Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (43 page)

AS UPLIFTING as it was to gather the evidence needed to pursue justice, much remained ahead of them, and Butch Schafer knew from experience that even the most promising new case usually doesn’t end up the way you think it might. “Don’t. Get. Emotionally. Involved,” he warned Virginia Rider.

It could easily have been a subconscious warning to himself. Only weeks had passed since he lost his daughter. She had lived with an aggressive form of rheumatoid arthritis and died in her sleep after too many doctors prescribed too many drugs to treat her pain. Toxicology results suggested that the medicines, magnifying one another’s actions, had killed her in an accidental overdose. Schafer was furious to learn that the pharmacy that had filled nearly all of her prescriptions had not cross-checked them.

The same day as the phone call with Middleberg, October 6, brought another first—an interview with a medical professional not employed by LifeCare. Rider and Schafer spoke with Dr. Bryant King briefly by phone and then drove to his undamaged home in a part of New Orleans that hadn’t flooded. King had walked there after being boated out of Memorial. “My plants were dying, so that was my biggest tragedy. Everything has actually worked out really well other than the fact that I don’t have a job,” he said.

Unlike the LifeCare witnesses, who had come to be interviewed through the company’s lawyer, King had contacted the attorney general’s office after seeing television coverage of mortuary workers recovering bodies from Memorial. He was disturbed by the number of bodies found in Memorial’s chapel. He told them about the man he had pronounced
dead early Thursday morning and carried to the chapel. “That person made the sixth patient. I’m willing to go to my grave on that because I was counting in my head,” he said. “After that, nobody else died on my second-floor area before I left the hospital. I left the hospital between twelve thirty and one thirty.”

Including the bodies in the chapel, King said, the total number of deceased patients in the hospital had been twenty or twenty-one when he left. When he learned from news reports that forty-five bodies were recovered in total, “I was like, That’s way too many. That’s the first thought that came to mind. There’s no way that that many people died in the time frame in between the time I left and the following day because …” He paused. “They were sick, they were really sick, but they weren’t sick enough that, well, they weren’t sick enough collectively, that twenty of them would die in a day. I mean, come on! What hospital loses twenty patients in a day? I mean, really! If you lose twenty patients in a day, somebody is coming to investigate because there is something abnormal going on.”

The “something” he had in mind was more abnormal than the heat and loss of power that followed Katrina. King suggested Rider and Schafer speak with the person who “controlled everything” at the hospital during the storm. “I would expect that the CEO would, you know, kind of conduct what happened, but he didn’t.” Instead it was a tall woman with striking red hair. “She conducted every meeting. I mean, that was strange to me, for someone that I’d never seen before.”

He knew her only as Susan. “I didn’t know who she was, other than the fact that she rolled with a lot of clout. Everybody responded to her. She walked in a room and said, ‘OK, let’s go ahead and get started.’ Everybody shut up and started the meeting.”

On Thursday morning, September 1, King had spoken with Dr. Kathleen Fournier, his acquaintance from medical school, who told him about a conversation with Susan and Dr. Anna Pou. The conversation was about ending patients’ suffering, and King recalled that,
according to Fournier, “Anna said, ‘Oh yeah, I don’t have a problem with it.’ ”

Fournier had asked for King’s opinion on eliminating patients’ suffering. “In my mind, I’m thinking, it’s not normal. That’s not what we’re paid to do. We’re paid to do this until either everybody dies or everybody leaves.”

The investigators pressed him later in the interview. “You knew what she meant, but you didn’t question it?”

“I kind of … we … the conversation was … It’s a little murky … But I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Well, they’re suffering, da-da-da.’ Nothing was explicitly said other than I can’t be a part of anything like that.”

He hadn’t thought his opinion would make a difference. Whereas some people had been scared of the people outside of the hospital, King was wary of the people in it. He was a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound man, but all he’d brought to the hospital were apples, oranges, and some almonds. Not a weapon. The person with the weapon was the boss, the law. He’d thought this on the ER ramp when he’d seen people being turned away and had argued with the CEO. Well hell, they’ve got all the guns. They could throw me in the water and say, “You can no longer come inside.” When he saw what was happening on the second floor, he figured: There’s only so much I can do or say. There were armed security guards everywhere. Obviously they wouldn’t have shot him in front of everyone, but he was sure they would have removed him. He was the last doctor hired there. The newbie. He grew up in East Chicago. He often spoke his mind, but he knew, in the end, when to shut his mouth.

King said he had sent messages to his best friend telling him that “evil entities” were planning to euthanize patients.

“You were talking about ‘evil entities’?”

“Because I couldn’t call them people anymore. When you talk about killing people you’re—talk about killing people who’ve done nothing wrong—you’re not … to me that’s not really a ‘person.’ Humans
don’t do that. We don’t do that to each other. So, I was like … These … these … these … the correct word would have been, ‘These motherfuckers are talking about killing people!’ ”

King’s best friend had taken the messages to National Public Radio, and reporter Joanne Silberner had described the texts on air on the program
All Things Considered
the very afternoon the injections were taking place: “King said some of the staff was starting to panic, even talking about helping some of the long-term acute care patients, those close to death, die.”

King said that after telling Fournier he disagreed with the idea and sending the texts, he helped carry patients to the parking garage for evacuation. The hospital was no longer functioning as a hospital. “The whole formal structure of it had broken down.” When he returned to the second floor, the helpers who had been invited to fan the patients were mostly gone. They had been told to leave. “A guy came in and asked, ‘Would you like to join us in prayer?’ I was like, ‘No.’ There’s no reason … we’ve never prayed before. This is Thursday at noon, I mean, what’s this?”

