My friend Daisy told me the following Katrina story. It’s a simple tale, but kind of chilling. I wanted to record it before I forget.
Daisy and her husband stayed through Katrina, and their Garden District apartment was relatively unscathed. They lost power, of course, and they heard about the looting at Wal-Mart but they weren’t too concerned.
Then Daisy went for a drive on some errand, and she saw a dead body. I think the man may have jumped or fallen from an overpass. The police were on the scene. It was disturbing, but Daisy still didn’t understand the chaos into which the city was descending.
A short time later, as she returned from her errand, she passed by the same spot. The body was still there. The police were gone.
An hour later, she and her husband evacuated the city.
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I think such experiences are hard for those of us who live elsewhere to even fathom. Sounds horrifying.
A coworker here at the newspaper in Missoula recently attended a Women in Photojournalism conference in St. Louis, at which she saw a slide show of images taken by photogs at the Times-Picayune. At a meeting yesterday, she told the rest of us that it proved to her that even the horrible images that came over the news wire didn’t come close to telling the whole story.
“How so?” asked my editor.
“There were some images that were so brutal that they couldn’t have possibly run in the paper,” replied the photog.
“Such as?” asked my editor.
“A person’s dead body being eaten by dogs.”
Oh. That kind of photo.
Nobody knew what to say.
Daisy’s story and the one you speak of J are both chilling. It is also quite sad that things such as these still happen in this time, and in this country.
The most chilling thing is not any individual story but the truly vast number of stories only some of which are documented in any way.
One could argue, for this case in particular, where, during the height of all the commotion and disorder in the water-logged city of New Orleans, would they relocate the body? The coroner’s office? Who would be working there at that time, and would there have been power to keep the facility cool enough to keep the body from festering? There could have been more pressing issues to attend to as well. Granted New Orleans finest leave a lot to be desired and leaving a corpse in the middle of the street is not only morally and legally questionable but would add to the numerous other public health concerns, but desperate times call for desperate measures.