Stories

Boston Globe
September 23, 2005

By Keith O'Brien
Globe Correspondent

NEW ORLEANS -- As if his father's death in a flooded nursing home and the loss of everything he owned were not enough, Joe Gallodoro walked into a Baton Rouge hotel room this week, filled out a lengthy form, and then had his mouth swabbed for DNA.

Gallodoro is not under investigation, but his father's death is. Tufanio Gallodoro, 82, was one of 34 people who died three weeks ago when Hurricane Katrina flooded St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, and he is on a growing list of the confirmed dead in Louisiana since the storm.

But Tufanio Gallodoro, a retired truck driver, has yet to be officially identified -- which is why authorities wanted his son's DNA. Beyond that, Joe Gallodoro knows very little. He does not know where his father's body is or its condition, given the hot weather and flood waters it was found in.

Like countless families in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast, Gallodoro does not know when he will be able to arrange a funeral for his father, a first-generation Italian-American who liked to grow tomatoes.

"They're telling us it could be months before they release the body," said Gallodoro, 57. "We're dealing with his death. We're dealing with the loss of our business, our jobs. We all lost our homes. Talk about despair. You start to question things."

In many ways, time has stopped in New Orleans. The schools are closed, nearly all businesses are shut down, and entire neighborhoods are empty.

But in other places, business is busier than ever. Morgues across the state are filled with the bodies of people who died before the storm, because of the storm, and afterward. Of Katrina's 832 confirmed dead in Louisiana, only about 100 have been identified, leaving many long days ahead for federal forensic teams.

In the suburbs west of New Orleans, where residents have returned, there is a backlog of funerals, said George Rohrer, general manager of several funeral homes. Business, he said, has more than doubled.

In New Orleans, it is a different story. Funeral homes are flooded, damaged, or without power. Cemeteries and churches are closed. Even if places of worship were open, families would have a hard time finding a minister, priest, or mourners.

"The storm has left families displaced from their homes, children displaced from their schools, and they're waiting to come back to bury their dead," said Boyd Mothe Jr., a funeral director in Algiers, a New Orleans neighborhood across the Mississippi River that was evacuated but spared the worst of the storm.

Mothe waited until after the storm to remove 10 bodies from his funeral home, taking them by van to another home he owns 50 miles west. A handful of funeral directors rode airboats down flooded streets to gather 23 bodies from a hot, powerless, flooded mortuary.

The biggest problem, however, was the bodies of those killed by Katrina. They began to mount in the city while others -- mostly sick and elderly evacuees from New Orleans -- were dying elsewhere. Vera McCarthy, 88, died Sept. 16 in an Alabama hospital. Deborah Fisher, 85, passed away a week after the storm, in San Antonio. Rosalie Daste, 98, was evacuated from a nursing home but died Sept. 5 in Monroe, La. The obituary for Tony Falcone, 80, in the Baton Rouge Advocate, said, "A memorial service is pending due to Hurricane Katrina."

With everyone scattered, homes in ruins, and telephone service still spotty, planning a funeral right now is just too much to expect, said Ann Kinberger, whose uncle, Edward Blanchard, died Sept. 8 at his home in Marrero, a suburb south of New Orleans. Blanchard, 82, did not need to be evacuated before the storm. He drove himself to Baton Rouge.

After the storm, Blanchard returned home, where his niece said he helped neighbors fix their houses. He died there, she said, possibly because of the heat. His relatives have been unable to contact his friends because, said Kinberger, "Everybody is somewhere else."

Blanchard had wanted his body to be given to a medical school in New Orleans, but Kinberger said the best she could do, given that both are closed, was to donate it to Louisiana State University School of Medicine in Shreveport. She plans a memorial service, but does not expect to hold it until November.

Other bereaved families are doing what they can now.

On Wednesday, about two dozen people gathered at a Marrero funeral home to remember Barbara Creppel, a 61-year-old mother of five who died of heart failure after evacuating to Alexandria, in the center of Louisiana. A daughter, Marie Saulino, said the burial could occur in a month, when the cemetery resumes operations.

Just having what amounted to a wake was hard enough, Saulino said. She drove two days from Ohio, where she was staying with relatives. When she realized that she and her mother had lost everything in the flood waters, she had to buy clothes for her mother to wear in an open casket.

Saulino, 42, bought a pair of stretch pants that she thought her mother would have liked and a white-collared blouse. The blouse did not please Saulino as much as the pants, but she did not dwell on the issue. "We have no income and no place to live," she said, "so what do you do?"

Gallodoro, for the moment, finds himself in a similar situation. He lost his home in St. Bernard Parish and said he is filled with guilt about his father. A criminal investigation involving 34 counts of negligent homicide against the nursing home's owners may be one reason why it will take so long for the body to be released, said Kristen Meyer, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals. But she said it should not take months, adding that the state has yet to bury any of the dead in its custody -- something officials previously said they will do.

Gallodoro said he had expected the nursing home to evacuate his father before the storm.

So now he reflects on the life of his father, a man who taught him the values of hard work. Tufanio Gallodoro raised his family in the Uptown section of New Orleans, his son said, before moving them to St. Bernard in the 1960s. There, the proud union truck driver could afford to buy his first and only house. "He wanted the American dream," his son said. He joined a Catholic church nearby, became an usher, and retired 20 years ago.

Last fall his father went to stay at St. Rita's, Gallodoro said, because he was hobbled by a series of strokes that left relatives unable to care for him. If one of the strokes had killed him, it would have been hard on relatives, Gallodoro said, but there also would have been a grand funeral.

They would have had it at his church, Gallodoro said. The pews would have been filled with loved ones, and then they all would have retired to someone's home for baked chicken and macaroni, gumbo, and spaghetti -- and stories, lots of stories about the man who was not there.