Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
December 4, 2005 Sunday
LOOKING FOR THE LOST;
The search for children scattered by Katrina
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
NEW ORLEANS
Three months after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, the fate of more than 1,300 children remains unknown. Until a few days ago, Lil Joe and Kolenik Williams, brothers from New Orleans, were among the lost.
A teenage sister living in Baton Rouge when Katrina hit called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children several weeks after the Aug. 29 storm, saying she had not heard from them or from their mother, Nicole Williams. She had little contact information for other relatives.
That left two investigators working for the center to pursue the only lead they had one recent afternoon - the children's father, an inmate in New Orleans' storm-battered jail.
As the pair, Paul M. Burke and Bill Gleason, climbed the jailhouse's chipped, concrete steps, they were optimistic. That quickly faded, once inside the dreary visiting area.
The father, Joseph Jackson, speaking via a telephone through a glass partition, shook his head back and forth as Burke pressed him for information - friends' names, relatives' locations, a grandmother's phone number.
"Would she contact your brother?" Burke asked, anticipation in his voice. Jackson said no. "Would she know where he's at?" Burke pressed, leaning closer toward the glass. "I don't even know where he's at," Jackson responded, again shaking his head.
Like so many leads, this one was a bust.
Burke and Gleason headed downstairs. "We spent days to get absolutely nothing," Burke said, clearly frustrated. "They could be anywhere."
So could the hundreds of others, a situation that illustrates one of the most anguishing and challenging consequences of the flight from Katrina. For, while investigators believe most of the missing are safe somewhere, the wrenching apart of their families is proving a gargantuan obstacle to overcome.
In the government's hastily organized evacuations after New Orleans flooded, families were scattered across 48 states. Those overseeing evacuations, in their rush to clear people from the city, often separated families as they pressed them onto buses, helicopters and planes, which then went in different directions.
Documentation proving custody of children or other family ties was destroyed or lost. Access to phones and computers was minimal, creating gaps between the time families were separated and the time children were reported missing. Hurricane shelters had no coordinated system for feeding evacuees' names, birth dates and other information into a national database.
On top of that, many of the families were severely splintered even before the hurricane. Parents and children had different last names. Many children had been in the care of aunts, grandparents, great-grandparents or unrelated guardians before the storm, and those caretakers often lacked information crucial to finding children, such as birth dates, names of the youngsters' friends, recent photographs and nicknames.
"They're scattered physically, which doesn't help, but they're also scattered socially," said Burke. "When you have this sort of family structure, it's very difficult. When they scatter, they're just gone."
All of this has created a labyrinthine nightmare for investigators such as Burke and Gleason, who can spend hours a day roaming the mangled streets of New Orleans in search of information that could reunite children with their families.
Burke, a retired Alaska state trooper, and Gleason, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective, are members of Team Adam, a unit of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The group, comprised of retired law enforcement officers from across the country, was formed 2 1/2 years ago and serves as a quick-reaction force when children vanish.
It took just hours for Team Adam members to be deployed after Katrina, a reflection of the level of need created by the storm - initially, 4,819 children were unaccounted for.
Rewriting the rules
Bob O'Brien, director of the national center's missing children's division, said tens of thousands of calls came in immediately after the center established a special Katrina phone bank on Labor Day. Quickly, he said, the team had to rewrite its own rules to handle the unprecedented situation.
"Typically, when we take on a case of a missing child, we're opening the case based on a call from law enforcement or from the parents or legal custodian of the child," said O'Brien. "In Katrina, we expanded that because of the circumstances. Whole families were disappearing. We might have a relative who called in and said they hadn't seen the family in six months and hadn't heard from them at all. We opened cases like that."
By mid-November, the center's Katrina-related caseload was down to about 1,320.
O'Brien said some of those still missing could be dead. Identification of bodies has been slow, because of the poor condition of so many of them. But most of the children, he said, probably are safe but separated from relatives or guardians, who because of the haphazard evacuation cannot find them.
They might be in foster care or staying with friends or Good Samaritans. But no one can be sure until they are found, and accomplishing that has become more difficult as shelters close and as those searching, or being searched for, shift locations.
The problem is likely to worsen when the federal government stops paying for hotel rooms for evacuees, who will be forced to move yet again. Most states have been given a Dec. 15 cutoff date for hotel payments, but some were given until Jan. 7.
"It's like eating an elephant sandwich," said Gleason of chasing down leads across various states and gleaning information from family members who often don't communicate much in the best of times.
Tracking them down
The Williams' case was one such example.
Two of Nicole Williams' children live with her mother in Texas. Another, a 17-year-old with a baby of her own, lives in Baton Rouge. Only 6-year-old Joseph, known as Lil Joe, and 1-year-old Kolenik were living with their mother in New Orleans.
It was the 17-year-old who reported the youngest ones missing.
The key to finding them was to find Nicole Williams, and one way to find her was to find their father.
The jailhouse meeting with Jackson took two days to arrange, and it underscored the difficulties of nailing down reliable information. Jackson, for example, said he and Nicole Williams were married, something the investigators did not know but that could affect the surname she used if she had applied for post-storm assistance. He said Kolenik's name was spelled differently - Colnik - than what the case file contained, something that could prove important if the children had been enrolled in school somewhere.
