What Happens To The Unidentified OR Unclaimed Dead? (Modern DNA Technology To The Rescue)

In NYC, identifying the dead, and finding closure

• By ULA ILNYTZKY
  Associated Press
• Posted: Thursday, August 30, 2012 12:01 a.m.
• Text size: A A A

 
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AP photoAnatomical specimens are displayed at the City of New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner where anthropologists routinely work to reveal the persons behind unclaimed and unidentified remains in New York on Tuesday.

NEW YORK — On a wind-swept island off New York City, the remains of 850,000 people rest in pine boxes in a grid of covered trenches — but many are not resting in peace.

They are the unidentified or unclaimed dead who have been found around the nation’s largest city — often with little hope of a loved one ever knowing their fate. Now, with advances in DNA technology and anthropology and with new federal funding, the city medical examiner’s office has exhumed dozens of the bodies in a new push to identify several decades’ worth.

It’s how Ben Maurer’s family finally learned that the 17-year-old had jumped to his death from a Manhattan building on June 25, 2002.

His mother, Germaine, submitted his DNA to the medical examiner in 2009, when the first phase of the project began. The DNA was entered into a public database containing information on thousands of cases of missing and unidentified people — and matched a John Doe buried in the potter’s field on 101-acre Hart Island in Long Island Sound.

He was given a proper funeral near the family’s home in Piscataway, N.J., shortly after his remains were returned to them in 2009.

“It meant everything,” said Jared Maurer, Ben’s 28-year-old brother. “It finally gave us closure to what had happened to Ben.”

Jared Maurer said he frequently visits his brother’s gravesite. “I tell him I miss him, I tell him I love him,” he said.

At any given time, there are 40,000 active missing- and unidentified-persons cases in the United States. New York State accounts for 25 percent of those cases, most of them in New York City.

The identities of some of the bodies in the potter’s field are known, but their families are too poor to have them buried elsewhere.

DNA samples weren’t regularly taken from all bodies until about 2006, so the only way to identify many bodies is to exhume them, once DNA samples can be matched up with a description of a corpse, like in Maurer’s case.

Fifty-four bodies for which the medical examiner’s office had no DNA samples have been disinterred from Hart Island. The exhumation, performed by city inmates, is part of a larger effort to gather data on the unknowns. So far, 50 have been identified, including some who were exhumed.

To date, the scientists have gathered data on more than 1,200 unidentified bodies and entered it into Namus, the public database that is run by the National Institute of Justice — the research arm of the Department of Justice — and that helped identify Maurer.

DNA technology developed for the need to identify remains from the Sept. 11 attacks and other disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, has contributed to a national push in recent years to identify unclaimed remains, said Benjamin Figura, a forensic anthropologist and director of identification at the medical examiner’s office.

The first phase of the project began under a grant from the National Institute of Justice that allowed the medical examiner to review cases going back to 1998. Two subsequent grants expanded the project to include cases dating to 1988. The grants total more than $1.5 million.

The third grant has been extended through April 2013, and the medical examiner’s office has applied for a fourth grant. Once the money runs out, Figura said, the identification work will continue, but with fewer resources.

Bodies in advanced states of decomposition get an anthropological workup; the scientists determine age, ancestry, sex and height and identify any other unique features that could help in identification, such as tattoos, scars and prior surgeries.

“What we’re building is a biological profile. ... If we can say this is a 17-to 25-year-old male, we can narrow down the pool of potential matches,” said Bradley Adams, who heads the team. “If I say the person is 6 foot 2, that will pin it down more.”

Germaine Maurer called the New York City morgue to search for her son the day after he disappeared, but because he had dark features and looked older, he was labeled as a male Hispanic in his 20s, rather than a 17-year-old white male.

She counts herself lucky.
“There are many families out there missing loved ones who never know what has happened,” she said. “We were very fortunate. We found out all the details.”

Hilarious Wonderful Animated Funeral Procession

Follow this link for some real fun and laughs:

http://www.thiswayupmovie.com/


Isn't this how you would like your funeral procession to go?

Artist's Troubled U.S. Health Care "Truth Tour" and Death

Isn't America a village where we all need to watch out for and take care of one another.  Don't God and  Christ always talk about helping the poor, "the least among us?"  Then why can't we show more compassion for those that are underinsured and uninsured?  Should the cost really be an issue?  Just do it:  help those who need health care help.  Isn't that basic human decency and kindness?   How about the healthcare CEOs who live in mansions and have seven figure salaries and bonuses?  Where do they get that money from?

