Memorial keeps vigil for unknown Katrina victims

By Christine Bordelon
Clarion Herald

It’s been 15 years since Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area, and, even now, unidentified and unclaimed bodies remain at the New Orleans Katrina Memorial located in front of the Charity Hospital Cemetery at 5056 Canal St. next door to St. Patrick Cemetery No. 1.

“It is the most important thing I have ever participated in,” said Sandra Rhodes Duncan, board chairperson of the New Orleans Katrina Memorial Foundation, which fought to have the site built. “After Katrina, it was horrible. There were bodies everywhere. So, we got the funeral directors together” and joined the Orleans Parish coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, in his quest for a memorial.

Duncan, president of Rhodes United Fidelity (a subsidiary of Duplain W. Rhodes Funeral Home, the corporation that took the lead on the project), said the memorial, dedicated in 2008, honors the more than 80 individuals who are buried here, mostly from Orleans Parish she believes.

Forever etched in time

This year, on Aug. 29 at 8:29 a.m. – the exact time the levees broke in 2005 – a wreath will be laid at the site in a short ceremony cosponsored by the New Orleans Katrina Memorial Foundation, which maintains the site, along with the Crescent City Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association, the Orleans Embalmers and Associates, the Louisiana Morticians and Funeral Directors Association and embalmers and funeral directors from across Louisiana, Duncan said.

African master drummer and Congo Square Preservation Society member Luther Gray will perform. Participants are required to wear masks and maintain social distancing. The memorial will be open all day Aug. 29.

The unsettling nature of the storm’s destruction left many New Orleanians homeless, jobless, emotionally drained and displaced throughout the country. Many neighborhoods were wiped out and churches were destroyed, forever changing the landscape we knew as New Orleans.

According to “Deaths Directly Caused by Hurricane Katrina,” a study published by Poppy Markwell, M.P.H., and Raoult Ratard, M.D., M.P.H., there were approximately 1,170 persons in Louisiana who died from Katrina. More than 80 unidentified bodies discovered throughout the city were brought to the coroner’s office, then run by Minyard, and remained unclaimed.

The corpses first were stored in a refrigerated warehouse, Duncan said, and initial discussions by the coroner’s office in 2006 centered on possibly building a mass grave to bury them.

Wanted dignified burials

Duncan said The Crescent City Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association were against that original idea and stepped in to formulate a plan for a memorial to offer a dignified burial to the 88 unidentified and unclaimed dead.

“We started meeting with Crescent City and the state funeral directors and embalmers after the storm,” Duncan said, “and formed a coalition with funeral directors from across Louisiana and some from Mississippi. We couldn’t leave those bodies. There was no place to bury them. Everybody had lost everything and was just trying to take care of the living.”

The association initially donated $100,000, Duncan recalls, which supplemented $1 million set aside for a memorial for unclaimed and unidentified bodies, and the process began to design and construct the memorial. Matthews Bronze was selected as the builder designer, starting with an idea from then-Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, she added.

Duncan said much effort was made not to disturb bodies already buried on the site, which the Charity Hospital Cemetery had used as the hospital’s potter’s field for the burial of indigent patients.

“We had an archaeologist test sites on the property to make sure they didn’t put the mausoleums over those already buried,” Duncan said. “We didn’t want to disturb any burials there, so we put the memorials in the least populated area of the site.”

By 2008, on the third anniversary of the storm, a memorial was dedicated at a cost of approximately $1.2 million with private and public funding. A band played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” as a procession of more than 30 hearses, donated by funeral homes, carried the bodies into the memorial. Duncan said a minister led prayers at each gravesite.

Hurricane-centric design

The memorial’s design has six, rectangular, 9-foot-tall sections, each with 18 burial crypts, that are faced with reflective black granite in a semi-circular design with 50 “strategically placed” cypress trees surround the mausoleums, Joan Rhodes, a foundation board member, said.

“Those trees were placed in the design of the eye of a hurricane,” Rhodes said. “In the center of the cypress trees is where the circle and mausoleum are laid out.”

Writing etched into a lone, solid granite block explains the purpose of the memorial. It is “dedicated to these (unclaimed and unidentified victims of the storm) individuals and to all who suffered or died during Hurricane Katrina.” On one side of the granite block, the memorial reminds viewers of the “harrowing days and the long struggle to rebuild the city”; on the opposite side, the memorial credits the New Orleans Katrina Memorial Corporation and its members for maintaining perpetual care. Four benches surround the monument for visitors to sit and reflect.

Other memorial structures scattered throughout the site describe the history of Charity Hospital Cemetery (originally built as “Potter’s Field” in 1848); honor the Bureau of Anatomical Services (dedicated to those who donated their bodies to science and were buried here); and note the political leaders and other organizations, including funeral homes, that contributed to the site.

Not all the people buried here have been identified, although a few were. Duncan said the coroner’s office took DNA samples from all the bodies. These samples are currently housed by the state of Louisiana’s health and hospital system in Baton Rouge.

“For everybody that was unidentified, there is a cylinder with DNA in it, in case anyone comes to claim a body,” Rhodes said. “Everyone is numbered and identified.”

The foundation pays for perpetual care out of the initial money raised for the memorial, Duncan said. There are no plans to expand the memorial at this time, but donations to the memorial are accepted at Sandra Rhodes Duncan, 2612 Martin Luther King Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70113. Its members, most of whom had lost everything in the storm and were struggling personally to survive, were adamant that the memorial be built so that those who perished in the 2005 storm would never be forgotten.

“It’s important,” Duncan said. “This was a priority for the whole group. We did not want to see those bodies put in a potter’s field and didn’t want them to be put in a mass grave. Nobody wanted to see that happen, even though nobody had anything after the storm.”

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