8 mourners die in Mombasa highway dawn crash

NAIROBI, Kenya Oct 16 – Eight family members transporting the body of their kin for burial perished in a road accident on the Nairobi-Mombasa highway on Tuesday morning.

The accident involving their hearse and a truck occurred at Chumvi area, near the Machakos turn-off-according to police.

“They all died on the spot. The ninth body we collected from the scene is the one that was being transported for burial,” a police officer said.

The mourners were moving the body from the coast to western Kenya when the accident occurred.

“The hearse rammed into the truck while overtaking,” the officer said.

All the nine bodies – including the one that was in the coffin have been moved to the Machakos District Hospital mortuary.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2012/10/8-mourners-die-in-mombasa-highway-dawn-crash/

Doctor’s Bath for Corpses Reinvigorates Cold Cases

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas took a scorched-looking, decomposed head and five stiff, bloated hands and gently submerged them in his secret solution. After they soak for three days, he said, any scars, lesions or birthmarks the victim might have had will reappear.

Dr. Hernández Cárdenas's technique, normally applied to full bodies, can restore clues like wounds and fingerprints.

They did. The putrid head looked human again, with full lips, large pores and a massive bruise on the forehead. The hands had recovered their identifying prints.

“Science advances,” said Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, “whenever there are difficult situations.”

The newly revealed details may never lead to a conviction, or even an arrest, but Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, a forensic odontologist who works in the Ciudad Juárez Forensic Science Lab, has attained the kind of star status that could be produced only in a city like this, with its semidesert climate, exorbitant murder rate and can-do frontier creativity. Dr. Hernández Cárdenas developed the rehydration technique, which he primarily uses on full bodies, more or less single-handedly, and he even pays part of the cost for the chemicals that turn back the clock on his brittle subjects.

Forensic experts have long used glycerin injections to reconstitute fingers to get prints, but that is not practical for entire bodies — particularly not in the scorching heat of Ciudad Juárez, where bodies decompose and mummify quickly. Only through rehydration does the corpse regain some of its original condition, helping the police by revealing lesions and bringing internal organs back to nearly their state at the time of death.

On most days, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas can be found in the lab here rehydrating some of the bodies that were stored or buried without being identified from 2009 to 2011, the height of the violence between competing criminal syndicates in this border city. With nearly 8,000 people killed during that period, he always has plenty to do, and his process tends to include both music and dark humor.

He says he talks to the corpses, consoling them while he works, indulging them with romantic music as they float in the “Jacuzzi,” the chemical-filled tub he uses for rehydration. If the individual features that reappear on a victim’s face look menacing, ballads give way to rap and hip-hop, which fill the impeccably clean but foul-smelling lab.

Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, 55, focuses mainly on helping rehydrate the hundreds of unclaimed corpses in his hometown, particularly those of women, so they can be identified and the murderers tracked down. “It would have even been a sin not to do it,” said Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, who said his work sometimes keeps him up at night.

“I used to take many girls to bed,” he said, “but not the way you think.”

He has often been frustrated by the lack of justice for those whose deaths he comes to know so intimately. Of the 150 or so bodies he has rehydrated so far, only a handful have provided clues that led to arrests.

Rather casually, he said he also avoids following up to see whether law-enforcement agents have identified the bodies he has worked on, fearing that corrupt officials or criminals will come after him.

“He who knows less, lives more,” he said. “One doesn’t even trust the authorities.”

The biggest supporters of his work are the families of the disappeared, who see in his chemical solutions the chance for closure. Experts, who say Ciudad Juárez is the only place where the technique has been deployed, tend to discuss his efforts in more scientific terms. Dr. Hernández Cárdenas has a patent application that is due for approval this month.

“If it holds up, I think it would be an accomplishment and an amazing advance,” said Elizabeth Gardner, a professor of forensic science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who has witnessed Dr. Hernández Cárdenas’s process.

Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, a former boxer, never intended to get into this line of work. Married at 17 and a father of three soon after, he struggled to put himself through college, where he studied orthodontics.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance by night to make ends meet, a side job that came to define his destiny. One night in 1977, he delivered 28 bodies — killed in an explosion — to a morgue. The forensic team asked him to inspect their mouths for identifying traits, a fascinating challenge for the self-described obsessive doctor.

Dr. Hernández Cárdenas continued splitting his time between his elderly patients’ prosthetic teeth (he still has his practice) and Red Cross duties until he got a break at the forensic lab in 2002. He was put in charge of analyzing the cadavers’ teeth to determine their age. Once he was there, a question that had nagged him for years began consuming his time: could the fingertip rehydration used by forensic specialists throughout the world somehow be applied to entire bodies?

Suddenly, “I had material, I had time, I had authorization” to experiment, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas said. He began experimenting with fingers and ears available at the city’s forensic lab, placing them in glass jars — “I kept eating Gerber,” he said — slightly tweaking the chemical proportions each time while enduring his colleagues’ teasing.

One morning, he arrived at the lab to find that one of the jars contained a perfectly intact finger. “I thought my co-workers were playing a trick on me,” he said. But their response left him cold. “We don’t mess with your filthiness,” they assured Dr. Hernández Cárdenas.

In 2008, he managed to properly rehydrate his first full body, becoming a quasi-celebrity among the city’s residents and in the country’s forensic science circles.

“He is in high demand,” said Carlos Reynosa, coordinator of the forensic science master’s program at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. Staff members from the American Consulate and the United States Agency for International Development have also inquired about, and observed, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas’s method.

Unfortunately, he said, officials and academics are not the only ones interested in his methods.

Now divorced, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas said his intriguing reputation follows him everywhere in Ciudad Juárez. Women, in the midst of dinner dates, often ask him about his work, demanding details that he refuses to divulge. “I don’t think it’s an adequate subject to talk about with a lady,” he said.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/world/americas/mexican-doctors-bath-for-corpses-reinvigorates-cold-cases.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Nearly 50 Graves Found On Arthur Dozier School For Boys Grounds

Nearly 50 graves found on the Arthur Dozier School for Boys grounds in Florida offer clues to solving the mystery surrounding the missing bodies of former students. The alleged abuse which occurred at the reform school for boys reportedly left approximately 80 children unaccounted for — until now.

While the bodies of 50 boys are cloaked in secrecy, the remains at the small cemetery may point investigators on a path to finally finding some answers about what happened inside the gates of the now defunct facility.

University of South Florida anthropologist, Dr. Erin Kimmerle, had this to say about the Arthur Dozier School for Boys:

“These are children who came her and died, for one reason or another, and have just been lost in the woods. We found burials within the current marked cemetery and then we found burials that extend beyond that. For the majority, there’s no record of what happened to them. It’s about restoring dignity.”

Dr. Kimmerle is the leader in a research effort to find out what happened at the reformatory for boys in Marianna, according to the Miami Herald. Through the use of ground-penetrating radar, the team has been able to unearth 49 graves so far, leading to the discovery of 18 bodies, Radar Online notes.

The startling abuse allegations at the Arthur Dozier School for Boys include claims of rape and violent beatings. When the boys misbehaved, they were allegedly sent to the “White House” a building comprised of cinder block, as punishment, prompting the phrase “White House Boys” to refer to the scores of young men who claim they were taken to the structure and severely abused.

Ovell Smith Krell, 83, told the investigation team that her brother, Owen, was sent to the Florida reform school after he ran away from home and stole a car in 1940. The family never saw Owen again; they were told that the boy spent the night outside, died due to a cold induced by exposure, and had been buried.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/364154/house-of-horrors-nearly-50-graves-found-on-arthur-dozier-school-for-boys-grounds/#D8iOwkIIgoR2jhqZ.99

Merciless cemetery vendors prey on mourners

THERE are more than a thousand schemes to let out human suffering among most susceptible Zambians.

Out of personal creativity and brevity in entrepreneurship, graveyard vendors at Ndola’s Kawama cemetery are teeming with personal conviction to earn whatever they can to sustain their families with food and other basic essential necessities.

