Death toll rises

last updated 8 January 2015

New Orleans

Families returning to their New Orleans homes for the first time since Hurricane Katrina have discovered 104 more bodies, pushing Louisiana’s death toll above 1,000. Many of the victims were elderly people trapped in attics where they climbed to escape rising waters in the flood-ravaged Ninth Ward. Jack Stephens, sheriff of St. Bernard Parish, said house-to-house searches should have continued until the bodies were found. “For people to come home to that damage and then to make that gruesome discovery,” he said, “that doesn’t seem fair to me.” Family members have also complained of foot-dragging at a makeshift morgue. Two and a half months after the storm, at least 321 bodies remain unidentified.