Presumed Missing Six months after the storm, some family members hold out hope their loved ones will be found. Submitted By: N.O.V.A March 2006 Source: Times Picayune 03-05-2006 ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** At the end of a narrow highway along a bayou stretching to the Gulf, Angel Chauppetta found precious few remnants of the place her father once called home. The camper chassis. A propane tank. A tackle box. One shoe. Before Hurricane Katrina, Hopedale was a quaint St. Bernard Parish hamlet of raised houses, shrimp boats and one pop-up camper where Charles Chauppetta lived his days. But when his daughter visited in mid-September, she found only a trail of structures reduced to bent metal, crushed concrete and splintered timber. And strewn across the fragile marsh, she found the items that belonged to her father, a retired welder and a grandfather of four who has not been heard from since Katrina washed a wall of water more than 14 feet high across his home alongside the outlying swamp. If any relatives believe Chauppetta's father is dead, they have not said so. At least not within earshot. But even if they did, it would do nothing to convince her that he's never coming home. To Chauppetta, 39, the few objects left behind in Hopedale are priceless clues. Combined with a handful of tips from strangers and the efforts of professional investigators searching for Katrina's lost, they might lead one day to the discovery that her father got out before the storm, or somehow managed to survive it. Until then, his name remains on the long list of people still classified as officially missing. As the post-Katrina era reached the half-year mark last week, the roster held nearly 2,000 names, a fraction of the 11,565 that have been reported lost by relatives, neighbors or friends since the Aug. 29 hurricane. Officials expect the list to shrink further. Some names will be assigned to remains still on the grounds of the emergency morgue that operated for several months at Carville. Many others belong to people who simply have failed to check in with the Find Family National Call Center in Baton Rouge. None of the detective work so far has supported wild rumors that were rampant in the storm's immediate aftermath that police had shot hundreds of looters and dumped their bodies in the Mississippi River, that alligators and sharks had devoured survivors as they trudged through flooded streets. Those hysterical contentions have been relegated to urban myth. Meanwhile, call center volunteers continue to track down survivors, sometimes finding as many as a dozen a day. Combining persistence, sleuthing skills and DNA tests, they also home in on relatives who might help identify the unknown dead. The forever vanished State medical examiner Dr. Louis Cataldie has estimated that some 500 people never will be found. "Bodies quite possibly could have been washed out into marshes, into the Gulf," said Bob Johannessen, the state Department of Health and Hospitals spokesman. "And when you figure in the time that has passed since then, it makes all the sense in the world that some bodies are just not going to be recovered." In another category, "there are a significant number of people who went missing during the storm and who intend to remain missing," Johannessen said, referring to those who saw the chaos in Katrina's wake as an opportunity to cast off the troubles of an old life and start fresh in a new town. Chauppetta has reckoned with the possibility that, for one reason or another, her father might never be found, that his fate will be uncertain. "I know it might always be a mystery," she said. But is he dead? Put to her straight, the question elicits a defiant answer: Absolutely not. "I think I would feel something if he were really gone," she said. A loner Her father always was a solitary man, unlikely to make friends at an emergency shelter or give his name to volunteers, Chauppetta said. He never memorized phone numbers, not even hers. He would not be able to surf the Internet to find himself listed as missing. And a lack of medication could drive him into bipolar depression. He never carried identification, Chauppetta said, beyond the tattoo on his chest: a dragon clutching a lightning bolt in its talons. Trusting that her father has slipped into anonymity among the living, Chauppetta has posted dozens of homemade fliers across Louisiana and Mississippi. Her father glances out from them in color-copied snapshots. In what might be the eeriest image, he carries a tackle box and a lantern while wading through knee-deep water across a flooded road. It was taken in Hopedale in 2004, the day after Hurricane Ivan. Surrounding the pictures in bold type are Angel's phone number and her plea: "IF YOU SEE THIS MAN! PLEASE CALL." She also took her effort to the Internet, posting a 109-word appeal at a Web site that carried myriad pleas from other Gulf Coast families seeking vanished kin. "My father lived in a small camper past old Pip's place by the ditch where the shell road started (before it was paved)," she wrote. "He is 62 years of age. He was last seen by my brother 8/28/05. He refused to evacuate." Bodies still in attics? Of the 1,840 people still cataloged Friday as missing from Louisiana, 30 were 5 or younger; 74 were 80 or older. Women comprised 910 of the total. The majority -- 1,422 people -- were from New Orleans. Of 1590 people whose race was known, 1,352 were African-American. Besides the main index, Cataldie also has kept a secondary list, a subgroup of residents whose names and last-known locations, mostly in New Orleans' 9th Ward and Chalmette, have been mentioned again and again by relatives and friends, Johannessen said. No remains of these people have been found, but loved ones who call the center insist Katrina must have claimed them. To resolve these cases, Cataldie and local authorities started another round of searches Wednesday, mostly in the Lower 9th Ward, for remains of at least 264 of the missing. Henry Yennie, deputy director of operations for the call center, said a body-processing trailer was set up in the neighborhood Wednesday to handle any remains. Dr. Amanda Sozer, the project manager for the state's DNA identification effort, is convinced that even after multiple searches, bodies lie beneath piles of rubble or are hidden in attics. Finding them will go a long way toward trimming the list of the missing, she said, as will collecting DNA samples from relatives of the missing to connect with unidentified remains. Equally important will be ridding the