Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (52 page)

The senator’s spokesperson said she would not be giving up the contributions.

Schafer tacked up the article in his office. He didn’t honestly think that Senator Landrieu had called Attorney General Foti to protect Tenet, but seeing something in the news that backed his cynical view of the company made him giddy.

THE NEWS MEDIA continued to fan public interest in the story. CNN reporter Drew Griffin and producer Kathleen Johnson extracted morsels of information from an array of sources and broadcast a new story on the investigation every few weeks, garnishing tiny discoveries
(“More than one medical professional is under scrutiny as a possible person of interest”; “Dr. Cyril Wecht […] has been hired as a consultant”) with footage from earlier interviews.

Angela McManus followed the news closely from temporary lodgings in Baton Rouge, many miles away from her flooded family home. McManus made sure her new phone number was listed. She wanted investigators and reporters to be able to find her to talk about her mother, Wilda.

“
I don’t know what God’s will is,” she told National Public Radio’s Carrie Kahn in a story that aired late that winter. “I don’t know when He was calling her home. If He did in fact do it, OK. But if man decided that, I want to know that. My family needs peace about that.”

McManus’s siblings had retained a lawyer to help them find answers. The family members of several other deceased patients did too. Many family members wrote to the attorney general’s office seeking information. Some complained that coroner Frank Minyard had not responded to requests to release death certificates needed for successions. When the certificates were received, the cause of death was often marked “pending investigation,” leaving open the possibility that insurance company payouts would be denied.

On NPR, Kahn gave the public the first details of the case being built against Anna Pou. A male actor read aloud Virginia Rider’s words from a leaked copy of the previous October’s search-warrant affidavit. “Dr. Pou informed them that it had been decided that they were going to administer lethal doses to the LifeCare patients.”

In the broadcast, Kahn said attorney Rick Simmons was asked if Pou had euthanized any patients. “Dr. Pou did not engage in any criminal actions,” he told NPR.

Reaction to the story was swift. The anti-euthanasia group Not Dead Yet issued a statement full of outraged speculation: “The only way the staff could evacuate was if they could report there were no more living
patients to take care of. This was not about compassion or mercy. It was about throwing someone else over the side of the lifeboat in order to save themselves.”

ALTHOUGH THE NPR story laid out the version of events Rider had pieced together, she was furious that her affidavit, with the names of victims and witnesses, had leaked. She was determined to find the source. The reporter had allegedly told someone it came from Tenet. Rider knew that Tenet attorney Harry Rosenberg had received the search-warrant materials by order of court the previous October, agreeing that he would keep them confidential. Rider served him with a subpoena commanding him to identify everyone to whom he had disclosed the information. Then she was told by her superiors to back off. Perhaps they were protecting a friend. Or perhaps the leak had come from the attorney general’s side.

ON MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, workers raised white tents on the outdoor parking lot across Clara Street from Memorial’s emergency room ramp and prepared a crawfish boil for former employees and staff. Servers dumped steaming piles of crustaceans before guests, who snapped them in half and tugged out their tails. Some doctors had returned to practice at their outpatient offices in the complex, and Tenet had announced plans to reopen the new surgery building where Anna Pou, Karen Wynn, and the intensive care nurses had tried to sleep the night Katrina struck.
The main hospital, however, would remain closed. The music was upbeat, the faces downcast, even tearful. Dr. Horace Baltz saw it as an occasion for emotional closure. He came to bid colleagues and his forty-three-year career at the hospital good-bye. The clash of the
festive and funereal reminded him of a wake, the darkened hospital lying corpselike before them.

Baltz didn’t hear anyone speculate on what might have happened to the patients after the storm. Several partygoers did, however, excoriate the absent Dr. Bryant King in a way Baltz considered a racially prejudiced “
verbal lynching,” calling him untrustworthy, not a team player, and a troublemaker for having spoken out on CNN. King had moved out of the state after the uproar began against him.

Baltz departed without thanking his hosts. The next month,
Tenet announced intentions to sell Memorial Medical Center and what remained of its other hospitals in the region.

