He said he had faxed the morgue death certificates for all six, along with names and phone numbers of next of kin, but was told that the names were not in the morgue database.
One of the six was Patricia Anne Otto, 74, who was vacationing in New Orleans when she died of a heart attack five days ahead of Katrina. Her brother, John Tepe, a Chicago resident, said he had spent more than a month trying without success to locate and retrieve her body.
Tepe said he had struggled to control his temper, especially when a FEMA official asked if he wanted to speak to a clergyman. "I told them I don't need someone to assuage my grief. I need someone who can get something done."
Bagnell, the funeral director from St. Tammany Parish north of New Orleans, said he had been trying to calm frantic families of four flood victims whose bodies were still at the morgue though officials had cleared them for release.
He said he made the 125-mile round trip to the morgue three times, carrying forms faxed to him by FEMA authorizing his funeral home to pick up the remains. He was turned away each time, he said.
"Their attitude is: It's the family's problem, not ours," Bagnell said.
It's certainly a problem for the family of Clementine Eleby. The 78-year-old woman perished at the convention center in front of one of her daughters.
When Katrina hit, another daughter, Earline Coleman, a substance abuse counselor, was trapped in Methodist Hospital downtown along with her husband, a nurse. They escaped to Houston unaware of her mother's fate.
When she heard from her sister that their mother had died, Coleman went straight to St Gabriel, but was turned away.
"I thought, OK, they can't help me today, but surely by the end of the week my mother's remains will be returned."
Now she calls every day, but she has received no information. She persuaded someone from the White House to call on her behalf Friday, but all he was told was that Clementine Eleby was not one of the 32 bodies identified so far.
"I don't sleep at night because I know that she's out there, and I just hope that she knows that we're looking for her," Coleman said.
Reysack, the nuclear plant worker, said that as Katrina approached, he and his sister implored their father to leave his house in the low-lying New Orleans suburb of Arabi.
"I know what I'm doing," the elder Reysack told his children. "I'm not leaving my home."
After helping recover his father's body, Reysack filled out paperwork, provided a DNA sample and confirmed his father's identity with the recovery team. He was told to contact FEMA to retrieve the body.
But his calls got him nowhere. He said he reached one chaplain in St. Gabriel who told him that the paperwork had been lost and that the computer did not show his father's corpse as identified.
"My ultimate mission and purpose in life now is I want an answer," he said. "Someone has to explain to me how they lost my father's body."
