Thursday 7 March 2013

Ferry sinking trial overshadowed by possible sightings of missing passengers


Shortly after photographs appeared in news reports of two missing passengers from the sunken Queen of the North ferry, others who were on the ship that night started reporting foggy memories of possibly seeing them, either at sea or on land.

The sightings just added to the mystery of what exactly happened to Gerald Foisy and Shirley Rosette, court has heard

Several survivors thought they might have spotted one or both of them in the First Nations community of Hartley Bay, where most were taken after the sinking. Others recalled watching two unidentified people step out of a floating life raft into a mysterious fishing boat and sail away.

But mostly, the details have been vague and the witnesses have admitted they weren’t entirely sure what they saw, if anything at all.

Still, the sightings have hung over the criminal negligence trial for Karl Lilgert, the navigation officer on the bridge when the ferry struck an island on March 22, 2006. His lawyers have used those sightings to foster doubt about the fate of Foisy and Rosette.

Lilgert is on trial for criminal negligence causing their deaths, and among the many facts the Crown must prove for a conviction is that the couple died that night.

Their bodies were never recovered, though they have long been presumed drowned at sea.

The latest witness to add the confusion was Joanne Pierce, the ship’s second steward.

On Wednesday, Pierce said she was certain she had seen Foisy just before the ship left Prince Rupert as she helped check passengers into their cabins. She also told the court she never saw them again.

One of Pierce’s tasks in Hartley Bay was to conduct roll calls of the survivors once they were gathered in the community’s cultural centre, and she testified she didn’t encounter them during the roll call or in the hours she spent wandering around interacting with passengers.

However, she told police about a week after the sinking that she might have seen Foisy in Hartley Bay. In an interview with an investigator, a transcript of which was read in court, Pierce said she might have spotted him very briefly outside and possibly again in the cultural centre, but she stressed she wasn’t sure.

Seven years later, she said she has no memory of ever seeing Foisy in Hartley Bay.

“What’s clear in my mind is I remember seeing him in the purser’s square (on the ferry) and not so clear about Hartley Bay,” said Pierce.

“However, if that’s what I said (to police), I guess it’s a possibility.”

Most of the passengers ended up in Hartley Bay, while three dozen crew and passengers were taken to a nearby coast guard vessel. The trial has already heard the couple wasn’t seen on the coast guard ship.

By the time everyone reached Hartley Bay, it was quickly becoming apparent there was a discrepancy between the list of 101 passengers and crew who boarded the ship and the tally of survivors.

Pierce and her colleagues asked each passenger and crew member in Hartley Bay to write their names on a large sheet of paper. The names of Foisy and Rosette did not appear on that list.

Lilgert’s lawyers have attempted to suggest there is doubt about what happened to Foisy and Rosette, though they have not offered their own theory.

His lawyers have pointed to the sightings at Hartley Bay and the testimony that a fishing boat may have taken two people away from the life rafts.

They have pointed out crew members were assigned to search the ship for anyone still on board but believed the ship was empty when they abandoned ship.

They have also noted initial attempts to count the survivors at sea came up with 101, leading the crew to believe everyone had made it off alive.

The Crown alleges Lilgert’s negligence led to the couple’s deaths. They say Lilgert failed in his duties when the ferry missed a scheduled course alteration and sailed towards an island.

The defence has suggested poor training, unreliable equipment and inadequate staffing policies contributed to the crash.

Lilgert has pleaded not guilty to two counts of criminal negligence causing death.

His trial, which started in January, is expected to last up to six months.

Thursday 7 March 2013

http://www.680news.com/2013/03/06/crew-member-recalls-seeing-missing-ferry-passenger-on-ship-but-not-on-land/

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Death toll in Leyte landslide rises to 14


The death toll in the landslide that marred operations in a geothermal power plant in Leyte last week rose to 14 following the recovery of five bodies Wednesday and another one early Thursday morning.

