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Business helps seniors prepare for worst

The hearing aid company fingerprints seniors for free to make identifying them easier if disaster strikes.

By STEVE THOMPSON
Published October 7, 2005

NEW PORT RICHEY - It wasn't the prospect of a hurricane like Katrina, but other bad things that can happen to an elderly person that got 82-year-old Josephine Walter interested.

Like kidnapping.

"Next thing you know, you find them in a ditch somewhere" with no ID, she said. She has seen it plenty on television.

"I said to my husband, We have to set time aside because we're going to go down there and get our fingerprints taken," Walter said.

The couple went this week to the New Life Hearing Aid Center in New Port Richey, where the owners are fingerprinting seniors for free with the blessing of the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. The idea is that if a Katrina-like disaster were to hit here, their remains could be identified more easily.

More than a month after Hurricane Katrina, most of the nearly 1,000 dead in Louisiana lie unidentified in a morgue, still awaiting release to relatives. Officials have been hamstrung by lost dental records and the decomposition of bodies that floated in floodwaters and lay in the heat for days or weeks. Officials say an accurate catalog of the dead may be weeks away, or longer.

David Dewey, 66, who runs the hearing aid center with his wife, Jean, says he was trying to think of a way he could help as he watched the Katrina disaster unfold.

"I'm too old to go up there and tromp around in the mud," he said. So he thought of something he could do for people here. Dewey, a former sheriff's deputy in Ohio, set up a table in his business and said he will fingerprint people for free from 10 a.m. through 2 p.m, Mondays through Wednesdays.

"We're not trying to sell hearing aids to them, we don't pester them or anything like that," he said. "This is just our way of putting something back into the community."

It appears to be the first such initiative in the Tampa Bay area, and law enforcement types are endorsing it.

If everyone would participate, "that would be very nice," said Kara Shell, who has been a fingerprint examiner at the Pasco County Sheriff's Office for 25 years. "It would save us a lot of time."

Fingerprints alone, however, might not do the job, especially in cases where a body is found floating in water or has been left somewhere for a few days, Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky said. He's a professor of forensic sciences at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

"Decomposition tends to cause something called skin slippage," he said. In a matter of days, sometimes, fingerprints on a body can become useless.

But Dewey thought of that.

Before he got started, he spoke with Bill Pellan, the director of investigations for the Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner, who gave him some advice: Be sure to include information on any surgical procedures a person has had or medical devices implanted.

So Dewey, his wife and Pasco sheriff's officials have put together a card for the prints, with a baggie attached for hair and nails for DNA samples, and places to fill in information on dental and medical records, tattoos and anything else that might help.

Neither Dewey nor officials keep any of the information. The cards go home with the seniors, who are to store a couple of copies and make copies for neighbors or relatives.

"God forbid," Dewey said, "we ever need it."

For information on the program, call the New Life Hearing Aid Center at (727) 842-3330.

Information from the Associated Press and Times researcher Carolyn Edds was used in this report. Steve Thompson covers crime in Pasco County. He can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6245 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245. His e-mail address is sthompson@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 7, 2005, 01:50:23]