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

"We have a dentist who has done amazing identification with dentistry, working just from pictures people showed him. We have a whole gaggle of volunteer geneticists who help us assemble family trees for DNA matchups. We have technicians who have gathered DNA samples for us from as far away as Afghanistan. And we have mathematicians who help gauge the probabilities that those matchups are accurate."

But the work, he said, has led his workers into disturbing and unexpected areas. "We tracked one parolee to New York, but when we got him on the phone he threatened to kill the person who found him. He didn't want to be found."

The trackers have also learned more than they wanted to know about family relations. More than a few women, he said, have used the opportunity to escape from abusive domestic relationships. "They beg us not to report their whereabouts to the person tracking them. And we don't," Yennie said. "We only promise that, if we find someone, we'll give them the phone number of the person who asked us to look for them."

In the case of fugitives from the law -- people running from alimony or child support payments or other debts -- Yennie said the center gets the advice of law enforcement personnel on its staff.

But the most unexpected challenge, he said, has been in dealing with the wearying complexity of family relationships and with unwanted discoveries about bloodlines. DNA identification, he said, often depends on painstakingly tracking a consistent genetic pattern within a family. In more than a few cases, searchers have been told by family members that all the siblings have the same father, only for the DNA evidence to show otherwise.

Yennie said the staff keeps such information confidential.

"Our purpose is to find people, not to violate their privacy. We don't want to learn this stuff. We just want to find or identify people and move on," he said.

Of those still missing, fewer than 50 are children, Yennie said. Slightly more than half are African American men. Most are more than 50 years old.

In addition to tracking the living, the Find Family center has taken over from the Orleans Parish coroner's office most of the work of identifying the unclaimed dead. Yennie said the center has been unable to find any way to identify 26 bodies. Tentative identification has been established for about 46. About 100 bodies have been positively identified, but the families have no resources to claim them and are awaiting government aid to help with burials.

Yennie expects both the search for the missing and the identification of the dead to accelerate in the coming weeks because of the recent allocation of funds for obtaining access to a highly specialized LexisNexis online search. He also cited the help of more law enforcement personnel experienced in tracking fugitives. Within six months, he said, there should be enough time and manpower to go street by street through New Orleans with census records and to finally nail down Katrina's cost in lives.

In the meantime, he and the call center crew have been given the macabre chore of reburying those exhumed by Katrina from graveyards -- coffins found afloat or broken amid the wreckage of the storm.

The most bizarre such case, he said, came not from New Orleans but from farther west near the coastal town of Cameron, where Hurricane Rita left behind a casket. The dead man was from the Cameron graveyard, where he had been buried in the 1950s. In 1957, Hurricane Audrey had dug up the casket and carried it out of the cemetery. It had been sunk somewhere in a salt marsh east of town until Rita came ashore and resurrected it again.

"He'd been lost there underwater nearly 50 years," Yennie said. "There were barnacles on his coffin."