Coroner's Journal (3 page)

Families of missing persons call into the Family Assistance Center (FAC) on a daily basis. We've had over 16,000 calls and more than 10,000 missing persons entered into the database.
Where are they?
Some are in the morgue, unidentified. Some have washed into the river and the gulf, some may be in the marshes, some may be in their flooded homes awaiting their family's arrival. What a horribly traumatic event, to go back to a flooded home and find the decomposing human remains of a loved one there.

They find their bodies in the toxic sludge, under furniture that floated about and under the drywall ceilings that crashed down on top of them.
Why weren't they found during the searches? For lots of reasons, there is no one answer.
I am relegated by those reasons to the position of trying to control the damage those families experience. I have been in the field talking to them. It sucks!

There have been problems with the DMORT database. It wasn't set up to handle missing persons and fatalities scattered over an area the size of Great Britain. I'm told it's held together with high-tech Band-Aids. I'm not even sure what that means.

The FAC members collect all the information on an eight-page form. They list the surgeries, prosthetic devices, unique characteristics, tattoos, and personal effects of the victims. Visual identification is a rarity, owing to the condition of the bodies. There will be no open-casket funerals. I need dental records, but many were destroyed in the flood. We send dental teams out into the flooded offices to try to salvage any records. We take photos of the victims' mouths and show them to family members for identification. Forensic dentists match pictures of smiling victims to their dental photos and X-rays here at the morgue. I always have one of the Victim Relief chaplains here for support when we do this. Such reality without compassion is indeed brutality.

I see those victims smiling back at me in those family photos. I hear them say, “Find me and send me home.”

Fingerprints are great tools if you can get them, but the sludge and the water and the time and the animals have not been kind to these bodies. In short, some don't have fingers for us to print.

We have the same problem with medical records. Many doctors' offices and hospitals are flooded and out of commission. We have taken total body X-rays on all the victims. I hold a chest X-ray up to the light and look at the wire pattern in the sternum of an elderly man found at a certain address. He's had coronary bypass surgery. I have a lead. If I had his old chest X-ray, I could match that wire pattern and make a solid identification. Alas, the X-ray has suffered the same fate as the dental X-rays. We will not give up, we will continue the search. Every day I sit in the “IR” trailer with DMORT investigators, radiologists, forensic pathologists, and forensic dentists. Every day we try to reunite the deceased with their families. DMORT isn't some federal bureaucracy, DMORT is people—dedicated people.

There are a lot of dead folks here, and a lot of families wanting to know whether their missing loved ones are among the deceased. One of the most crucial and difficult parts of the job is to notify the families of victims and deal with their immense grief. Compunding the grief are the facts that families aren't able to view the bodies quickly, and that the bodies aren't released to the families fast enough. It's excruciating for relatives, but there is just no way I can speed the meticulous work of identifying the dead and preserving evidence of possible crimes.

As I told reporters on national television, “We won't take anybody out of the rotation or the process. To take one person out would corrupt the process.” And so when folks say, “Can we speed up the process?” the answer is, unfortunately, no.

People always ask me how I stay sane doing what I do. I'm not sure what “sane” means in this profession, but it does take an emotional toll. I sometimes wonder whether maybe I've brushed shoulders so often with Charon, that mythological ferryman of the dead, that it's caused me to question the very nature of humankind. There's a fine line between healthy skepticism and jaundiced cynicism.

If there's one thing that's helped me walk that line, it's the fact that I've kept a personal journal, starting in the coroner's office of East Baton Rouge Parish in 1993. I wrote whenever it struck me, jotting notes in the field and later sketching images on a small pad as I remembered them. These were not sketches of any forensic value, but nuances that stayed with me for some reason. I wrote in my journal mostly at night, especially after a particularly troubling autopsy or a visit to an unsettling crime scene, when neither a soft pillow nor the comfort of DeAnn, my loving wife and partner, could induce slumber. The journal is about how the lives—and untimely deaths—of the people I investigated crossed my path, and how I tried to bring order and integrity to the aftermath.

I've become quite aware of the importance of these private journals because, since Katrina, I've been unable to keep up the practice to the degree I'd become accustomed. I simply haven't had the time. Other than the occasional flurry of midnight e-mails (from which this chapter evolved), I've been without my usual coping mechanism to process these experiences privately. The burden then falls, even more than usual, to De and Michael, whom I've barely seen in weeks and weeks. I miss them more than I can say.

Michael, my youngest son, is another reason for keeping these journals. I want him to be able to understand what was going on in his family during his formative years. How many eleven-year-olds go tracking across the shopping mall to decribe the “splatter pattern” of a leaky garbage can that has been moved across the floor? “Look, Dad, they stopped here for a second—see how the drops fell straight down? They started back up this way, and hey, look, over here they started speeding up. I guess they figured out they had a leak, huh?” Kids do tend to listen to our conversations, don't they? Michael once accused me of going to the movies without him—he found trace evidence of a popcorn hull on me. Actually, I was innocent: I had had popcorn at the office earlier. At any rate, I just want to give him some perspective as he wanders down life's road and takes his place in society. He may find it helpful later to reflect on how my years on the job affected him.

As coroner, I have served as the state's official witness to the worst that humanity has to offer. I've investigated some of the most despicable crimes and violent deaths imaginable, have held the limp bodies of innocent children. Nothing, not even the profound inhumanity of serial killers like Derrick Todd Lee and Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, can compare to the sheer devastation of Katrina and Rita. Yet in many ways, it seems that everything I've done in my professional life has been training for these last terrible weeks. The stories that come later in this book trace my evolution not just as a doctor but as a human being. The people I met, the families I counseled, the mistakes I made, the crimes I helped solve—these were my training ground, I see now, for the biggest challenge of my life.

