[StBernard] (no subject)

[Westley Annis]

The quest to identify two who died in the tempest 
By Rukmini Callimachi

ASSOCIATED PRESS

9:18 a.m. December 16, 2006

NEW ORLEANS - Water is unforgiving to the dead and by the time the crews
arrived, the men were missing their eyes. 

The workers slipped the two old men into zippered bags and drove them to an
emergency morgue. Over the months that followed, investigators cut them,
prodded them, photographed them, X-rayed them and studied their DNA, all in
an attempt to coax their bodies into spitting out names. 

Today, their bodies rest in steel coffins inside a warehouse on a street of
flowering weeds in New Orleans. In neat rows beside them are the coffins of
27 other anonymous souls, their bodies stuck in a forensic purgatory -
unknown, unclaimed and unburied more than 15 months after Hurricane Katrina
made landfall. 

Some of Katrina's dead succumbed alongside people they knew; slips of paper
or damp cardboard, inscribed with their names, were tucked into their
clothes. But others drowned alone, their bodies drifting in the black water,
snagging on fence posts, or coming to in the rubble of uprooted homes. 

It's a fate which continues to torture the living, who struggle to give the
dead what the dead are owed. 

A body can only say so much about itself. It can tell its sex, its height.
Bones can speak of past accidents. But with time, the elements erase much of
the rest. 

More than a week passed before the first crew arrived to retrieve the more
than 1,300 people who died in Louisiana, and by that time, many of the
bodies were beyond recognition. 

The two old men lay had been lying in the mud inside a locked apartment for
at least 16 days when the crew from Kenyon International Emergency Services
arrived, strapped on respirators and broke down the door. 

Besides their eyes, the two men were missing fingers and toenails. Soaking
in the coarse water, their skin color changed; the workers who retrieved
them couldn't tell if the men were black or white. 

  

Dr. Frank Minyard, 77, Orleans Parish's coroner since 1973, remembers the
dead being brought to the emergency morgue "by the truckload. All in body
bags. All badly deteriorated. As tough as I am - and I think I'm tough - it
affected me. I lost the joy in my heart." 

In a loading bay, the bags containing the two men were lifted onto aluminum
tables and unzipped. The mud was washed from their bodies, and the
investigators recorded what few details were apparent, starting with the
men's personal effects. 

The first wore a short-sleeved dress shirt. On it, a pattern of red,
single-stem roses. In his pocket, $60. On his shoulder, a blue tattoo of a
sailing ship. He was 6 feet tall and at least 65 years old. 

Several weeks would pass before his skull and facial bones were measured and
investigators could say with certainty that he was white. 

When they opened the second bag, they found a naked man. He was also over 65
and around 6 feet tall. Measurements would show that he, too, was white. 

The men were tagged with numbers. Morgue workers took full-body X-rays,
hoping to find a pacemaker or a hip implant - a piece of steel inserted
inside the body that might yield a serial number. 

The men had none. 

They also looked for evidence of trauma, a healed fracture, perhaps, that
could be pinned to a relative's memory of an accident. 

There were none. 

At another station, investigators tried to lift their fingerprints, but
their skin slipped off like a glove. 

They X-rayed their teeth in the hope that dental records salvaged from New
Orleans could help them attach a body to a name. 

(Back in the submerged city, a dentist named Doug Cross donned a Hazmat suit
and ventured inside flooded dentists' offices to retrieve records. Many
crumbled in his hands or stuck together like a child's botched paper mache
project.) 

In another compartment of the tent, a piece of each man's right shinbone was
extracted, and from the inner core of the bone, his DNA. 

In Baton Rouge, a family assistance center was fielding calls from the
relatives of the more than 13,000 people initially reported missing. More
than 1,000 mouth swabs were collected from the families of those presumed
dead and a database of their DNA was established. Back in New Orleans,
investigators were venturing into the rubble, retrieving hair brushes, nail
clippers, socks, anything that might offer specks of the genetic barcode of
the missing. Almost all of it was contaminated by the floodwaters. 

When the DNA from the two old men was analyzed, it failed to match any of
the samples donated by families of the missing. But the two had nearly
identical DNA. 

The two men from apartment 4D are brothers. 

When she found out, Julia Powers, chief of the forensic identification unit
for Katrina, grew excited. "I mean, how many people are missing two white,
elderly brothers?" she asked. 

But her search of databases turned up nothing. 

No one, it appeared, was looking for two brothers from a street of flooded
1970s-era apartment buildings in the white, blue-collar community of
Chalmette, La. 

  


>From the beginning, the identification of the dead, like every aspect of the

post-Katrina recovery, was snarled with red tape. Eventually, a
state-of-the-art morgue would be erected, but as federal dollars dried up,
the forensic team was disbanded. 

