JINDO, South Korea — One by one, coast guard officers carried the newly arrived bodies covered in white sheets from a boat to a tent on the dock of this island, the first step in identifying a sharply rising number of corpses from a South Korean ferry that sank nearly a week ago.
Dozens of police officers in neon green jackets formed a cordon around the dock as the bodies arrived today. Since divers found a way over the weekend to enter the submerged ferry, the death count has shot up. Officials said today that confirmed fatalities had reached 104, with nearly 200 people still missing.
If a body lacks identification, details such as height, hair length and clothing are posted on a white signboard for families waiting on Jindo island for news.
The bodies are then driven in ambulances to two tents: one for men and boys, the other for women and girls. Families listen quietly outside as an official briefs them, then line up and file in.
For a brief moment there is silence. Then the anguished cries, the wailing, the howling. They have not known for nearly a week whether they should grieve or not, and now they sound like they’re being torn apart.
“How do I live without you? How will your mother live without you?” a woman cries out.
She is with a woman who emerges from a tent crying and falls into a chair where relatives try to comfort her. One stands above her and cradles her head in her hands, stroking her face.
This heartbreak still awaits many families of those still missing from the submerged ferry Sewol, or at least those whose relatives’ bodies are ultimately recovered. Families who once dreamed of miraculous rescues now simply hope their loved ones’ remains are recovered soon, before the ocean does much more damage.
About 250 of the more than 300 missing or dead are students from a single high school, in Ansan near Seoul, who were on their way to the southern tourist island of Jeju.
Bodies are being identified visually, but family members have been providing DNA samples in case decomposition makes that impossible.
The families, and South Koreans more broadly, have at times responded with fury. The captain initially told passengers to stay in their rooms and waited more than half an hour to issue an evacuation order as the Sewol sank. By then, the ship had tilted so much it is believed that many passengers were trapped inside.
At a Cabinet briefing Monday, President Park Geun-hye said, “What the captain and part of the crew did is unfathomable from the viewpoint of common sense. Unforgivable, murderous behavior.”
The captain, Lee Joon-seok, and two crew members have been arrested on suspicion of negligence and abandoning people in need, and prosecutors said Monday that four other crew members have been detained. On Monday night, prosecutors requested a court to issue a warrant to formally arrest these four people.
