Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (53 page)

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Authors: Sheri Fink

Tags: #Social Science, #Disease & Health Issues, #True Crime, #Murder, #General, #Disasters & Disaster Relief

BOOK: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
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LATE JUNE BROUGHT a major development in the case Rider and Schafer were assembling against Pou. The Louisiana Supreme Court had, in May, denied the investigators access to anything Pou had told Tenet attorney Audrey Andrews prior to Andrews informing her she was exclusively Tenet’s attorney. However anything Pou said subsequently—to Andrews or Tenet’s media relations chief—was fair game. Rider and Schafer
quickly moved to interview the two Tenet employees, and Tenet offered to make them available, but Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, filed new motions in court attempting to block them.

Although he wasn’t required to do so, Schafer agreed to a hearing to determine the answer to a single question: at exactly what point in the conversation had the Tenet lawyer informed Pou that she was not Pou’s attorney? Schafer’s gentlemanly decision proved to be a critical mistake. He had been outfoxed. Simmons used the hearing to argue for broader protections against disclosure of what Pou had said. On June 26, the lower court ruled that anything Pou had discussed prior to being notified, even if Pou revealed it again in the later conversations, was protected. The Tenet lawyer’s eight pages of notes on the conversation would, consequently, be protected too.

Schafer planned to appeal this decision on behalf of the attorney general’s office, but for now, the decision frustrated Rider and Schafer’s efforts to get key evidence of Pou’s unguarded conversation with the Tenet employees. After months of waiting, it seemed that their case would have to go forward without the information.

One weekday afternoon in July, several weeks after the court’s decision, Rider received a call from her chief, telling her the arrests of Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo could take place the next week. The timing disappointed her. She was at last heading to Dallas to interview a Tenet official and then planned to fly to Las Vegas to take a Certified Forensic Accountant exam. She’d had to postpone the test once to search the hospital the previous year.

She had already written up a draft arrest warrant. She offered to take it down to the courthouse on Friday before she left town. Another special agent could then make the arrests.

No, she was told. Attorney General Foti wants
you
to execute the warrant.

She said she could still take the affidavit to the court on Friday, get it signed before her trip, and then return on the red-eye flight from Las
Vegas, arriving in New Orleans by ten thirty a.m. the following Thursday. Someone could pick her up at the airport and they could carry out the warrant. Rider assumed arrangements would be made with Pou’s lawyer for Pou to turn herself in and be booked. This was, most of the time, the way things were done, particularly when the target was a professional not deemed a flight risk.

“You can’t get the warrant signed early.”

Rider wondered why. Her boss directed her to get the warrant signed at six p.m. on Monday. She was to execute it the same day, after the ten o’clock news. She would have to cancel her trip. These would be surprise arrests. The director’s job was on the line if the “targets” were lost.

That weekend, Rider began surveillance on Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo.

C
HAPTER
9

ANNA POU HAD FINALLY and quietly returned to performing surgery. Months had passed since her name was broadcast, and little seemed to be happening with the investigation at the attorney general’s office, although rumor had it something might soon emerge.

James O’Bryant, her patient before Katrina, had developed facial pain again. A scan showed the cancer had grown back behind his left eye and needed to be removed. He said he wasn’t sure he wanted to undergo another extensive operation. The chairman of Pou’s department, Dr. Dan Nuss, believed he could remove the whole tumor, and O’Bryant decided to let him try. Pou would work alongside Nuss to reconstruct O’Bryant’s face.

The operation took place on Thursday, July 6. The surgeons painstakingly removed bits of tissue, sending them for a rough initial check under a microscope for cancer cells before cutting deeper. Over many hours, they pursued the tumor’s tentacles only to discover that it had invaded a bone around a previously removed blood vessel. The scan had not shown this. To get all the cancer, they would need to open O’Bryant’s skull, something they felt he could not withstand. Twenty hours into the operation, they closed his face as best as they could and left part of the tumor inside him.

A nurse walked into O’Bryant’s room after the operation. “Oh my God,” she said. “What do they expect me to do with this?”

“Please just act like you know what the hell you’re doing,” O’Bryant’s wife, Brenda, said. “He’s frightened to death.”

Patients with shocking facial deformities were new to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, a Franciscan-run hospital in Baton Rouge. Pou and her Louisiana State University head and neck surgery colleagues were operating there now because the New Orleans hospitals where their department had been based had not reopened.

After Pou learned from Brenda O’Bryant about how the nurses were treating James, she called a meeting with the staff members. They crowded into a room with a computer, and Pou showed them step-by-step what procedures had been done and how James had reached his current condition. She explained why following every last detail of her care instructions was so important to helping the fragile tissues of his reconstructed face heal.

Pou worried about O’Bryant’s recovery. She posted signs in the intensive care unit warning anyone caring for him not to put pressure on the left side of his face, head, neck, shoulder, or arm.

FRIDAY, JULY 14, 2006

DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN NUSS had friends in high places. Through him, Pou and her attorney, Rick Simmons, learned that
Foti was likely to release the findings of his investigation, and they would not be good for Pou. Someone from the attorney general’s office called the department
asking for Pou’s address, a worrisome development.

On Friday afternoon, Simmons phoned the attorney general’s office.
“Are you going to arrest my client?” he asked. “No, not right now,” prosecutor Butch Schafer said, somewhat honestly. “We can self-surrender,” Simmons reminded him. They had discussed this before. Simmons would
deliver Pou to be booked in order to avoid the indignity of a surprise arrest.
Attorneys for Lori Budo and Cheri Landry had also expressed a preference for self-surrender. Simmons assumed they all had a deal.

