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Deputy coroner helped identify dead in Haiti
By
RHYS SAUNDERS
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Mar 06, 2010 @ 11:51 PM
As a deputy coroner for Sangamon County, Jim
Allmon sees death on a regular basis.
But he said nothing prepared him for the
devastation he witnessed when he arrived in
Haiti three weeks ago in an effort to help
recover and identify some of the more than
230,000 who died as a result of the Jan. 12
earthquake that leveled parts of the
impoverished island nation.
Then again, Allmon’s extensive training and
almost a decade’s worth of experience working
with the deceased kicked in as soon as he
arrived in the capital, Port-au-Prince, he said.
“I think you have to turn it off while you’re
there,” he said at a welcome-back get-together
Saturday night at Delaney’s Bar and Grill, 2249
N. Third St. “Once you’re there, it’s almost
like your skills take over. The easiest way I
could describe it is when they brought us into
Haiti, we were put into a situation where we
really didn’t have time to unpack and settle
in.”
It was his first trip to Haiti, and Allmon
worked with Kenyan International Emergency
Services, a company hired to recover and
identify remains and repatriate those remains
back to the families. Allmon returned to
Springfield on Friday.
“The challenges over there were the
identification and the recovery because there
was a lot of debris to go through, a lot of
roadblocks we hit with identifying some of the
remains,” he said.
One particular roadblock was a lack of dental
records. Many people, while employed with
businesses or companies in Haiti, did not have
such records with their employers.
That made identifying the dead particularly
difficult, he said.
“We took photographs, and we did anything that
anybody else would have done in a mass
disaster,” Allmon said.
Now that it’s over, Allmon says the images
ingrained in his mind are starting to hit home.
“There’s people starving there, literally, and
I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “It’s
tough. I don’t think it really hits you until
you get home.
“I think there is hope for Haiti, but I think
they have a very long road ahead of them.”
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