The vendors prey on the mourners like starved vultures as they display portably packed water in plastics, flavoured ‘ice blocks’ and other cold drinks to quench the thirst of a mass of wailing mourners who often gather under the blazing sun during the burial processions.

The merchants are always trying to mournfully do the best in their business of selling drinks and water at the graveyard site – roundly shifting marketing positions as they move their cooler boxes nearer to the grave site where mourners gather to pay their last respects to beloved ones.

The hawkers know that it is a healthy business day for them each time there are more people being buried on a particular day.

A limping woman, in her old formative stages of life, exclaims in the full glare of mourners, charging: “How could you set your business of selling these things in front of mourners?” She bursts out as she filters in the mass of weeping and wailing mourners at the grave site: “You do not feel the pain of the mourners, and what type of people are you to enjoy doing what you are doing when people are mourning?”

Then an intoxicated grave digger thunders in a rather satirical tone: “You should also start selling nshima so that mourners could feast during burial processions!” He almost implied that there was no drinking after the cloud of death has engulfed the life of one.

But the vendors are not perplexed as one would have expected from the outbursts but instead elect to go about with their vending chores.

“You see,” Joshua Mulenga begins, “People do not respect the graveyard to an extent that they are freely trading at this rather sacred place of final rest of people. There are people buried here who have died from different ailments and it is a health risk for people to sell consumables here.”

Mr Mulenga, a resident of Pamodzi, says it is important that relevant authorities should address the issue of vending at graveyards with the desired sense of urgency to protect innocent people who are ignorant at the heath-risks associated with buying consumables at cemeteries. Ndola City Council (NCC) senior Press and public relations officer, Esther Banda, acknowledged that it is immoral to carry out any form of vending at the graveyard and that those vending at the necropolis – the resting place – were into their trade illegally.

Almost in a whitewashed tone, Ms Banda comes out clean that vendors at the cemetery are “usually told to do their business outside the boundaries of the graveyard. It is public hazard to sell such commodities at the graveyard and that is why one cannot find uncovered foodstuff being sold at the graveyard”.

As the status of the graveyard vending remains unchanged, it would always be possible for many third class people to eke out a living from the shores of the grave – elevating their lives from the pangs of abject poverty and squalor through a thousand innovative survival designs.

A vendor at the Kawama Cemetery when approached for a comment angrily retorted, almost like a storm in a tea pot: “You are the same people who want us to start stealing to earn a living. You simply keep on saying things about us selling at the graveyard in a negative way in the hope that if you keep writing about us continuously it will become true that we are doing something unacceptable. The Government has not ordered us to stop selling from here because it knows this was how we survive!”

You should have been there to witness the horrid chapter of vending at Ndola cemeteries.

It is the thirsty of mourners under the blazing sun that ignites the temptation to buy the merchandise on display at the graveyard.

At Mitengo Cemetery, vendors selling ice-creams are a common trait and appropriately appear well-informed when mourners were thronging the graveyard to put their loved ones to rest.

At the notorious Kantolomba Cemetery, the story is the same if not worse because the vendors undercover sell consumables and some grave diggers continue to trade in potent alcoholic drinks, including home-brewed beer.

My recent survey revealed that Chibuku Shake Shake – the traditional beer was selling like hot cakes among some mourners and especially the grave-diggers.

Kantolomba Cemetery was also gravely associated with incidences of disgruntled thieves ransacking graves – stealing valuable caskets and coffins, including undressing dead people.

Against this absurd scenario, Ms Banda, dejectedly, responds to a Times query that the ill-act to rummage through the graveyard was synonymous to trespass and against the laws of the land, adding: “It is illegal. That is why it is done in the night. It is a crime”.

At the latent site, nothing was so fatal to vend at the graveyard with such bustle simply creeping and souring at the same affair.

And the pro-profit element of graveyard chores remaining in favour of the paradox of economic survival has wide health implications for mourners who buy consumables from vendors at Ndola’s cemeteries.

Something must be done to serve the surviving innocent souls from the macabre graveyard vending.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

http://www.times.co.zm/?p=15724