Simmons asked Schafer to give him a call so he could bring Pou in and avoid a “perp walk.” He didn’t want news crews tipped off, snapping photographs of his client being led to jail in handcuffs. Schafer assured him that wasn’t going to happen.

Simmons placed a few other phone calls and told Pou to keep her surgery schedule. Pou had plans to spend a long weekend off in New Orleans with her mother. She gave that up, instead picking up her mom and driving the seventy-five miles back to the capital where Pou now
stayed part-time at a home she did not own. Throughout the weekend, she checked on O’Bryant in the ICU, spoke with his nurses, and sat with Brenda, consoling her.

SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2006

THE ARREST TEAMS had printed out Yahoo! maps on Friday and checked their targets’ work schedules. On Sunday afternoon they met to learn the surveillance plan. Pairs of agents began watching Anna Pou, Lori Budo, and Cheri Landry in four-hour shifts, following them between their homes and worksites. They were instructed to “maintain visual” and know the women’s whereabouts at all times in preparation for the planned arrests of all three women on Monday.

Anna Pou’s cell phone rang on Sunday evening. It was Brenda O’Bryant calling about James. Hours earlier at the hospital, a doctor in training had tugged at what he thought was a stitch that needed to be removed. He had in fact torn away part of a scab, but James had seemed all right. He was discharged as planned and the couple drove two hours home to
Bogalusa, a paper mill town on the Pearl River at the Louisiana-Mississippi border. In 1995, a chemical accident in Bogalusa poisoned
thousands and led to a class action lawsuit that was settled months before Hurricane Katrina. Brenda figured that the orange cloud that had hovered over the city for several days had caused James’s cancer.

At around seven thirty p.m., Brenda noticed blood pooling beneath James’s face and called Pou, who instructed her to put something cold on his wound and head to the nearest emergency room. Pou asked to speak with the ER doctor on Brenda’s cell phone. At first he refused to take the call. Brenda insisted and handed him her phone. Pou asked him to check several things. He seemed annoyed and gave the phone back to Brenda.

Pou kept Brenda on the line, even when a security guard escorted her out of the ER for violating the hospital’s no-cell-phone policy. Pou convinced her not to hang up. “I need to know what’s going on,” she said.

The bleeding seemed to have stopped. If it started again, it could be catastrophic. Pou told Brenda to make sure James was observed for at least an hour in the ER, then taken back to Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge by car or ambulance. “I can’t do anything without seeing him,” Pou said. “You’ve got to bring him back here.”

James was experiencing more pain. He began praying aloud. Then his wound started gushing.

The ER doctor put a stitch in his face to stop the bleeding. It seemed to work, but Pou wasn’t yet comfortable letting Brenda drive James to Baton Rouge. Blood might be gathering in a confined space beneath the surface, a hematoma, its pressure growing.

James said his pain was getting worse. The doctor didn’t seem to believe him. He acted as if James were an addict seeking narcotics.

Then James’s face erupted. The staff rushed him into an ambulance. He was bleeding so profusely that on the way to Baton Rouge, they transfused him with two units of blood.

Pou prepared the operating room. She called her chairman, Dan Nuss, telling him he had to come in on a Sunday night. The surgical nurses arrived, and the staff scrubbed their hands and arms and donned sterile gowns and gloves. They operated on O’Bryant through the night.

THE SAME NIGHT, Attorney General Foti met by speakerphone with agents and prosecutors to go over the arrest plan for Monday. One prosecutor suggested upping the charges from second- to first-degree murder.
Murdering with the specific intent to kill someone older than sixty-five, or more than one person of any age, fit the state’s definition of the more serious crime.

“No!” Foti’s public information director Kris Wartelle nearly shouted. The idea of prosecuting Katrina health professionals for first-degree murder was crazy. Merely investigating them for second-degree murder had provoked angry letters from the public. A second-degree murder conviction would carry a lifetime sentence of hard labor without parole in Louisiana. The only thing to gain from first-degree charges was the option to pursue the death penalty.

One attorney on the call suggested dialing down the charges to manslaughter;
murders committed in “sudden passion” with loss of self-control after a provocation, or in cases where there was no intent to kill, carried a maximum sentence of forty years’ imprisonment. The voices advocating for second-degree murder prevailed.

Wartelle sensed that sending agents out to arrest the women was a terrible idea from a PR standpoint. She gave Attorney General Foti advice on how to avoid media attention during the arrests, so the television cameras did not catch the women in a perp walk and broadcast the footage on the popular “Live at Five” evening or ten o’clock nightly television news. She asked him to slow down, to go over with her the questions he might face at a press conference after the arrests. He did not.

Prosecutor Butch Schafer and Special Agent Virginia Rider also disliked the idea of surprise arrests. Rider bore responsibility for organizing them, and Schafer knew she was not enthusiastic about slapping handcuffs onto suspects’ wrists. Schafer made his opinion known in the strongest possible terms within the attorney general’s office. Letting people
turn themselves in was done every day; it hadn’t occurred to Schafer these arrests would go any other way. He knew the women’s attorneys expected they would be allowed to deliver their clients to be booked. He had given them his word he would contact them if their clients were going to be arrested, and a Southern gentleman didn’t violate a gentleman’s promise. But it was the attorney general who had the power to make this decision. Perhaps he wanted to use the case to establish his strength as a prosecutor after spending three decades as a sheriff.

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