Not all of Katrina’s missing want family to find them

NEW ORLEANS – By Louisiana’s latest official count, 1,292 people are known to have died in the state because of Hurricane Katrina.

About 1,280 – the number changes daily – remain missing.

Hundreds of people were sucked into the Gulf of Mexico by Katrina’s retreating storm surge and will never be found. But the state-run, federally funded Find Family National Call Center is discovering that hundreds of others have used the storm and the nationwide diaspora it triggered to escape a troubled or painful past. They do not want to be found.

The center’s 90 or so workers immerse themselves daily in tracking missing wives and fleeing felons, reburying exhumed coffins, prying unknowingly into the dark family secrets of confused parentage and dealing with the anonymous dead whom no one seems able – or willing – to claim.

But the work, said Henry Yennie, the center’s deputy director, has led his workers into disturbing and unexpected areas. “We tracked one parolee to New York, but when we got him on the phone he threatened to kill the person who found him. He didn’t want to be found.”

The trackers have also learned more than they wanted to know about family relations. More than a few women, he said, have used the opportunity to escape from abusive domestic relationships. “They beg us not to report their whereabouts to the person tracking them. And we don’t,” Yennie said. “We only promise that, if we find someone, we’ll give them the phone number of the person who asked us to look for them.”

But the most unexpected challenge, he said, has been in dealing with the wearying complexity of family relationships and with unwanted discoveries about bloodlines. DNA identification, he said, often depends on painstakingly tracking a consistent genetic pattern within a family. In more than a few cases, searchers have been told by family members that all the siblings have the same father, only for the DNA evidence to show otherwise.

Yennie said the staff keeps such information confidential.

“Our purpose is to find people, not to violate their privacy. We don’t want to learn this stuff. We just want to find or identify people and move on,” he said.