The search for children scattered by Katrina

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

December 4, 2005

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.