Alberto Ignacio Jr., geothermal projects division vice president of construction firm First Balfour, said the four bodies were retrieved Wednesday morning buried in the ground along the road where they were building a pipe shelter at the time of the landslide.

Ignacio identified the first four bodies recovered on Wednesday as those of Salvador Lascañas Jr., Alfredo Arabis, Romeo Yazar and Danilo Mabuti.

The fifth body later recovered in the day and a sixth early morning Thursday were identified as Salvador Yabana and Jorden Salcedo.

"We are extending full assistance to the family for funeral/burial expenses. We have also assigned staff to be with the families as we did for the rest who were earlier recovered," Ignacio said in a text message to GMA News Online.

Previously recovered were Bonifacio Poliño, Etcheld Dela Austria, Edgar Cabarse, Billy Abella, Joel Milay, Marlon Buanghog, Uldarico Taboranza, and Abelardo Permangel.

The landslide occurred at Pad 403 of the Upper Mahiao Geothermal Project in Leyte last Friday.

“'Yung ginagawa kasi sa pipe shelter sa road 403 and 409, there's a section on the pipeline along the road na nagka-landslide,” Ignacio told GMA News Online in a phone interview.

The plant's operator Energy Development Corp. (EDC) suspected that an earthquake last Feb. 27 and two weeks of rain may have triggered the landslide Friday morning, which initially claimed five lives.

First Balfour is the contractor for one of the civil works in the province.

“The Emergency Response Team and all available personnel, as well as company resources and equipment, have already been mobilized,” the company said in a statement.

The EDC accident is the second landslide to claim lives in the country this year.

Five were killed while five are still missing when a section of the west wall in a mine pit of Semirara Mining Corp. in Antique collapsed on Feb. 13.

Thursday 7 March 2013

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/297949/news/regions/death-toll-in-leyte-landslide-rises-to-14

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Brooks County officials develop investigation protocol in handling of immigrant deaths


Brooks County officials are developing a protocol for handling investigations of immigrant deaths after a wave of scrutiny from a civil-rights group.

County officials weren’t consistently ordering DNA sampling in cases where immigrants’ remains couldn’t be identified, but that could change under a proposal.

The issue came to the forefront after last year’s record discovery of 129 remains in the county — all thought to be undocumented immigrants who sought to avoid the Border Patrol checkpoint at Falfurrias by trekking through the county’s barren, unforgiving ranches. More than 30 remain unidentified, County Judge Raul Ramirez said.

Members of the South Texas Civil Rights Project and other immigrant advocacy groups said people were being buried in nameless graves, their families left with little hope of finding them because of the lack of DNA sampling. In February the groups presented a letter to county officials and had a news conference on the courthouse steps.

Ramirez, justices of the peace and members of the sheriff’s office met privately Tuesday. All agreed that DNA testing should be done in cases where identification isn’t found with the remains, Justice of the Peace Oralia “Lali” Morales said.

“I want these people identified,” she said. “ ... When you do an inquest, this is what you think about: you think about your son, brother, husband, sister ... I have a 12-year-old son. You think about how it could be one of your family members.”

Morales is writing a draft of the protocols, which she said also aim to address other problems with the death investigations, including transportation to the remote sites where remains are found and accessing the sites, which usually are on private gated ranch property.

The county will continue using the Elizondo Mortuary in Mission to handle the remains, as has been the procedure for years. Now, when a DNA sample is ordered, mortuary staff will provide it to the Anthropology Department at Baylor University in Waco.

That’s where anthropology and forensic science professor Lori Baker coordinates Reuniting Families, an effort to identify and repatriate the remains of undocumented immigrants. The program has resulted in more than 36 identifications in the past three years, but until now mainly has focused on Arizona, Baker said.

Using the Baylor services will protect the overwhelmed county from additional expenses and manpower. Baylor tries to profile each set of remains to determine sex, stature, age and even clues about the person’s country of origin. It also sends DNA to nationwide databases that can help match it with samples from people seeking missing relatives.

