The VIC

When you drive the back roads of Louisiana, you rarely think to look to the side and wonder what might be behind that tree-line, or what drama might be unfolding a few hundred yards to your left or right. When you are driving you have a goal, a destination, a reason for the direction you are going. I am here to document one of those times when something did happen along one of those Louisiana back roads. Here to speak that which the State and Federal Governments have decided to suppress. I have a story to tell about an Early January weekend and the heroic survivors of one of the most gruesome stories ever told in a land with a multitude of such tales.

Highway 30 runs South and East out of Baton Rouge, broadly paralleling the Mississippi river on its way to New Orleans. Along the way it passes the sleepy little community of St Gabriel, named ironically enough for the patron saint of communication. The sugar cane fields are bordered with moss hung trees, most without leaves this time of year. Driving down this highway in that time before dawn you see the patchy ground fog reaching tendrils upwards from unseen breezes, the entire scene barely visible in the morning light.

This is the land of giant oil and petrochemical refineries. The lights of the vessels and piping stand out even against the lightening morning sky. Steam from the cooling towers drifts over the road often obscuring oncoming traffic and adding to the morning fog. The food of the insatiable American industrial machine is manufactured here for use over the rest of the country. As you turn off Highway 30 and make for the Mississippi levee, the countryside becomes even more rural, isolated and strange.

This story begins really months before with the devastating hurricane one-two punch of Katrina and Rita, killing hundreds and washing away the interred remains of hundreds more. By design and accident these remains made their way to a temporary morgue facility in St Gabriel and then to a new morgue built well off the River Road, back in the trees along the Mississippi. The VIC as it became known stood for “Victims Identification Center” but in the parlance of those that worked here simply… The VIC.

These victims and disinterred remains found their way to frozen food trailers in the massive parking area of the VIC where they were processed by professionals in the fields of forensics, anthropology, dentistry, mortuary science, pathology and law enforcement. For those lucky ones that were identified, release was only delayed by political, legal and financial issues that were resolved often enough to keep a trickle of bodies leaving the facility against the tide of incoming dead.

December 28, 2005 a body was found in the remains of a washed away cemetery in Plaquemines parish. This casket was odd from the first, as it was bound in chains made of iron and padlocked. Most of these caskets had to be opened with power tools but this example required larger tools and drew quite a crowd of morgue workers when it was finally opened. This crew of hardened veterans had been processing bodies for four months by this time, little could happen that could phase them. Inside this secure casket were the severely decomposed remains of an individual dressed in black clothing. Virtually completely skeletonized, this body had among its other anomalous features, a round wooden dowel protruding from the chest and apparently driven through the clothing of the individual.

Once the body is removed from the casket, they are placed on stainless steel tables with casters for easy portability around the morgue. The bodies are digitally X-rayed both for whole body and Dental X-rays and the file sent across the parking lot to a server storing hundreds of similar files awaiting their turn at evaluation and hopefully identification. Any Personal effects that are seen either in the casket or on the body or observed in x-ray are catalogued and photographed separately.

My first encounter with the body was indirect. I was called to the Dental groups offices to assist with what they believed were corrupt files. The view on the monitor when I walked in was of the lower half of a skull oddly stretched left to right showing the entire upper jaw. Included in the view I was able to see were two massive canine teeth. The dentists all agreed they were vastly oversized from normal and extended to what would have been the gumline of the lower jaw.

“So…. You guys found Lestat?” was my only thought. Dentists have NO sense of humor about patients apparently.

As the sun went down on December 30th I drove away from the facility, back to my apartment, looking forward to just a half day work on new years eve and then a couple of days off for the New Year celebration. The first death occurred before I got home that night I am positive. No one was there to see it, but I can imagine it. The trailers that held the dead were in orderly rows, the freezer units running keeping them at just above freezing. The codes of the number and locations of bodies along the sides of the units. These trailers are managed by a group wearing red coats and shirts who move them and care for them and monitor them to keep them safe and running. I am positive that Mudflap (yes, this was his name) heard something…. If it was like later on, it was a banging inside the trailer that got his attention. He certainly had keys to the unit. I can only imagine what he must have had as his last thought, opening the door of that trailer, shining his flash inside. Did he see the horror shambling towards him or was he just fallen upon and consumed? What fetid breath greeted his light? He must have died almost instantly, I know now we all hope he did as the later victims often lived for many hours while being consumed.