I didn't have a survivor's guide when I got into the coroner business. I certainly could have used one, though. I don't think one exists. Maybe this will help some of the other folks who get into this vocation and have to deal with and reconstruct the details of a person's final minutes or moments before death comes.

Be forewarned. This book is no
CSI: Cajun Country
. I'm not a polished movie star, we don't rely on special effects, and the stories of the people who are left holding the pieces can't fit neatly into a one-hour episode. It's about emotional survival on the battlefield of death investigation. Death will walk with us.

 

 

 

On the surface my job seems quite simple. I pursue the cause, time, and manner of death. My responsibilities are to the deceased, the survivors, and society at large. There are times when I feel it is the survivors who suffer the longest if not the most. The violent or unexpected death of a close friend or loved one can shake the foundations of a person's existence. Some of those left behind in the aftermath of a death may suffer from pathological grief disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder. They live with recurring nightmares and intrusive thoughts that can plunge them downward into an abyss of severe depression and hopelessness.

And as a coroner, I, too, have tasted from that deadly cup. At times, I've come away from crime scenes and autopsies with a tainted worldview: tainted by anger that I strive not to bring home; tainted by skepticism turned to cynicism; tainted by fear. That taint has been lessened in part by people like Caron Whitesides and Wanda Hebert, who have worked with me for years and shown me how to salvage some good from the bad.

There is a truth I accept on this matter:
If you don't deal with a horrible or traumatic event, it will deal with you. There is no escape
. In recent weeks I'm having trouble taking my own advice. I accept the reality of the situation, do my duty to the best of my ability, and deal with the emotional consequences.

I have witnessed unbelievably selfless acts from fellow coroners, rescue workers, and medical teams from around the country. I have been inspired by the downright unflappable spirit of the people around Cameron and the natives of New Orleans—it makes me proud to be from Louisiana. But there is no solace when you look at the hurt in the eyes of the survivors. It is my obligation to do it right; 99 percent is a failing grade. The feds will go away, but I will not.

What went wrong? Why weren't the local, state, and federal governments prepared to cope with a hurricane or disaster of this magnitude? I'm sure politicians will appoint committees to investigate, as well they should, and the blame will fly faster than the mud in a political race down here. I sure as hell can't explain it—truth is, I'm not even going to try, at least not here. All I want to do here is to assure the survivors that dignity for the dead is my only agenda.

Finally, I ask readers to forgive such an incomplete accounting. There aren't words invented yet to describe the depth of despair—or courage—in this corner of the world I love so much. No one person can attempt to tell this story. And it is not over yet.

Gotta go.

 

—
Lou Cataldie

TWO

My first death investigation came on a gorgeous spring day in 1976. I was standing on the porch of a beautiful white turn-of-the-century house graced with tall windows and delicate Victorian touches. This house—across the alleyway from the courthouse, a cold brick structure that housed the sheriff's office and an un-airconditioned jail on the third floor—was the place where I worked. It had been converted into a medical clinic, and I was the only medical doctor in this rural outpost. I loved the feel and sound of walking on a wooden porch, especially this one—built out of cypress from the local sawmill. Though the interior had suffered from some modernizing attempts in the 1950s, the rooms were spacious and had twelve-foot ceilings. We had furnished the facility with medical equipment that was military salvage from a MASH unit—circa the Korean War by the looks of it—but it worked.

I had decided to follow my altruistic inclinations and become a general practitioner in a small rural town in a state I hold close to my heart. Looking back, that altruism was mixed with an element of ignorance on my part—my desire for a sort of Norman Rockwell life. At any rate, I took my new wife and son to the tiny north Louisiana town of Colfax, population 1,800. There was only one other physician in the entire parish. It was about a year before that altruism was beaten out of me. While I was there, though, I became gratis coroner of Grant Parish, as well as the jail physician; both positions came to me by default. The other doc had served his time in the barrel and had no desire to continue the post. That's called a clue! But who could blame him? There was no budget, and expenses, such as paying for an autopsy, had to be approved by the police jury.

That morning, a breathless young man burst through the doors of a full waiting room while I was seeing patients. I ran out to the man, who kept yelling something to the effect that
“the Colonel need to come quick.”
It would not be the last time that I heard myself, the coroner, being referred to as “Colonel.” I rushed out of the examining room and followed the man onto the porch. I was expecting to be greeted by a medical emergency. Instead, what I found was an obviously dead body in the bed of a road-worn pickup truck.

Of course, all my patients had rushed out behind me to peer at the corpse, too. The two guys in the cab of the old truck jumped out and explained what had happened:

“Zack here got hit by a piece of pulpwood what fell off the truck,” said the first man. “It landed right smack dab on his head! That's what happened, Colonel. We got the pulpwood log right here for you to see, uh-huh.”

The fact that Zack was dead was apparent to all involved, and by now the whole town was involved, including the sheriff's office. Zack's skull was caved in, and the alleged cause of his demise—a rather hefty log that looked to be about eight inches in diameter and must have weighed several hundred pounds—was there as well.

The witness continued: “We was way out in the woods and we didn't know what to do except to bring him here to you, Colonel.”

“I'm not a colonel. I'm the
coroner.
”

“Okay, Colonel, sir. What we supposed to do now?”

Everybody around the truck—a sizable crowd had gathered—nodded their heads in understanding and offered opinions.

“Pulpwooding is dangerous business all right.”