The Baylor group even has volunteers willing to travel to Brooks County this spring to begin exhuming unidentified bodies for testing. The volunteers will conduct the work at their own expense, Baker said.

Thursday 7 March 2013

http://www.caller.com/news/2013/mar/07/brooks-county-officials-develop-investigation-in/

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Buried alive: true stories of premature burial


Mary Best was 17 years old when she contracted cholera in India. All alone since her adoptive mother left the country some months earlier, Mary suffered hours of agonising stomach cramps and sickness, her pulse becoming weaker and weaker until, at last, the doctor pronounced her dead.

She was buried in the vault of her adoptive family a few hours later, in the French cemetery in Calcutta.

The year was 1871, and cholera victims were generally buried very soon after death to prevent the germs spreading. In India’s tropical heat, a rapid burial was all the more necessary. Nobody questioned Mary’s hasty interment.

But ten years later, when the vault was opened to admit the body of Mary’s newly deceased uncle by adoption, the undertaker and his assistant were greeted by a horrifying sight.

The lid of Mary’s coffin, which had been nailed down, was on the floor. The girl’s skeleton was half in, half out of the coffin, and the right side of her skull bore a large, ugly fracture. The fingers of her right hand were bent as if clutching at something, perhaps her throat, and her clothes were torn.

Mary, it seemed, had not been dead when she was nailed into a coffin, but merely unconscious.

Cholera victims frequently fell into a coma, and it was in this state that Mary had been buried. Some hours or days later she awoke with no idea where she was.

In a book published in 1905 and now reprinted, two doctors and a colleague presented a macabre compendium of premature burials (and near misses) gathered from newspapers around the world.

Perhaps the most disturbing cases were those where the victims came tantalisingly close to being saved, only for the fear or incompetence of the living to seal their fate.

In 1887, in France, a young man was being carried to his grave when the undertakers heard knocking from under the coffin lid.

Afraid of creating a panic among the mourners, they proceeded with the burial. But as the earth was being thrown on the coffin, everyone heard the knocking.

Rather than remove the lid, they waited for the mayor to come. By the time he arrived and the coffin was opened, the man inside had died of asphyxiation.

There were other cases of people waiting for the authorities before opening the coffin, only to find that its occupant had died minutes earlier.

It was clear from the victims’ contorted bodies, the nails torn from fingers and toes, and the expression of utter horror on their faces, that they had been trying to free themselves.

Sometimes people who tried to prevent what they feared was a premature burial were dismissed as being mad with grief and unable to accept the reality of death.

In 1851 Virginia Macdonald, a girl living in New York, was buried after falling ill, despite her mother’s insistence that her daughter was not dead. The family tried to reassure the hysterical woman but to no avail, so they eventually had the body disinterred.

They found the deceased girl lying on her side, her hands badly bitten. It seemed she had woken in her coffin and begun eating her hands, either in terror or hunger.

Similarly, in 1903, a 14-year-old boy was buried in France, having been forcibly removed from his mother who protested that he was not dead. The day after his funeral she was found digging in the earth with her bare hands, trying to reach the coffin. The coffin was duly opened and the boy found inside, his body twisted from trying to break out: he had died from suffocation.

It is possible that, in some cases, what were thought to be signs of frantic attempts to escape were caused by the natural process of putrefaction or rigor mortis.

Grave robbers may in some cases have been responsible for the discovery of coffins with lids wrenched off and corpses in disarray. But sometimes there was no doubt that a living person had been buried.

Some of the most heartbreaking cases involved women whose deaths followed a complicated pregnancy.

Untreated eclampsia in pregnancy can lead to seizures and even coma. This may have been the case with Lavrinia Merli, a peasant girl living near Mantua in Italy, who was thought to have died from ‘hysterics’. She was interred in a vault in July1890. Although it is not clear why, the vault was opened two days later and it was found that the girl had regained consciousness, turned over in the coffin and given birth to a child. Both were dead.

