They died on flooded city streets in the Big Easy and in country homes in Mississippi.
One survived seven months of combat in Iraq only to die near his childhood home. An 80-year-old woman died sitting in a bedroom chair when a tree crashed through the roof. One man was killed when he went out to his car to charge his cellphone during the storm.
A woman known only as "Vera" was struck by a car after the hurricane hit, according to her husband.
Most of the dead from Hurricane Katrina don't have names yet. Many will never be identified because their bodies decomposed in the floodwaters and heat before they were found.
For some, a few details are emerging from relatives who want them remembered:
Jewelry shop owner David "Kip" Logan, 49, liked to play golf and hunt and attended a Baptist church. His last act was to tell his wife to run as a tree cracked and fell on the porch of his Laurel, Mississippi, home, collapsing an awning on top of him.
Deborah Logan suffered two broken vertebrae and broken fingers, but stayed with her husband as neighbors pulled him from the wreckage, dug a damaged car out of the debris and drove him to the hospital.
"I held his head in my hands the whole way," Deborah Logan said.
For some reason, 43-year-old Vicky Thaggard wrote a letter to her preacher four months ago describing how she wanted her funeral carried out. She died when a tree fell on her car in Leake County, Mississippi.
"Different people think you know before you die," said Kay Cain, her niece. "I don't know ... Why else would she leave a letter like that?"
Whenever Merry Thompson went out for a drive, she was accompanied by a 1m tall stuffed toy, Sylvester the cat. It was a tribute to her late father, who was named Sylvester, and it was guaranteed to draw stares from drivers around Eagle Lake, Mississippi.
The 43-year-old died when a tree fell on her mobile home.
"She's crazy -- not looney bin crazy -- but she just had a lot of personality," her son, Nick Thompson, said. "She's very outgoing and warm."
Josh Russell had spent a tour in Iraq, then switched to the National Guard from the Marine Corps so he could spend more time at home. The 27-year-old was killed when the Humvee he was riding in hit debris on a highway in Pearl River County, Mississippi.
Russell was nervous about being called into action, sent into the teeth of the hurricane, said his widow, Jamie Russell.
"He didn't want to go, because he knew it was going to be a bad storm. But he went, because that was his duty," she said.
These are just a few of the dead whose names are known and whose stories are being told. But there are sure to be thousands more in months ahead.
Many, like the man whose body was on a wooden cart on New Orleans' Rampart Street near downtown may simply be buried in anonymous pauper's graves. The elderly man was wrapped in a child's bedsheet decorated with the cartoon characters Batman, Robin and the Riddler. He had one shoe on, one off.
Identifying the dead will be a daunting task, made even more desperate because many will likely be bloated and decomposed by the time they're taken away. Officials said they would try to locate dental records, but urged family members to bring in photos, fingerprints or even a toothbrush or provide DNA samples.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has warned the nation to prepare for the worst as bodies believed to be in houses and in floodwaters are recovered.
"It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine," Chertoff said.
Slowly, though, some faces are being matched with the dead, mostly by family members.
For days, mystery shrouded the body of "Vera" as closely as the sheet that eventually cloaked her body. She stayed there in the Garden District, at the corner of Jackson and Magazine, with a spraypainted tribute on the sheet over her: "Here lies Vera. God help us."
Vera turned out to be 66-year-old Elvira Smith, who lived with her common-law husband, C.N. Keene, about five blocks from where she was killed. Sitting shirtless and with a growth of beard on the front porch of his modest duplex, Keene said he last saw his wife Monday after the hurricane struck.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not