It was their fifth stop of the day, which had begun hours earlier in Baton Rouge, where Team ADAM volunteers each morning receive case files and head into the field. Most files contain scant information gleaned from phone calls and e-mails from those who have filed reports. Often, information is limited to the child's last known address or the name and suspected address of a relative. Many lack photographs.
"Phones are hit and miss, so we spend a lot of time driving around, going from address to address, knocking on doors," Gleason said.
Even with a GPS device in their car, the going was slow as they traversed the bleak and barren post-flood landscape.
Three months after the storm, some roads remained impassable. Streets signs were blown away or bent at odd angles. Numbers were hard to find on the broken-down houses.
Most missing children come from the most heavily damaged parts of the city - the poor and working-class areas - and buildings there still bear the scrawls of search-and-rescue teams. "Dog prints inside," read the message on one door. "Dead cat," read another, the grim words adding to the dismal nature of the investigators' task.
"There's nobody at this address," Gleason said as they arrived at one damaged house on the end of a cul de sac, where 11-year-old LaChristina Taylor, for which the center had no photograph, had reportedly been living with her grandfather. That was all Gleason and Burke knew of the little girl.
They updated the file, and the next step, for another day, would be to try to find out where the grandfather had gone.
"These are the kind of days that I get back and everybody gives me crap because I didn't find anything," Burke said. "It's not like we're not looking. It's really frustrating."
A successful find
Burke and Gleason then headed toward another part of town, where the aunt of a missing 11-year-old boy lived. The boy's mother was in jail. His father, who reported him missing, lives in Georgia but thought his son was with the aunt, who had been told to expect the investigators.
As Burke and Gleason approached a home, they saw a woman sitting on the second-floor porch talking into her cellular phone. It was the woman, known only as Aunt Wanda, and as the men got out of the car she put down the phone and pulled out her identity documents.
"I'm his auntie!" she said anxiously. Then, she produced the missing boy, Jeremy, who apparently had no idea he was considered missing.
Burke and Gleason stayed just long enough to verify his identity, then headed off, grateful at having resolved one case but cognizant of the heaps of others that remain open.
"I would hope," Burke said when asked if he believed all the cases would be resolved. "I have to hope."
Then, as they drove toward another address that turned out to be an abandoned house, Burke's phone rang and he let out a "whoop!" Nicole Williams' mother had been found in Texas, and she had provided a new phone number for her daughter.
The next day, Nov. 16, the case was declared resolved.
Nicole Williams, Lil Joe and Kolenik had survived the hurricane and floods by holing up in a high-rise building. When the water receded, Williams led the children to the convention center. There, they boarded an evacuation bus to Houston, spent time in a shelter, and in November got vouchers that enabled them to rent an apartment.
Throughout all of this, Williams, in a recent phone interview, said she had tried to contact family members but that the constant moving, the lack of a phone, and the family's already scattered circumstances made it difficult.
When they left their home, Williams said she and the children walked several miles to the convention center, then sat in despair with thousands of others as buses passed them by. When, after a day and a night, she saw a chance to board a bus, they joined the surge of people.
A police officer took Lil Joe and Kolenik away from her and put them on the bus.
"I said, 'I'm not going to let you separate me from my boys,' " Williams says she told the officer. "They were telling me, 'Don't worry, everybody is going to the same place.' "
Another officer intervened and let Williams join the boys, but Williams wonders what might have happened had she not stood her ground.
"I wasn't letting my boys out of my sight, because nobody was going to save their lives like I would," she said, choking back tears. "You'd have to be a mother to know that ain't nobody going to risk their lives like you would to save your kids."
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
December 4, 2005 Sunday
Answers hard to come by for families kept at distance
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
Each day for more than three months, Linda L. Jackson has wondered if her two grown daughters and seven grandchildren, ages 8 to 16, are alive.
She last had contact with them as the wind and rain raged around one daughter's New Orleans apartment Aug. 29. As they spoke by telephone, Hurricane Katrina blasted the apartment door open.
Jackson, who lives in Memphis, was incredulous that her daughters, Felicia and Linda, both in their 30s, were still there. Felicia told her it was too dangerous to go outside. "I love you," Jackson told Felicia before hanging up. "She said, 'I love you too, mama.' I said, 'Give me a call tomorrow if you can.' "
Felicia never called. Neither did Linda, and Jackson's inability to learn their fate further illustrates the plight of many affected by Katrina.
"Just imagine getting up every day, looking at the TV and seeing that they're still finding bodies," said Jackson, a nursing home custodian. "Everything has gone through my mind."
Like many families hardest hit, the Jackson clan is financially strapped and lacks resources that could help them find each other. Regular phone lines were downed, and neither daughter had a cell phone. Neither does their mother, and she recently moved and has a new phone number, which her daughters would not have.
Jackson's sister, Sharon, who lives in California, told Jackson about two months ago that she had heard from one of the daughters, Jackson says. But the sister could not recall where the daughter was supposed to be or if the others were with her.
Since then, Sharon's phone has been cut off. Anyway, Jackson says she is skeptical of the account. "I won't be convinced until I see them or hear from them myself," she says.
She has reported the family missing to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which posted their pictures on its Web site along with the scant information she was able to provide. They show smiling, sweet-faced children, some with ribboned pigtails, some with graduation caps.
Jackson has also checked in with the Red Cross.
So far, the only thing she knows is that the area where her daughters lived was badly flooded.
"I'm just hoping and praying something comes up," she said. "I don't even know what to think. I don't even know what to do."
