The Search for Katrina's Victims Finds Some Missing by Choice

Cortez Stewart, 4, is reunited with her mother and siblings in Houston. About 1,280 Louisianans are still unaccounted because of Katrina. (National Center For Missing & Exploited Children Via Associated Press)

NEW ORLEANS -- By Louisiana's latest official count, 1,292 people are known to have died in the state because of Hurricane Katrina.

About 1,280 -- the number changes daily -- remain missing.

Hundreds of people were sucked into the Gulf of Mexico by Katrina's retreating tsunami-like storm surge and will never be found. But the state-run, federally funded Find Family National Call Center is discovering that hundreds of others have used the storm and the nationwide diaspora it triggered to escape a troubled or painful past. They do not want to be found.

The center's 90 or so workers immerse themselves daily in tracking missing wives and fleeing felons, reburying exhumed coffins, prying unknowingly into the dark family secrets of confused parentage and dealing with the anonymous dead whom no one seems able -- or willing -- to claim.

Even now, nearly seven months after Katrina, the Find Family phone bank fields 120 to 150 calls a day about relatives or loved ones who vanished in the storm or its aftermath. The vast majority of those being sought are discovered among the thousands of names in American Red Cross or Federal Emergency Management Agency databases that track the whereabouts around the country of evacuees from the storm. The overall number of people missing has been dropping steadily, if slowly, since the storm. More than 10,000 were originally on the list.

"But every day, too, we get one or two we can't find anywhere -- truly missing people, whose absence has only now been discovered," said Henry Yennie, the former mental health executive who serves as the center's deputy director. There were 21 such names reported between March 6 and March 10.

Why has it taken so long to report them?

It's a function of New Orleans's population "being exploded all over the country," Yennie said in a telephone interview from Baton Rouge. "I don't think any of us can begin to appreciate the extent of this disruption Katrina caused in the lives of these evacuees. You lose your house. You lose your job. You lose your community and the personal networks you used to keep track of your extended family and your friends. And you wind up somewhere like a shelter in Montana."

In such cases, he said, evacuees may have quickly tried to locate members of their immediate family but have taken months to realize that they never asked anyone about a distant cousin or a neighbor they never really knew well.

Then, too, in a large low-income population, which would include many evacuees, Yennie said, "you have a fair number of people who live marginal lives at the edge of society. Often they live alone. Sometimes they're mentally ill. Frequently they have no living relatives. They aren't part of any network."

He added: "There was one deceased fellow we found who was in his fifties. He had lived in the same place for 35 years and once taught at a bartender college. But we couldn't find anyone in his neighborhood who knew anything about him. We eventually identified him through DNA."

Immediately after Katrina, Yennie said, the Find Family center had nearly 150 people fielding calls round the clock. Most were evacuees themselves -- pastors, social workers, funeral directors, mental health workers -- working out of a long-vacant supermarket building in the Gateway Shopping Center in Baton Rouge. As the months have gone by and after more than 9,400 of the missing have been located, the work has eased to 12-hour days. It has also, Yennie said, become more specialized.