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DANIEL RUBIN    Posted: Thu, Aug. 30, 2012, 3:01 AM Daniel Rubin: Artist tried to draw attention to troubled U.S. health-care system Daniel Rubin, Inquirer Columnist Email Daniel Rubin, follow Daniel Rubin on Twitter SHARON GEKOSKI-KIMMEL / Staff Photographer Craig Rishko of Newtown reflects on Theresa BrownGold's portraits of people with health-care troubles. She displayed them outside the Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown. 1 of 3 View images READER FEEDBACK Post a comment RELATED STORIES   Prison health-care services questioned   Cuba campaign takes on 'free' health care   Little evidence found of value of autism treatments Theresa BrownGold spent Wednesday lugging around a giant oil portrait of a college athlete who fell into a diabetic coma because she couldn't afford her insulin. The Bucks County artist figured the harrowing image of Courtney Leigh Huber, the paint streaking from her face as though she were being erased, would start a conversation about the way this country takes care of the sick. It didn't. The 58-year-old painter went on talking anyway - at the SEPTA station in Levittown during rush hour, in the heart of Doylestown at lunch, in Quakertown for the afternoon drive, bringing her one-woman "Truth Tour" to street level in the hope that the faces she's painted over the last four years will reach people put off by politicians, lobbyists, and those looking to make a buck off people's health. Not that BrownGold is opposed to profit. For a dozen years, she and her husband ran a restaurant and catering company in Buckingham. She handled the money, and a simple calculation at work four years ago ignited her activism. "We had a longtime waiter who was moving on to a bigger restaurant," she said. "He had full benefits. I realized we could save a lot of money on health-care costs if we hired two half-time employees instead." But her decision troubled her. So did what was happening to some of her customers, in particular a man whose medical insurance cost him as much each month as his mortgage. She decided to paint what was on her mind, using what she'd learned at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to investigate the experiences people had with health care. Her method was to sit down with her subjects for two to four hours to understand their stories and feelings. Then she'd snap a couple hundred photographs and try to capture something essential. "I like to say I don't paint people. I paint souls." She called her project Art as Social Inquiry, and she was hitting the subject from all angles until she was contacted on Facebook by the mother of Courtney Leigh Huber. Huber was 23, a former high-jump champion. She was also a Type 1 diabetic. After graduating from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, she was dropped from her family's health-care plan. Her insulin cost less than the insurance premiums, so she went without coverage. She started cutting back her nighttime doses. What she mistook for the flu was really the beginning of a diabetic coma that cost the young woman her life. Huber's photographs haunted BrownGold. Forget about balance - she started to focus on "the untouchables," those too expensive to cover. She has painted nearly 50 giant oil portraits. She's halfway to her goal. BrownGold, who describes herself as a left-of-center thinker who always voted for Arlen Specter, has become increasingly radicalized. She took some of her work to the Occupy movement's protests in Doylestown and Philadelphia. At a town-hall meeting in August 2011, where she confronted her Republican congressman, Mike Fitzpatrick, she was steeled by her portrait of Joann Wallace, a 65-year-old woman from lower Bucks who'd lost insurance after her husband got hurt at work. She skipped seeing a doctor. Her left eye started going bad. A Walmart optician discovered her retina had detached, but Wallace had waited so long she lost about 80 percent of her vision in the eye. The U.S. Supreme Court came next for BrownGold. For five months in the winter and spring, as the Affordable Care Act was before the court, she displayed her portraits outside. She was looking for sensible debate. She got yelled at a lot - "talking points," she says. At noon Wednesday in Doylestown, she talked until the sound system cut out. She shrugged and talked louder, offering to answer questions from any of the dozen people who'd stopped on the way to lunch to hear her. Around her a dozen volunteers, many in Obama T-shirts, held her portraits. "You don't have to agree with anything I said. I just want to discuss it," she pleaded. There were no takers. Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917, drubin@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @danielrubin or Facebook at http://ph.ly/DanRubin

Find this article at:  http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/daniel_rubin/20120830_Daniel_Rubin__Artist_tried_to_draw_attention_to_troubled_U_S__health-care_system.html

Poverty Addiction Hope Death-RIP DeAndre McCullough/A Poem

Shame on America!  Where is our compassion, empathy, sympathy, concern, love, help for those in need, whatever their need?  Pray for DeAndre.  We're all in this forever.

A poem by DeAndre McCullough:

Silent screams and broken dreams,
Addicts, junkies, pushers and fiends.
Crowded spaces and sad faces,
Never look back as the police chase us ...