King said he looked around and saw Anna Pou standing on the other side of the walkway by the bathrooms and the ATM. “She had a handful of 10 cc syringes with the pink needle—which is our eighteen- to twenty-one gauges—she had a handful of them and she said verbatim to a patient, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you feel better.’ ” King said it was highly unusual for a doctor to be handling syringes. “I don’t know what was in the syringes; I don’t know why she had them because we don’t ever inject anybody if we don’t have to. I mean, call a nurse to do that. We don’t do it. Not to say it that way, but that’s how we function.” King wasn’t just being flippant. He saw a reason for that division of responsibility. A doctor’s order was checked by a pharmacist and checked again by a nurse. Even those trappings of medical formality and quality control hadn’t broken down at Memorial until that moment.

King hadn’t seen Pou inject a patient. He had drawn his conclusions by piecing together earlier events. “So when she had a handful of syringes, it
really startled me. It’s like: prayer … la-la-la … conversation this morning.… This is not a normal situation. I should probably not be here.

“As I’m leaving I’m thinking, This is crazy. Why are they praying in the middle of the day? Why does a physician have a handful of syringes? Because we haven’t been giving medicine that way.” He didn’t know what had happened after he left by boat and reached shallow water at the drop-off point. “I took all my stuff and took my bag I had upstairs and put it in one of the red contamination bags, waded through the water, took it out of the bag, changed socks, and went home. Walked from Memorial to this location right here.”

Rider and Schafer showed King photographs and he identified several people. “That’s Anna,” he said of the first one.

Before leaving, Schafer asked whether they could contact him again. “Absolutely,” King agreed. “By all means, call me, contact me, knock on my door.… My take on this is that something wrong occurred, and I don’t know how, why, or who decided it, but they need to answer to the family members, because somebody lost family members because of whatever decisions were made.”

King said the only other people he’d spoken with about events in the hospital were his girlfriend, best friend, sister, and a producer from CNN, with whom he’d had an on-camera interview several weeks earlier. It hadn’t yet aired. He said he was telling Schafer and Rider the same things he had told the producer.

“How has my information contributed?” King asked Rider. “Was it telling you things that you already knew, things you didn’t know? One direction or another?”

“Learned some things from you that I didn’t know,” Rider told him.

SUSAN MULDERICK had moved back to the city in early autumn and was cleaning out her home when she received a call from a Tenet attorney.
Mulderick spoke with him at length before he told her she should get her own lawyer, and he doubted that Tenet, her employer, would pay for one. In tears, Mulderick walked to the nearby house of an attorney she trusted, who took a break from cleaning her own house to sit on the porch and talk. The attorney was furious and thought what the Tenet lawyer had done—milking Mulderick for information, then telling her to get an attorney—was unethical.

Mulderick had half a dozen siblings, many of whom worked at other hospitals in New Orleans, and it had recently become clear how different each one of their experiences had been. One night, soon after returning to the city, they sat in a circle in the backyard drinking wine and taking turns telling stories. Mulderick shared the anecdote about Dr. Fournier and her cat and spoke of the smells and the suffering. Another sister described how St. Bernard’s
Chalmette Medical Center, where ambulances had failed to return to complete a pre-storm evacuation, had flooded in a matter of hours to the ceiling of its first floor. It only had two stories. The hospital’s several dozen patients had been moved upstairs and then transferred by boat to the care of doctors at a nearby prison, on higher ground. Several strong men had lifted a patient who weighed roughly five hundred pounds through a window on a bed sheet and lowered him successfully onto a boat from the second floor. Several patients had died.

Another sister had worked at Tulane Hospital in downtown New Orleans.
Tulane was also dark, hot, and surrounded by water, but officials at its parent corporation, HCA, had been proactive about arranging for private helicopters and buses to rescue patients, employees, and their families, betting correctly that government assets would prove insufficient. The process of an orderly if slow evacuation had kept panic at bay. She knew of no patients who had died at Tulane. This sister was able to laugh and joke about her experiences.

After the phone call from the Tenet attorney, Mulderick hired her own lawyer, and he advised her to stop talking about what had happened.
He quickly learned of the attorney general’s confidential search-warrant affidavit. A well-connected criminal attorney for Tenet in Louisiana, Harry Rosenberg, had obtained a copy of it and described it to him.

Mulderick’s attorney said LifeCare had “put the hat” on Tenet for the deaths and pointed fingers at Mulderick and Dr. Pou. He encouraged Mulderick not to worry. A search-warrant application, he explained, has to convince a judge that a crime was likely to have been committed and that the search location could have evidence of it. The allegations could include hearsay—evidence someone heard from someone else rather than witnessed directly—which likely would be inadmissible should there ever be a trial.

Again he reassured her. Asking for patients to be given morphine to make them comfortable was something the lawyer’s wife had done for his ailing mother-in-law. Hospice had even suggested it.

Tenet attorney Rosenberg had been promised that the attorney general’s people would not take action against anyone without talking to him first. Mulderick and her lawyer could consider working together with Tenet’s attorneys, given their overlapping interests. It was in fact possible the corporation would pay for her defense.

Anger at Tenet began to swell among the hospital’s employees. At the end of September, Memorial’s CEO had sent out a legally required notice that the hospital would be closed for at least six months and the employment of most staff members was officially ending. The hospital would provide relief pay until early November, plus a bonus to those who worked the hurricane, and would try to accommodate staff members who were willing to relocate. Long-term staff members were infuriated by the short notice of their termination and the lack of a severance package and continued benefits. Some shared their feelings with Memorial and Tenet leaders. Why had other hospitals, not Memorial, posted thank-you letters to their staff in the newspaper? Why had another hospital continued to pay full salaries for months instead of providing only partial “relief” checks? Tenet president and CEO Trevor Fetter forwarded
complaint letters to his regional human resources director and asked her to respond for him.