By spring, only a few scientists remained, and their employment contracts
specified that they could do only lab analysis, not field work. Still, the
constantly shrinking team - which now consists of just one full-time
employee, Powers - succeeded in identifying more than 900 bodies. 

But some cases fell through the cracks. With the scientists banned from
venturing out to flooded houses, some homes, including the one where the
brothers were found, were never searched for clues. 

St. Bernard Fire Chief Thomas Stone was there when they took the bodies out,
and now, more than a year later, he has returned with an AP reporter and
photographer who want to document the apartment where the brothers lived and
died. 

The mud that once flowed across the floor had turned gray and crusty, and as
it hardened it receded, revealing some of the dead men's belongings. 

In a corner of the living room, Stone knelt and picked up a medical bottle
labeled Warfarin, a medication typically prescribed to prevent blood clots.
The label said it was last filled at a nearby Sav-A-Center on Aug. 18, 2005,
10 days before the storm. 

Also on the label was the address of apartment 4d - and a smudged name:
Keistut Pranckunas. 

It's like uttering the name of a ghost. 

  

"They had a difficult name - Greek, I think. Maybe Russian," says Abdul
Khan, the owner of the apartment block that housed apartment 4D. 

Pranckunas? 

"That's it!" he exclaimed. 

"I kept on checking the paper to see if they'd turn up on a list of the
dead. They never did." 

For years, he'd leased the unit to the brothers. They kept to themselves,
rarely venturing out. One was sick. The other cared for him. 

When the waters began to rise, Khan says, their upstairs neighbor banged on
the door, then tried to kick it in. It was bolted from the inside. 

After the storm, Kahn tried to retrieve his rental records to help
investigators, but the waters had ruined them. 

Louisiana voter registrations show that a Kiestutis Pranckunas lived at
apartment 4D. He was 78. Also living there, according to public records, was
81-year-old Peter Pranckunas. 

Plug "Pranckunas" into the Google search engine. Skim past links to a
Lithuanian church in Saginaw, Mich. and a Web ad for wedding accessories,
and eventually, you'll find a link to the Katrina People Search Board. 

There, 11 days after the storm, someone posted this message: 

"We have two uncles that lived in Chalmette LA ... Their names are Peter and
Kayo Pranckunas. If someone knows their where abouts it would be appreciated
if you would let us know." 

It's a dead end. The e-mail address listed at the bottom has been disabled. 

But if you keep searching the Internet, you'll eventually come to an
obituary published in 2002 in the Telegram & Gazette, in Worcester, Mass. 

Withold Pranckunas was 81 when he died of cancer. He was one of eight
children of Lithuanian immigrants and was survived, says the obituary, by
three brothers - including Peter and Kayo Pranckunas of Chalmette, La. 

Withold Pranckunas also left behind four daughters, among them Valerie
Pranckunas. 

She answered her phone in Winslow, Maine, on the second ring. 

"Oh my God," she gasped, and she sobbed. "Oh my God." 

  

A half-century ago, Peter and Kayo joined the circus, leaving their
Massachusetts town to tour the country with the lions and bears of Ringling
Bros and Barnum & Bailey. When the big top wound its way back to Worcester,
the uncles arranged for the girls to have front-row seats. 

Now 53, Valerie last saw them when she was a child; her uncles, who worked
at a concession stand, gave her a stick with a toy monkey on top. 

Ringling Bros eventually made its way New Orleans and there, after years on
the circus trail, the two got off. 

In his old age, Peter would become an invalid, bedridden and slowly slipping
into dementia. Kayo, stronger and healthier, took care of him. Kayo was the
one with a tattoo of a sailing ship on his shoulder. 

Their meager Social Security check didn't allow them to have a phone.
Several years ago, their nieces sent them a phone card, a book of stamps and
a stack of Christmas cards. 

Once or twice a year, Kayo walked to a gas station near the apartment and
asked the attendant to dial the 1-800 number on the back of the card so he
could telephone his nieces, or their father. Occasionally, they would send
letters, sometimes written inside one of the Christmas cards or on the back
of junk mail. 

When it became clear that Katrina had decimated New Orleans, three of the
nieces called a relief organization, giving full descriptions of their
missing uncles. It was catalogued in a database which was never passed on to
the team currently struggling to name the dead. 

  

The brothers DNA is being compared to that of their nieces, the little girls
they used to treat to the circus. Once the match is confirmed, they will
most likely be cremated; that's what they wanted, the family says. Their
ashes will be poured into separate urns, which will be sent to the
Massachusetts town where they were born. 

There, those who know them by name await them. 

  

EDITOR'S NOTE - Authorities have asked anyone with information on other
unidentified Katrina victims to call the New Orleans Forensic Center at
1-504-658-9660.