From
The New York Times:
The smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel’s wooden doors. Inside, more than a dozen bodies lay motionless on low cots and on the ground, shrouded in white sheets. Here, a wisp of gray hair peeked out. There, a knee was flung akimbo. A pallid hand reached across a blue gown.
Within days, the grisly tableau became the focus of an investigation into what happened when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina marooned Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. The hurricane knocked out power and running water and sent the temperatures inside above 100 degrees. Still, investigators were surprised at the number of bodies in the makeshift morgue and were stunned when health care workers charged that a well-regarded doctor and two respected nurses had hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with lethal doses of drugs. Mortuary workers eventually carried 45 corpses from Memorial, more than from any comparable-size hospital in the drowned city.
Investigators pored over the evidence, and in July 2006, nearly a year after Katrina, Louisiana Department of Justice agents arrested the doctor and the nurses in connection with the deaths of four patients. The physician, Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to “help” patients “through their pain,” a position she maintains today.
In the four years since Katrina, Pou has helped write and pass three laws in Louisiana that offer immunity to health care professionals from most civil lawsuits — though not in cases of willful misconduct — for their work in future disasters, from hurricanes to terrorist attacks to pandemic influenza.
Pou and others cite what happened at Memorial and Pou’s subsequent arrest — which she has referred to as a “personal tragedy” — to justify changing the standards of care during crises. But the story of what happened in the frantic days when Memorial was cut off from the world has not been fully told. Over the past two and a half years, I have obtained previously unavailable records and interviewed dozens of people who were involved in the events at Memorial and the investigation that followed.
The interviews and documents cast the story of Pou and her colleagues in a new light. It is now evident that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood. When the names on toxicology reports and autopsies are matched with recollections and documentation from the days after Katrina, it appears that at least 17 patients were injected with morphine or the sedative midazolam, or both, after a long-awaited rescue effort was at last emptying the hospital. A number of these patients were extremely ill and might not have survived the evacuation. Several were almost certainly not near death when they were injected, according to medical professionals who treated them at Memorial and an internist’s review of their charts and autopsies that was commissioned by investigators but never made public.
After autopsies were done and specimens removed, workers at
National Medical Services, a private laboratory in Pennsylvania, quickly detected morphine in nine bodies — the same nine patients LifeCare staff identified as potential victims.
A successful murder prosecution in Orleans Parish typically requires a coroner’s medical determination of homicide — that a death was caused by the actions of another human being — without regard to fault or legal responsibility. It is a step toward a criminal finding of homicide, in which a Louisiana court assigns fault for a killing.
Orleans Parish coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, brought together Cyril Wecht, Michael Baden — another well-known forensic pathologist — and
Robert Middleberg, the director of the toxicology laboratory where the autopsy samples were tested, to discuss the toxicology findings.
Records showed that more than half of the 41 bodies from Memorial that were analyzed by Middleberg’s lab tested positive for morphine or midazolam, or both. Middleberg had handled thousands of cases in his career, and the high drug concentrations found in many of the patients stuck out “like a sore thumb,” he told me.
The group considered the 90-year-old pneumonia patient Alice Hutzler, whom the LifeCare nurse Gina Isbell had promised to care for during the hurricane. Morphine and midazolam were found in her liver, brain and muscle tissue, but neither drug had been prescribed, according to her chart, which contained notes until the night before her death on Sept. 1. That chart showed that she was “resting calmly” the previous afternoon, and during the evening her nurses did not document any complaints of pain or distress that indicated she needed the drugs.
Hutzler was one of the nine LifeCare patients found on the seventh floor with one or both drugs in their systems. All were seen alive the morning of Sept. 1, and all were listed as dead by Memorial’s pathologist that afternoon.
“Homicide,” Wecht wrote on a sheet of paper with Hutzler’s name on top, underlining it twice. “Homicide,” he wrote for seven of the eight other seventh-floor patients, including Emmett Everett, Wilda McManus and Rose Savoie. The last patient, whose records indicated she was close to death, he marked as undetermined. Baden said he thought all nine were homicides.
The group considered one death on the eighth floor in the I.C.U.: Jannie Burgess was the comatose patient who was found by Ewing Cook when he climbed the stairs in the heat on Wednesday, Aug. 31. Burgess’s medical chart showed that she was given 15 milligrams of morphine seven times on Wednesday between 2:10 p.m. and 3:35 p.m. on spoken orders from Cook. This was more than seven times the maximum dose she was receiving for comfort care. But because she had already been receiving morphine and because of her advanced cancer, she was “not a clear, strong case,” Wecht wrote in his notes. He marked her death as undetermined.
Besides the nine patients who remained on the LifeCare floor and Burgess, the group also reviewed 13 Memorial and LifeCare patients whose deaths were recorded by Memorial’s pathologist on the second-floor lobby near the A.T.M. and elsewhere. (Other deaths struck investigators as suspicious, but because not all bodies were tested for drugs after autopsy, they were not considered.) Of those 13, 9 tested positive for midazolam and 4 for morphine, too. Investigators searching the hospital found prescriptions for large amounts of morphine for three of them, including Carrie Hall, the woman who fought hard to survive on Wednesday night. The prescriptions were dated Thursday, Sept. 1, and were signed by Dr. Anna Pou.
Despite Wecht and Baden’s strong opinions that the LifeCare deaths were the result of drug injections, Minyard wanted additional information to help him make his decision. He sent the patients’ medical, autopsy and toxicology records to three other experts for an independent review.
“Homicide,” Dr. Frank Brescia, an oncologist and specialist in palliative care, concluded in each of the nine cases. “Homicide,” wrote Dr. James Young, the former chief coroner of Ontario, Canada, who was then president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “All these patients survived the adverse events of the previous days, and for every patient on a floor to have died in one three-and-a-half-hour period with drug toxicity is beyond coincidence.”
The grand jury heard from Minyard but not from any of his forensic experts; nor from two family members who were present on the LifeCare floor during most of the ordeal; nor the main Justice Department investigator, who worked the case for a year and helped collect 50,000 pages of evidence.
The district attorney’s office prepared a 10-count bill of indictment against Pou for the grand jury to consider — one count of second-degree murder in Emmett Everett’s case and nine counts of the lesser conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, one for each of the LifeCare patients on the seventh floor.
This meant that the grand jurors were being asked to decide whether the evidence they heard persuaded them that Pou had “a specific intent to kill” — part of Louisiana’s definition of second-degree murder.
On July 24, 2007, Judge Calvin Johnson read aloud the 10 counts of indictment. The grand jury did not indict Pou on any of them.