He worked tirelessly to ID every Katrina victim in this Coast county. ‘My responsibility.’
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in August 2015.
Former Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove was determined to identify each person Hurricane Katrina killed in his Mississippi Gulf Coast jurisdiction.
The count was 97 dead, three missing, in Harrison County and 56 dead in Hancock County, where he assisted the coroner’s office.
“I owe an obligation to the public, as an elected official, to do everything I can not only to protect the public, but to protect the rights of the deceased and the family of that person,” Hargrove, who passed away in 2020, told the Sun Herald in 2015. “It is my responsibility to make sure that everyone is identified, that there is a cause of death and a manner of death.
“Now, I take it personal because I know if it was my family, I would want whoever was doing this job to do everything they could to get them identified and returned back to me so they could be put to rest in their final resting place.”
Hargrove, Hancock County Coroner Norma Stiglet and a FEMA mortuary team managed to identify all but two bodies, both men who died in Harrison County. Hargrove arranged to have the men buried on Katrina’s first anniversary beneath markers that identified them as Will and Strength.
His assistant, Joy Yates, said after the service: “It’s always going to bother him that he had to bury them unidentified. Not a day will go by that Gary doesn’t think of those two men.”
Hargrove identified Will in May 2007 as James L. Blair, 78, of Pass Christian. The coroner still remembers Blair’s address: One Hurricane Circle.
Hargrove had hoped Strength’s tattoo would crack the mystery of his identify. It appeared to say, “Love Jones,” but Hargrove was not sure because the ‘s’ was incomplete. He searched many databases, hoping to find a missing man with the all-to-common name Jones and a tattoo.
The coroner talked on more than one occasion to a woman whose son was still missing. Once, she said the young man had no tattoos; another time, she said he had a bunch of them. Then the young man’s half-sister called, saying their mother had passed away.
Her brother, she recalled, was trying to give himself a tattoo that said, “Love Jones,” but their mother caught him and took away his tools before he finished the “s.” Hargrove took DNA samples from the woman and her half brother’s grandmother, sending them to a lab in Texas.
On March 19, 2009, Katrina’s last victim in Harrison County was identified as 20-year-old Frank Jones of Gulfport. His body had been found in a canal.
“That,” Hargrove said, “was probably the best day of my life.”
