Ryburn said he learned four days after Katrina that his frail 83-year-old mother, Alma Ryburn, had died while being evacuated from a hospital in New Orleans to one in Alexandria, La.
Ryburn and his sister drove to Alexandria to collect the body, only to find that it had been transferred to a third hospital, and then finally to St. Gabriel. It took 10 days and the intervention of a funeral home to get the state to identify his mother's body, Ryburn said.
"My mom went around for 10 days, all through south Louisiana," Ryburn said. "That was not a pretty thing to go through."
William S. Porter III, an Army veteran from Suffolk, Va., said he tried for weeks to find out what happened to his father, 75, the embalmer who worked for Cal Johnson's funeral home. Despite pleas by family members, the elder Porter had refused to evacuate his home in the Gentilly section of New Orleans.
It was not until last Wednesday, Porter said, that he got a call from a FEMA official at St. Gabriel who told him that his father's body might be in the morgue. The body had been recovered from Porter's home.
The official told Porter he might have to provide a DNA cheek swab at St. Gabriel, and said he would call him back to confirm details. The call never came. Porter said his calls to FEMA numbers reached only answering machines.
Enraged, Porter flew to New Orleans on Friday, meeting with his brother, an Army staff sergeant who flew in from Ft. Sill, Okla. He said they would not leave without their father's remains.
"It's been a month now -- what are they waiting for?" Porter asked. "If they took my father's body out of his house, why didn't they just write down the address and look around for something with his name on it? It ain't that hard."
Johnson, the funeral director, said he had faxed documents to the morgue, including Porter's Social Security number, but was told that no information was available.
"I'm a professional in the business, a licensed funeral director, and they won't tell me anything," Johnson said. "It's ridiculous how secretive they are."
Johnson said he also tried to recover the bodies of six clients who had died before the storm and were transferred to St. Gabriel when floodwater threatened the Orleans Parish morgue. Even though those bodies already had been identified and prepared for burial, Johnson said, the morgue was refusing to release them.