If I had one wish it would surely be
That God would send angels to set me free.
Free from the madness, of a city running wild,
Free from the life of a ghetto child.

— DeAndre McCullough, 1977-2012

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August 29, 2012

A Better Life Eternally Eluded the Boy From ‘The Corner’

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

BALTIMORE — In good times, DeAndre McCullough inspired nearly everyone he touched. He was a small-time drug dealer made good, a recovering addict who had a fledgling career counseling troubled teenagers. He played bit roles on HBO in “The Wire” and in “The Corner,” which chronicled his life in the drug trade at the age of 15.

He had survived the inner-city whirlpools that swallowed so many people he knew. His father and several friends lost their lives to drug overdoses or gunfire. Mr. McCullough, who abused cocaine and heroin, never expected to live past 20.

“I’m 35 today,” he marveled in a text message that he sent to his mentor, David Simon, the writer and television producer, in May. “Never thought I’d make it. How ’bout that?”

But on Aug. 1, Mr. McCullough was found dead of heroin intoxication, making him a powerful symbol of the urban maelstrom that has devoured so many young men. To the people who knew him, his death was all the more heartbreaking because a better life had seemed so tantalizingly within his reach.

Michael Potts, the actor who played Brother Mouzone on “The Wire,” heard the news just as he was about to perform in “The Book of Mormon” on Broadway. Mr. McCullough had played Mr. Mouzone’s sidekick, Lamar.

“I was devastated,” said Mr. Potts, who said he had to steady himself for his performance. “As an African-American man, I thought: ‘Oh my God, I’m losing another one, not another one.’ ”

Here in Baltimore, friends and relatives had hoped he would avoid this all-too-familiar fate. Of Mr. McCullough’s closest teenage buddies, three ended up dead, four ended up in prison and several ended up addicted to drugs.

“Once ‘The Wire’ and everything hit, I thought life was going to be good for DeAndre,” said Kevin Thomas, the only one of Mr. McCullough’s close male friends to graduate from college.

Mr. Thomas, who works for a real estate company, knows how drugs and violence can burn through a family. His father died of a drug overdose. His mother, who was also an addict, died of AIDS. His brother was shot to death leaving a nightclub.

He had hoped that Mr. McCullough, his best friend from third grade, would be spared. “To see him go down that road of self-destruction was heartbreaking,” he said.

He still remembers Mr. McCullough as a teenager, laughing and joking on Fayette and Mount Streets, a drug-infested street corner in an impoverished community. The son of two drug addicts, Mr. McCullough sold drugs, skipped school and rarely read books.

Yet Mr. McCullough also wrote poetry. He was familiar with Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and he had a wry sense of his place in a warped world.

Ed Burns, who with Mr. Simon wrote the book “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood,” which inspired the HBO mini-series, said Mr. McCullough stood apart.

“He seemed to know a lot of what the world was about,” he said. “He could articulate the injustice, which was all around him. The other kids couldn’t. They suffered it, but they weren’t conscious of it. He was conscious of it.”

The book, published in 1997, opened up new possibilities. Suddenly, Mr. McCullough was being interviewed on “Nightline” on ABC and on NPR. He was 20 and thinking there might be another way of living.

“This is what I’ve done my whole life,” Mr. McCullough told NPR in 1998, describing his years of dealing and abusing drugs. “It defined me as a person. And now I’m trying to define myself as someone else that I’ve never been.”

He enrolled in drug-rehabilitation clinics and tried to get clean. He got his G.E.D. and went to community college for a semester with help from Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns.

He found honest work at a furniture store and a hospital, and at security companies. And he played bit roles in Mr. Simon’s productions.

In “The Corner,” he played the policeman who arrests the character based on his life. In “The Wire,” he took on the role of the assistant to Brother Mouzone, a hit man.

But it was at Mountain Manor Treatment Center where he found his niche. He spent about two years there, counseling young drug addicts, and dreamed of opening a youth center of his own.

“Oh my God, he just had a gift,” said Charlotte Wilson, a counselor who worked with him in 2004 and 2005.

“He could share the pain and he could share the joy. He would read the kids his poetry about living life on the street, hard knocks, talking about drugs and how you can come up out of it. They loved him.”

His mother, Fran Boyd Andrews, who overcame her own addiction, said it was the longest time he would stay sober. “I think that was the happiest I ever seen my son,” she said.

But no matter what Mr. McCullough did, the cravings kept creeping back. He started missing work, and finally his supervisor let him go.

Over the next seven years, he drifted from one low-wage job to another, in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics, and he spent long stretches unemployed.