list of survivors' names to produce a narrower set of potential matches. It also would cut down on time wasted as workers try to contact relatives to collect DNA samples, only to determine that a missing relative has long since been found. "There's a large number of reported missing and a smaller number in the morgue. They're somewhere," Sozer said. "If (relatives) have reported somebody missing and they've been found, they really have to call. We really want to target our efforts on the truly missing." Chauppetta and her brothers drove to Baton Rouge in October to give DNA samples. In early February, Chauppetta's mother, Deanna Wolford, and two of her father's brothers also offered saliva swabs so technicians might more easily distinguish the missing man's DNA when compared with his children's, if a near-match ever were found. But the efforts, at least for Chauppetta, were perfunctory. She has faith, rooted in her most recent memory of him, that her father's name will not be a permanent fixture on Katrina's missing-persons list. Waited too long On the afternoon before the hurricane roared ashore, her father yielded to the entreaties of his children and agreed to let one of them come get him, Chauppetta said, noting that he had no car of his own, only a bicycle and a boat. Earlier that Sunday he had been adamant about riding out the hurricane as he had many others, in a camper tethered to a steel beam. When Ivan grazed the Louisiana coast, he retired to the camper's loft bed when the rising storm surge reached his waist. Later, he described the storm's strength: "I thought a freight train hit," he told a newspaper reporter. As Katrina swirled toward shore, somehow Chauppetta and her brothers overcame their father's stubbornness. This hurricane was not Ivan or Cindy, they warned. Katrina was a killer. Even then, he insisted on staying put until late afternoon. If the storm were still on track, he would escape with Charles Jr., who promised to fetch him by truck or by boat. But as the storm bands intensified and the moment of rescue neared, the son could not persuade authorities to let him drive south of Meraux. Two weeks passed before Chauppetta reached Hopedale and discovered the battered traces of her father's life. Starting new lives The call center volunteers are not the only detectives whittling down the list of the missing. St. Bernard officials hired Don Banks, president of Global Disaster Management, to continue the search after the state's contract with Kenyon International Emergency Services ended in November. Banks agrees that 500 Louisiana residents likely will never be accounted for, but he is not ready to add Charles to the list. Not yet. Banks has discovered that not every name on the roster denotes a family still desperate for answers. Because of a backlog in the flow of information between local authorities and the morgue and the call center, the list also includes names of people long since found, alive or dead. According to Banks, on Feb. 15, when the state's list included at least 109 St. Bernard residents, his own register was down to 13 names; he had turned over data on the others to the state, he said. Some of those Banks has found were discovered during the first search step: a thorough investigation of the last place the missing person was seen or thought to have stayed during Katrina. That method helped locate a 72-year- old Chalmette man in December who had died in his attic on Dauterive Drive. In most cases, however, Banks has used credit card and Social Security records to locate his targets, sometimes much to the dismay of the missing. "We had people who didn't want to be found," Banks said. "I called people late at night, and they got really mad, yelling, wanting to know how I located them." One man feared that Banks was on his trail for failure to pay child support. Others expressed simple astonishment that someone back in St. Bernard had managed to track them down, especially given the strict adherence to privacy laws touted by FEMA and the Red Cross. "They're all over Texas; Rochester, N.Y. They're just scattered everywhere," Banks said, ticking off the places he has found St. Bernard residents since Katrina. "Tons of people in Florida. Lots in the state of Louisiana. Atlanta. Boston." But Banks still does not know where to find Charles Chauppetta, an entry on every updated list the state has sent him since September. "He's the one that just keeps popping back up. His name just keeps reappearing. What about him? Nobody has any answers," Banks said. Just tips: a report from a neighbor who had seen Chauppetta on the eve of the hurricane and found him still stubbornly refusing to leave, and several people who said they ID'd him in the Chalmette-Meraux store. "You're getting third and fourth stories all the time," Banks said. "To be honest with you, I don't know if he's at Carville or not. He could be in the marshes, he could be in the water, he could be anywhere." Angel Chauppetta also has played detective. When a store clerk in Hattiesburg, Miss., noticed one of her fliers and called to report that a man resembling her father had come in for coffee several mornings in a row in January, Chauppetta made the 60-mile drive from her home near Carriere, Miss, within the week. But when she arrived, the clerk said the man had never returned. Wolford, who was married to Chauppetta for two decades before they split in 1978, said the years since their marriage have not dulled emotions dislodged by her daughter's search. "You still wonder if he's hot, cold, hungry, if he's got shelter," Wolford, 64, said. "I want to know if he's living or dead. I want closure." But the family has made no plans for a funeral. Phone calls from vigilant strangers and the continuing reports from Banks and the call center stoke their faith that the mystery will be solved. Angel Chauppetta no longer jumps each time the phone rings or breaks down in sobs during the workday. But as she continues to post fliers, there is one tip she cannot get out of her mind. It was recounted to her by the wife of a man who is said to be the only person who survived Katrina in Hopedale, in part by binding himself to a tree. As the storm surge poured up through the wetlands, this man held a whistle in his lips and blew it for 15 hours, trying to attract some kind of help, Chauppetta was told. At one point, the man saw a single light, possibly the beam of a flashlight, waving back and forth from a place not far from his tree. Then a gust of wind whipped by and a giant wave crashed, and the light blinked out.