Mortician surprised by New Orleans dead

 No comments  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

By Josh Swartzlander / The Lincoln Journal Star

Mark Roper spent two weeks in St. Gabriel, La., this month, moving the bodies of Hurricane Katrina’s New Orleans victims into refrigerated trailers.

After watching the steady stream of corpses, Roper’s biggest surprise about the dead: almost all were elderly or homeless.

“The victims who were killed were mostly poor and homeless and institutionalized,” said Roper, vice president of Lincoln’s Roper & Sons.

“You really feel for these people. They just could not get out of the way.”

Roper was in Louisiana Sept. 1 through Sept. 14 as part of a Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a federalized volunteer group of medical and forensics experts trained to identify bodies.

Inside a portable morgue, the team fingerprinted the bodies, took DNA samples, checked for signs of foul play and moved the bodies into refrigerated trailers. Later, hearses would take the bodies to funeral homes designated by the victims’ families.

“I suspect there will be a number of people unidentified, unclaimed,” Roper said. He said those people may be buried in a cemetery specifically for Katrina victims.

Most of the dead had drowned, Roper said. Others had died of dehydration, probably caused by abandonment, he said.

He was surprised by the number of homicides — people with gunshot wounds to their heads and backs.

Autopsies were performed on those victims, Roper said.

Roper was charged with taking the bodies from the identification experts to the refrigerated trailers and logging their locations in those trailers.

The team slept on cots outside the morgue and worked 13-hour days.

“There was no hotel space,” Roper said. “This was physically exhausting work.”

Roper said the scene at the Louisiana morgue was gruesome, even for someone who works with bodies on a daily basis, even for someone who has responded to the sites of two airline crashes and to New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, terroristic attacks.

“The people who do this work, it’s a labor of love,” he said. “We do this on a daily basis. Here, it’s on a catastrophic level.

“We had a lot of empathy for the people there.”

Reach Josh Swartzlander at 473-7120 or jswartzlander@journalstar.com.