A Berkshire doctor related the story of another young mother, the wife of an army medical officer stationed in the Tropics, who had suffered a severe heart pain shortly after giving birth. Despite the best efforts of doctors — including, presumably, her husband — she died, or at least appeared to have done.

She was immediately prepared for burial. But the attendants were unable to close her eyelids, so her eyes were open as her children came to pay their last respects.

After they left, the woman’s nurse began stroking the face of her dead mistress. To her amazement she detected the sound of breathing and raised the alarm.

Doctors held a mirror to her mouth but there was no vapour on the mirror and when they opened a vein in each arm, no blood flowed.

They were convinced that the woman was indeed dead, and preparations for her burial continued.

Yet the loyal nurse persisted, applying mustard to her mistress’s feet and waving burnt feathers under her nose in the hope of provoking an instinctive physical reaction.

Finally, this roused the woman from what was a trance.

After her rescue, she said she had been aware that her children had been there saying their goodbyes, and of her coffin being brought in, but felt powerless to speak. She was, it seems, suffering some kind of temporary paralysis as a result of giving birth.

Intriguingly, there are several cases of dogs saving their masters by barking at the coffin or attacking the pallbearers, forcing them to set the coffin down and open it up to find the occupant alive.

Whether the animals somehow sensed that these unfortunates were still living, we cannot know.

Some of those who narrowly escaped being buried alive, though, were so badly traumatised that they never recovered.

A girl named Sarah Ann Dobbins, from Hereford, was declared dead in 1879, having been in a ‘trance’ for three weeks.

Her body was laid out in preparation for burial and left in a locked room for the night. The next morning it looked as though the body had moved a bit. A doctor was summoned and the girl revived. Fourteen years later she committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Wye.

So widespread was the fear of premature burial that a Belgian called Count Michel de Karnicé-Karnicki invented a Heath Robinson-style coffin alarm. It comprised a glass ball that would be placed on the chest of the ‘corpse’.

If the chest moved a fraction, the ball would roll off, triggering a bell to ring and a flag to spring up four feet above ground. There was even a speaking tube so that the awakened corpse could cry for help.

The alarm was not a great success. The glass ball was too sensitive to allow for any movement in a decaying corpse, and the signalling system failed in a demonstration.

To avoid the possibility of interring the living, people who died in Germany were placed in ‘waiting mortuaries’ for several days before burial.

'One five-year-old boy who was thought to have died woke suddenly in a mortuary and was duly taken home to his grieving mother, who is said to have promptly expired herself from shock.'

The coffins were left open and a ring with a cord attached to a bell was placed on the finger of each corpse, so that if they moved the attendants would be aroused.

One five-year-old boy who was thought to have died woke suddenly in a mortuary and was duly taken home to his grieving mother, who is said to have promptly expired herself from shock.

The fear of premature burial persists today and is occasionally exploited by Hollywood in horror movies. Nor is it an entirely baseless fear. It is not even unknown for modern doctors to mistake unconsciousness for death.

For example, a Fijian-born soldier had a narrow escape in 2007 when he was blown up by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Despite medics’ best efforts to save him, he was pronounced dead.

It was only when his corpse was being washed before being put in a body bag that one of the medical team noticed a very weak pulse.

Diagnosed as being in a coma, he was flown to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham.

Eight days later he came round to find that both his legs had been amputated, but went on to represent Britain in the discus event at the 2012 Paralympics.

A similar case was that of Maureen Jones, a 65-year-old grandmother from Yorkshire, who collapsed at home in 1996.

Her son called the GP, who decided that she had suffered a stroke and was dead. The undertakers were about to put her in a hearse when a policeman noticed her leg twitch and at once performed heart massage. Mrs Jones’s eyelids began fluttering and she opened her eyes.

She had been in a diabetic coma. She recovered, but four years later she was still having nightmares about being buried alive.

As such examples attest, the line between life and death can, even nowadays, be finer than we would like to believe.

Thursday 7 March 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2289355/Let-coffin-Im-alive-New-book-reveals-spine-chilling-true-stories-premature-burial.html

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