AP Inflates Katrina Death Toll

December 14th, 2005 7:13 PM

Hurricane Katrina is apparently still killing people. OpinionJournal.com's James Taranto reports:

Back in September we noted that some twisted souls on the Angry Left were hoping for an enormous death toll from Hurricane Katrina, because they thought that would hurt President Bush politically and diminish the 9/11 attacks and the threat of terrorism more generally. The actual death toll turned out to be in the low four figures--a terrible tragedy to normal people, but a disappointment for the aforementioned lefto sickos.

A story in the Associated Press, however, suggests that some people want to inflate the Katrina death toll. "Even as the official toll continues to rise when more bodies are found in once-flooded homes, the real total may never be known," the AP says. "The victims are scattered far and wide, and the connections of their deaths to the storm are not necessarily obvious."

Examples include "13-month-old Destiny McNeese, who rolled onto her stomach and suffocated on an air mattress after her family fled from Kentwood [La.] to Kentucky":

The toddler had been tightly wrapped in a blanket and propped, sitting up, against a pillow on a half-inflated air mattress in the apartment where her mother, the mother's boyfriend and four other members of his family were staying. She was left alone and the mattress was so soft she couldn't raise her face after she turned over. . . .

The storm didn't kill Destiny directly. But if she hadn't been an evacuee she would have been safe in her crib at home instead of on that air mattress.

Read the rest.