Storm of legendary strength created a myth that lingers Those 22 bodies linked by rope? Officials now say they never existed NEW ORLEANS - It was a disturbing story of death that emerged after Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans and its suburbs. A week after Katrina hit, media outlets reported that 22 bodies had been found tied to a single rope near tiny Violet, La., in devastated St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans. The story, which the Observer ran on the front page on Sept. 6, quoted Sheriff Jack Stephens saying rescuers had found the bodies tied with rope and wrapped 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. Don Banks, who has headed the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team in St. Bernard Parish throughout the disaster, said that he had never heard of the supposed group on the rope and that there was never any recovery of any bodies en masse like that. "It didn't exist. There was nothing like that," Banks said. His operation ran the morgues and recovered all of the dead bodies in the parish. 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 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. "I

All newspapers have not been accurate in their reporting including the one above. Jack Strain is not the Sheriff in St. Bernard Parish but rather he is the sheriff in a town located 30 miles east of St. Brnard Parish. I have heard of several people swimming or using a boat to get across lake ponchartrain from St. Bernard Parish. Jack Strains' community would have been on the receiving end of those "22 people tied together". I am not saying it didnt happen but if It did Jack Strain would have been one of the first to know. The first time I heard about this , I heard the bodies were found in New Orleans. Which is about 7 miles north of St. Bernard Parish. I am hearing stories everyday about what happened in certain parts of the city and they arent good stories. I dont have to read the newspapers to know what happened. I have several friends and family who were there.

The News Media is a mixed blessing. With-out them we would either know nothing or whatever we find out would take ages to find out. However they are also quite adept at providing us with a mixed bag of good and bad information. To be fair, sometimes this is their fault and sometimes it isn't.

Mixed blessing is an apt way to describe it - LOL. We need to remember that even accurate reports can show only part of the picture. This is why it is worthwhile to obtain information from multiple sources, and filter our perspectives accordingly. But without the news media, we'd be cloistered in our own little enclaves, without any idea of what is going on in the rest of the world.

That's true, Abby. I believe the media should be as honest and fair as possible when it comes to reporting the news. They should be unbiased and held to higher ideals than we truly expect out of the average person. I can forgive mistakes and I think most of us can do that.

Abby, Outlooker, more forgiving than I. I believe that media is, particularly and pecularly in Katrina's case, morbid and made money off of reporting gore and suffering that never existed. IF someone says 22 bodies were found strung together, instead of rushing to tittilate the percieved public's sado maschocistic love of gore , they should rush to say where are the bodies, give me some proof. The media continually built fabrication on fabrication JUST to make money...it was a strange moment of fiction, fabrication, and love of non existant suffering which detracted from the true suffering in my opinion. I think reality doesn't sell news, make money, or run up the charts, they like Hollywood version of fabrication. I will not be tolerant of that, and how can fabrication, not fact, be called "honest mistake"...again, I live on the island of misfit toys. ~Moogie

Moogie, you are just one of the many who believe the role of the media is to report the news, and not try to create it. There is no doubt that even our most worthy news medias around the world are more into trying to shape the news instead of simply reporting it. Look at the fall of some of the greats recently, such as the BBC and Time.

why don't they take "news" out of their name and call themselves Time entertainment, inc...:) yes, I still believe in accountability.

I don't know, maybe it's a selling point. :)