His relatives, friends and two young sons prayed for him and helped whenever they could. But he couldn’t escape the pain within himself, the gnawing sense that he would never succeed.

“It just ate at him and ate at him,” his mother said, “until he couldn’t get a grip on it.”

Last fall, he turned to Mr. Simon again, pleading for work on the set of “Treme” in New Orleans.

“He said, ‘I’ll get clean. I’ll do whatever I have to do,’ ” Mr. Simon recalled. “There was a weariness and a fear in his voice that convinced me that we had to try.”

Mr. Simon offered him a position on the set’s security team. Mr. McCullough started in October. By January, he was out of a job. “There are corners here, too,” he told Mr. Simon.

“What was the trigger that sent him back to addiction?” Mr. Simon asked. “It’s the biggest question in the world.

“But the journey from one America to the other is epic,” he said. “Once you’ve become a citizen of one, it’s really hard to find citizenship in the other.”

Back home in Baltimore, Mr. McCullough couldn’t find work. By June, the police said, he had found another way to fuel his drug habit.

“My heart nearly fell to my feet,” Mrs. Boyd Andrews said of the moment that she saw a crime scene photo that the police had posted online. The authorities said it was her son, who was accused of robbing two pharmacies and fleeing with bottles of morphine and oxycodone.

Mr. McCullough promised to turn himself in once he was clean, and he enrolled in another drug clinic. But two weeks before the program was over, he checked himself out.

“I knew then that he was back at it,” his mother said.

On the day before the police found his body, Mr. McCullough was hopeful. He had a line on a landscaping job and was talking about getting back on his feet.

The next morning, Mr. McCullough, who always called his mother at 8 a.m., didn’t call. That evening, a cousin went to Mr. McCullough’s girlfriend’s house and found him lying dead in the bathroom. His addiction had finally swallowed him whole.

High-Speed Rail Death In China-Is A Life Cheap In China?

Wow!    What frustration!  The Cao brothers are trying to deal with a massive Chinese bureaucracy to secure proper redress for the deaths, and severe injuries sustained by one of the brothers,  of their beloved parents in a high-speed rail accident/crash last year in China.  The parents died while taking their first vacation ever.  Per the article below, "his parents, naturalized American citizens taking their son on a triumphant tour of their native land, were killed."

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August 28, 2012

Victims’ Sons in Tough Fight for Redress After China Rail Crash

By ANDREW JACOBS

SHANGHAI — Henry Cao has stark memories of the moment the high-speed train he was riding rear-ended another last summer in the eastern city of Wenzhou: the pleasantly hypnotic rocking that gave way to a jolt he likened to an earthquake, followed by blackness and the sensation of falling as the car plummeted 100 feet off a viaduct.

“We were flying like rag dolls,” he said.

The crash killed 40 passengers, injured 191 and shook the nation’s confidence in its ambitious high-speed rail system. Mr. Cao, 33, a Chinese-American importer from Colorado, barely survived; he lost a kidney and his spleen, and head injuries have left him mired in a perpetual daze, unable to stay awake for more than an hour or two. His parents, naturalized American citizens taking him on a triumphant tour of their native land, were killed.

As Mr. Cao has struggled to recover over the past year, he has found himself drained by a different sort of battle: trying to wrest compensation from the Ministry of Railways, an unbending government behemoth unaccustomed to dealing with determined foreign citizens.

This month Mr. Cao returned to China for the first time since the accident. He and his brother, Leo, came to collect their parents’ remains and to press negotiations with the ministry. “They know how to wear you down,” said Leo Cao, 30. “First they let you scream and yell, then they stall you, and finally they tell you vague and empty words. Now they say, ‘You’re lucky you’re getting anything.’ ”

Their painful and politically fraught odyssey has highlighted the workings of an omnipotent ministry that employs more than two million people and rivals the Chinese military in size and influence. The experience has been disorienting for the Cao brothers, who left China as adolescents two decades ago. “This place is not how I remember it,” said Henry Cao, speaking faintly as his eyes flickered and lost focus. “Everyone is rushing around to make money. Life here is cheap.”

The ministry, which runs its own court system and is largely impervious to oversight, has long been dogged by accusations of corruption. A former rails minister, Liu Zhijun, who was fired five months before the accident, is expected to go on trial next month for charges of taking millions of dollars in bribes and other unnamed “disciplinary violations.”

Zhang Kai, a lawyer who represented a passenger sentenced to three years in prison for slapping a train conductor, described the ministry as a “monster left over from the planned economy era” that resists reform or challenges to its authority. “It is common knowledge that the ministry is responsible for generating maximum profits while supervising itself,” Mr. Zhang said.

