"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.
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