemetery, a red rose was placed on each casket, carried by
volunteer pall bearers. Each victim was interred in individual
graves within the mausoleums.
Each year since, a graveside ceremony has been held to mark the
anniversary of Katrina.
At last year's ceremony, Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, current coroner of
Orleans Parish, spoke of the victims at a service marked by a
clarinet's somber notes.
"They sit in silent watch," he said. "They sit in silent judgment."
(Additional reporting by Kathy Finn; Editing by Frank McGurty and
Mary Milliken)
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