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.
"My family has had to endure that memorial service knowing Lord knows when we'll get my father's body ... and put this behind us," Reysack said.
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.
The state official in charge of the morgue, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said through a spokesman that he was concerned about the flow of information from the morgue. At a news conference here last week, he acknowledged that many families were suffering.
"These are horrible times," Cataldie said.
Even funeral home directors, who routinely retrieve bodies from authorities, say they have been turned away at the heavily guarded morgue in St. Gabriel, La.
Among the remains authorities refuse to release are those of people who had died before Katrina struck Aug. 29, and were transferred after floodwater threatened the New Orleans morgue.
"It's inefficient and inept out there -- it's beyond incompetence," said William Bagnell, a funeral director who said he had been refused access to four bodies at the morgue even though officials faxed him forms inviting him to pick up the remains.
