NEW ORLEANS — Two days after Hurricane Katrina, Deborah Holloway’s mother stopped calling.

“I heard Deb, and then the phone went dead,” Holloway recalled. “I spent the rest of the week calling and calling. I called every agency I could think of and said, ‘There are two little old ladies trapped.’”

Her mother, Delia, and her aunt, Deborah, were wading through floodwaters in their family home at Canal and Galvez streets.

“Because of the house’s age, the windows were stuck, so they were literally in an oven,” Holloway said.

For days, the sisters, both in their 80s, waited for help, but it didn’t come in time for Delia.

“I don’t know when my mother died,” Holloway said. “She died upstairs in her bed. My aunt was in the house with her sister’s body for I don’t know how long.”

Her aunt was

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