Only thing is, they aren’t counting the bodies in the houses yet.

The search for Hurricane Katrina victims has ended in Louisiana with a death toll at 964, but more searches will be conducted if someone reports seeing a body, a state official said Monday.

State and federal agencies have finished their sweeps through the city, but Kenyon International Emergency Services, the private company hired by the state to remove the bodies, is on call if any other body is found, said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman with the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

“There might still be bodies found — for instance, if a house was locked and nobody able to go into it,” Johannessen said.

The other thing that infuriates me is that many of these victims’ relatives cannot even claim their bodies for burial and to find closure.

Unless they are freezing the remains, the longer they are allowed to decompose, the more difficult it will be to identify them.  

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.

Many of those bodies don’t have names, the remains so badly damaged by floodwater that fingerprints and other methods of identification are useless. But although authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses, they are still holding onto them — to the dismay of family members scattered across the country.

Additionally:

Forensic specialists supervised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are taking X-rays, fingerprints and DNA samples of the corpses, but notifying next-of-kin is being handled by state officials. Their greatest fear is misidentifying a corpse in the deluge of bodies.

Perhaps.  But it should not take this long.  Nor should survivors be kept from claiming the remains of their loved ones.

More and more, it looks like something from Jonestown in 1978.  Survivors were too poor to pay the staggering sums to bring their family member(s) home from the steaming jungles of Guyana for burial.  So the bodies were returned by the Carter Administration under dubious circumstances and eventually interred in a mass grave in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area.

This is what happen later with those bodies that cannot be identified: buried in mass graves.

Dubious circumstances, you may ask?  Here is where the connections to Jonestown coincide with those of the New Orleans fatalities:

  • There was/is no thorough investigation of what occurred to the victims.
  • The bodies were/are allowed to decompose for days whether in extreme heat or in muck and water.
  • The government is thus able to destroy evidence of the causes of death.  (Some people did not die from drowning, contrary to death certificates.)
  • The government can frustrate the efforts of family members and survivors to secure the body of their deceased family member, have an independent investigation or autopsy into the cause of death, and thus stymie any claims that could be brought against authorities.
  • The Bush Administration may be counting on public apathy, racism, and time to get away with culpability.
  • The bodies are being held at St. Gabriel, La., an out of the way place where government organizations like the FBI can probably conduct their own examinations in private and in secrecy.
  • The government has–as author Rebecca Moore insisted in the book, In Defense of Peoples Temple and Other Essays–“abandoned civilized treatment of the dead.”  And for blacks, especially for many New Orleans blacks, this had special significance.

Among the biggest adherents of the New Orleans funeral tradition are those most affected by Hurricane Katrina: impoverished blacks whose burial processions often feature parades and jazz bands. Some scholars have traced these so-called jazz funerals back to Africa. Duke University professor Karla F.C. Holloway says slaves brought to America burial processions involving call-and-response chants and musicians beating drums and tambourine-like instruments to help the dead on their way to heaven.

“The slaves in New Orleans would always accompany the dead to the burial site with rejoicing, because the rejoice was a release into a different kind of spiritual world, an ancestral world, which mixed with the Christian idea of being released into heaven,” says Dr. Holloway.

In recent years, the tradition took a turn, when street gangs adopted the ritual to bury their murdered members. Then, the tradition gained a hip-hop quality. One of the biggest jazz funerals in recent years was for James “Soulja Slim” Tapp, an up-and-coming rapper who was fatally shot on his mother’s front lawn. Soulja Slim’s jazz funeral in 2003 sent thousands into the city’s streets.

So deeply connected are music and death in New Orleans that the Web site of the Orleans Parish Coroner features the sound of its chief, Frank Minyard, playing the jazz trumpet.