AS THE SPRING months passed, Rider and Schafer found little of significance to add to the evidence against Pou for the LifeCare deaths on the seventh floor or against nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, who they believed had accompanied Pou. When would the agents be allowed to make arrests? “Not now,” they were told, without explanation.

In June, Schafer received a letter from a lawyer for the family of John Russell, the LifeCare patient whom Gina Isbell had tried to save by hand-ventilating him as he was carried downstairs after the power failed. She had stood by his body after he died and taken him to the chapel, the first patient placed there and blessed by Father Marse. The lawyer was writing to Schafer because—nearly a year later—Russell’s wife of forty-two years and her daughter had learned none of this. They had received a death certificate from the coroner’s office, but had not been given any conclusive proof as to what date Russell died and how he died. “He appeared to be in relatively good health and lucid shortly before the Hurricane,” the lawyer wrote. “That is when they last saw him. I attempted to contact the Coroner’s Office in New Orleans and my call was not answered.” The death certificate
marked “pending investigation,” listing no cause of death, made them worry, made them think that maybe the attorney general was right and patients at Memorial had been injected.

The urge to learn what had become of a loved one who perished in a large disaster or crisis was so essentially human that it had led to the development of a special field of DNA identification focused on mass casualties. The techniques drew from anthropology, forensics, molecular biology, genetics, and computer science. They had been applied, at great cost, to the jumbled bones from mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina; waterlogged corpses from the beaches of post-tsunami Phuket, Thailand; and the fragments—sifted through for years—from Ground Zero in New York City. A DNA sample from Russell’s left tibia had been taken to help confirm the identity of his body. Unique skin marks were also noted, and a skull and crossbones tattoo on Russell’s left arm seemed to have been wryly placed for the occasion. It said:
AS YOU ARE I WAS. AS I AM YOU WILL BE
.

It had taken Russell’s widow three weeks to locate his body, and she was never able to see it because it was too badly decomposed. It was held for investigation and released to a funeral home well over two months after the storm. Russell’s widow felt the need to know more. Although Schafer didn’t know it, she had suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder after the storm, imagining her husband suffering in the heat. She was not aware that he had died before the worst of the ordeal recounted in the news. Schafer called the attorney the very next day and made arrangements to get Russell’s medical records to him.

Also in June, Schafer and Rider interviewed the nursing director in charge of women’s and infants’ services at Memorial, Marirose Bernard. She described the successful transfer of the neonates the first day the waters rose. After this, she said she had taken charge of organizing two-hour nursing shifts to care for the adult patients staged on the second floor. She had seen patients die in the heat, and had given doses of the sedative Ativan to the one who looked uncomfortable and was crying out, “Mama.”
She denied hearing anyone talk about euthanasia, and Rider and Schafer did not press her on this. She said when she had left Memorial on Thursday afternoon with other nurses, about fifteen “pretty sick, pretty sick, awful” patients remained on the second floor under the care of Drs. Pou and Thiele and several nurses. She said she left in a boat, was allowed to take her cat, and hoped to find family members who had departed the previous day and were stuck in the New Orleans Convention Center. Instead, she spent the night on the I-10 cloverleaf, huddled with other staff “because our lives were being threatened.”

Butch Schafer had a flash of memory. “Were you interviewed by a news …?”

She said she had been interviewed by a Fox News correspondent. “She says, ‘Why did you stay, if you had the choice of being in your bed? Why did you stay?’ I said, ‘Because I am a nurse.’ ”

“You are the one,” Schafer said.

“I said I am a nurse, and that is what nurses do.”

Bernard was the one Schafer had been quoting ever since he was in Atlanta with his family and saw her interview after his daughter’s death. Bernard had evoked memories of his mama, a dedicated, white-capped nurse in the 1940s. “You are the one. I remember it now. Absolutely.”

“We did the best we could,” Bernard said. Schafer walked around the table and asked her lawyer for permission to hug her. The lawyer said it was up to his client. The nurse stood up, and they embraced.