In a report released in December, government investigators placed the blame for the Wenzhou accident on flaws in signaling equipment. Investigators say the ministry bypassed safety regulations in its haste to create the world’s largest high-speed railroad network.

For the brothers’ parents — Cao Erxing and his wife, Chen Zengrong, both 56 — the return to China was a capstone to lives of toil in New York City sweatshops and restaurant kitchens. The father and mother, neither of whom studied beyond middle school, had left Fujian Province with their boys, taught themselves English and earned enough money to buy a house in Queens. At the time of their death, they were custodial workers at La Guardia Airport.

“They finally felt financially secure enough to take their first vacation,” Leo Cao said.

His father died at the scene, but his mother survived for two hours, leaving haunting unanswered questions. Did she receive adequate medical care? And who was heartless enough to swipe the $10,000 from the fanny pack fastened to her waist?

In the parlance of Communist Party euphemisms, July 23 has become a “sensitive anniversary” — a day for newspaper editors and columnists to ignore. After a blizzard of coverage in the days after the crash — including reports of a botched rescue and efforts to bury one of the train carriages — the censors blocked discussions of the topic on microblog services. Last month, victims’ families were warned against holding public memorials.

But the Cao brothers, ignoring such admonitions, have become thorns in the side of the government as they seek financial assistance.

In a series of meetings, ministry officials have offered them $280,000 for the death of their parents and $85,000 for Henry Cao’s injuries, the brothers said. The Caos have requested a total of $5 million, based on what they say the three would have earned over 20 years of working in the United States.

Their lawyers say the ministry is ignoring a national law that bases compensation on accident victims’ earning power in the area where they lived. The ministry is citing its own regulations that rely on prevailing wages in the province where the crash occurred.

“The representatives tell us there is no room for negotiation,” said a lawyer for the brothers, Tian Jie. “Even they admit they don’t know who makes the decisions.”

Officials did not respond to a faxed request for comment, and repeated telephone calls to the ministry’s office of public information last week were not answered.

Leo Cao said that his brother was too disabled to work and that the offered compensation would not go very far in supporting his four young children and paying for his medical expenses. “From the outside, my brother looks somewhat normal, but he’s half the man he used to be,” he said.

The ministry’s minders stay in the same hotel as the brothers, paying for their accommodations and carrying their luggage. But they frequently call to find out where the brothers are. Negotiators have warned of “troubles” that might result from talking to journalists.

This month, as the brothers wept over their parents’ coffins at a funeral home in Wenzhou, ministry employees huddled awkwardly. “If they lose track of us they get scolded,” Leo Cao later said with weary resignation.

In the hours after the accident, ministry negotiators descended on morgues and hospitals even before the surgeons had finished stitching up the injured. Working in teams of four or five, they separated victims’ families into different hotels and relentlessly hammered out deals that in the end were nearly the same: about $140,000 for each fatality.

For the past year, the Cao brothers have angered officials by refusing to remove their parents’ bodies from the morgue. Leo Cao, who was completing a doctorate in information sciences at the time of the crash, said he had been partly overwhelmed by the medical needs of his brother.

But he also came to hope the delay might help persuade the ministry to compromise, and also allow a funeral service in the family’s ancestral Fujianese village. Officials refused, perhaps fearful it would draw other disgruntled survivors.

Still, the brothers held a makeshift memorial service at the funeral home and then stopped at the site of the crash. Last Wednesday, they arranged for the bodies to be shipped to New York. The funeral, scheduled for Saturday in Queens, is expected to draw hundreds of Fujianese immigrants.

As the talks dragged on, Henry Cao became increasingly withdrawn, saying he was no longer interested in the money and wanted only to return home. He spent most of his last days in China in his hotel room, reading biblical stories that touch on suffering and redemption. “I want to move on,” he said, staring at the floor.

But for now, his brother is determined to keep fighting and says he is prepared to file a lawsuit in Chinese court, even though several lawyers have advised him it would be futile. “It’s not only about money,” Leo Cao said. “I want justice.”

Among the hundreds of photographs recovered from their father’s iPhone from his first and final vacation in China, one image stands out: a shaky snapshot of the LED monitor that graced the carriage of their train boasting that it was moving at 303 kilometers an hour, or 188 m.p.h.

“My father was so proud of China’s progress,” Leo Cao said. “Unfortunately it was China’s progress that killed my parents.”

Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.     Page A1, Front Page