NEW ORLEANS - It may have been the most disturbing story of death that emerged after Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans and its suburbs.
A week after Katrina hit, Knight Ridder and other media outlets reported on Sept. 5 that 22 bodies had been found tied to a single rope near tiny Violet, La., in devastated St. Bernard Parish. The parish, or county, is east of New Orleans.
The story was sent around the world. Knight Ridder moved two stories on Sept. 5 that quoted Sheriff Jack Stephens saying rescuers had found the bodies tied with rope and wrapped around a pole.
The next day, residents of Sydney, Australia, read the newspaper headline, "Ring of 22 bodies found lashed around a pole."
The reports contained no details about how these victims ended up tied to the rope.
Last week, St. Bernard Parish Fire Chief Tom Stone said the reports weren't true.
"It's a hurricane urban myth. It's fictitious. It never happened. Thank God," he said.
While news reports about the rope of death contained purported confirmation from a top police official, Stone said that early on, parish rescue personnel had no reliable way to confirm or deny much of anything. Travel was by boat only, and radio communication was spotty at best.
Another story of mass death in the parish around the same time was quickly defused after a local congressman retracted his statement that 100 rescued people had died in a warehouse awaiting evacuation.
Stone, who helped coordinate rescue efforts at Chalmette High School, where 2,000 were stranded with little food or water, said he's discovered the probable source of the story about the roped victims.
He said that a resident of the affluent Jumonville subdivision, near Violet, who evacuated during the height of the storm surge told a rescuer that he saw people roped together.
"That's all he said, as far as I can figure out," Stone said.
The story quickly spread among harried sheriff's deputies and firefighters in dozens of commandeered pleasure boats, but they had to concentrate on saving the living. Somewhere along the way, the number 22 became attached to the story.
"It was getting to the point that if I didn't actually see it, I didn't believe it," Stone said. "There were a lot of rumors, but then there were a lot of truths."
Finally, around Sept. 5, Stone said he and the parish coroner went with searchers to the Jumonville development but were initially stymied by thick mud from the storm surge. Front loaders scraped away much of the black ooze, but not a single body was found, he said.
Since that time, rescuers have thoroughly searched the 68,000-population parish.
Stone has completed a map showing where each of the bodies of the 123 people who died in the parish was found. Jumonville doesn't contain a single red dot indicating that someone died there. There are no clusters of dots indicating mass deaths anywhere on the map.
"We're still looking for a few people, but they are not from that subdivision," he said.
