For Many Casualties, No Who, How or When

According to three townspeople, she lived all her life in Biloxi, for decades in the same small house without air conditioning, television or other creature comforts. She outlived two husbands. Her life revolved around day-long walks -- "practically all over Biloxi," Meaut said -- and daily services at St. Louis Catholic Church.

"She told me one Saturday night at church, 'I hope God gives me 10 more years because I'm not finished with my work here on Earth, and I'm trying to buy my way into heaven,' " Meaut said. "Father was standing there and he said, 'Oh, Miss Odessa, you know you can't buy your way into heaven -- you have to pray your way in.' And she just laughed."

Hurley refused to leave her home when neighbors were evacuating ahead of the storm. She had survived plenty of storms, she said. But when Meaut returned to find her own house destroyed, her younger son gave her the bad news. "He said, 'You know, they found Miss Odessa drowned.' "

Since then, Meaut has said many prayers for her old friend. But she knows Miss Odessa probably did okay on her own: "She paid her way into heaven -- you can bet your boots on that."

Staying in New Orleans

Willie Williams had wanted to be a football player -- and he still looked like one -- but things had not quite turned out the way he wanted. The father of five children under 6, he was a 10th-grade dropout and a laborer whose last job had been in roofing when he decided not to leave his native New Orleans for the hurricane.

"They was going to ride it out like a lot of people always did," said his cousin, Pam Williams, 35, who evacuated with her three children and who described his life and death from Houston, where she was relocating.

It may have been a fatal choice. Indirectly through a police officer friend in New Orleans, Williams learned that her cousin's body had been recovered after the storm, that it was seen tied to a tree by the river to keep it from floating away -- a practice searchers employed in the first chaotic days. His girlfriend, and the mother of his two youngest children, apparently is missing. There is no word on the children.

Williams said she does not know how her cousin died. "He knew how to swim pretty good," she said. "He was a survivor."

He also was the family peacemaker, she said.

"He'd see people getting into fights and he would break it up," she said. "He would tell them just to compromise with each other."

In the Shelter

As Grady Samuels Sr. sat in an evacuation shelter in Baton Rouge, he could not stop watching the images of hurt and crying children on television. The elderly man, known as "Grandpa Grady" back in his River Ridge, La., neighborhood, was sickened by the suffering the disaster had brought.

"He was saying, 'Ya'll get those children,' " said Rosie Jackson, 35, one of his many grandchildren. To calm him, family members lied and reassured him that they would rescue the children he was seeing on TV.