Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (54 page)

Rider often lay awake the night before an arrest, wondering if what she was about to do was wrong. Whether by surprise or self-surrender, she knew it would change the suspect’s life forever. In this case, evidence to warrant the arrests before a judge had been present for months. It was time for justice to advance.

Schafer did not wrestle with his conscience over prosecuting the women. Given what he knew about what happened at Memorial, he felt, absolutely, it was right.

MONDAY, JULY 17, 2006

ANNA POU and Dan Nuss succeeded in closing James O’Bryant’s facial defect after operating all Sunday night. They transfused him with more blood to replace what he had lost.

Pou tried to calm Brenda, who was furious at the ER doctor. “It’s not his fault that it started bleeding,” Pou said. “The hematoma may have happened anyway.” If James hadn’t stopped at that emergency room, the crisis might have occurred in their car on the way to Baton Rouge. “He could have died then,” Pou said. “Things happen for a reason. We just have to believe that God put you there and that’s where you needed to be at that time.”

When James was settled in the intensive care unit to recover from surgery on Monday morning, Pou left for the other hospital where she
worked. She had not slept, and she had another long operation on her schedule.

THAT AFTERNOON, Virginia Rider drove to New Orleans
with affidavits and warrants of arrest for Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo.

Rider’s affidavit was a concise and potent narrative of the alleged crimes, concatenating the salient evidence she had gathered. It drew mainly from interviews with the four initial LifeCare witnesses: Diane Robichaux, Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris. They had heard from Susan Mulderick that the LifeCare patients weren’t expected to make it out, that staff members were “not going to leave any living patients behind,” and that the LifeCare leaders needed to talk with Dr. Pou. Dr. Pou had appeared on the seventh floor and told Mendez that the patients would be given a “lethal dose” and LifeCare staff should leave. Pou was told that one of the patients was aware but weighed 380 pounds. She asked for him to be sedated, but the LifeCare staff refused. Steven Harris had given Pou morphine, Versed, and injection supplies, and Kristy Johnson had shown Pou and two Memorial nurses to the patients’ rooms, watching a nurse, later identified as Lori Budo, inject Rose Savoie, who responded, “That burns.” Toxicology tests revealed morphine and midazolam in the four patients named in the affidavit. They included Emmett Everett, Rose Savoie, and two other LifeCare patients from the seventh floor for whom toxicology results had first become available and whose cases were reviewed by pathologist Cyril Wecht. Ireatha Watson, age eighty-nine, who had dementia, had been treated for gangrenous toes; and Hollis Alford, age sixty-six, who had a history of schizophrenia, was gravely ill from a blood infection. Wecht deemed all four to have died from a lethal amount of the drugs. Criminal District Court Judge Calvin Johnson asked Rider a few questions and signed
the arrest warrants at about six p.m. They alleged that the women had violated the state’s second-degree murder statute by intentionally killing the four patients.

Rider gave the warrants for nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo to the leaders of their arrest teams in New Orleans. She drove back to Baton Rouge, and at about eight thirty in the evening had a rendezvous with other agents at a shopping center about a mile from Anna Pou’s Baton Rouge home to coordinate final details.

They reached Pou’s house around nine p.m. Rider walked to the door with a male colleague. She wore body armor and a gun that weighed down the bottoms of her pantsuit, pinned at the waist, a reminder of the weight she had lost in recent months of hard work and marital problems; she had not had time to go shopping for new clothes.

Rider’s colleague knocked. Moments later, a woman’s voice asked who was there. Pou opened the door and stood without shoes in rumpled surgical scrubs.

Rider reintroduced herself. Seven months had passed since they had met one another while touring Memorial. The agents told Pou she was being arrested and several entered the house. Pou was alone. They asked if she had any weapons and patted her down. Pou asked permission to change into fresh scrubs. Rider agreed and followed Pou into her bedroom with another female agent. They watched as the short, compact woman changed, brushed her teeth, and put on deodorant in the attached bathroom.

“What about my patients?” Pou asked. She told the officers she couldn’t leave home because she was awaiting a stat laboratory result. Rider asked which doctor covered her patients when she was not available and allowed her to phone him. “
I can’t tell you what’s going on,” Pou told the doctor.
She asked him to check the calcium level on one of her patients, and she described the other issues she needed him to track. “Please cancel all my surgeries this week.”

Pou was told to take off any jewelry and bring only her driver’s license
with her to the prison. She said she wasn’t wearing jewelry, and her driver’s license was in her bag. Rider told her not to reach into the bag, to pour its contents out instead. She watched while Pou did this and removed what appeared to be her wallet.

Rider read Pou her rights. Pou signed “Anna Maria Pou” on a form indicating she understood them, and she initialed the line “No” where it asked if she was willing to answer questions without her lawyer. Then Rider slipped a pair of handcuffs over Pou’s hands, checking, as she had learned in police academy, for a space of two fingers’ width between the metal and Pou’s wrists for comfort before double-locking the cuffs.

Rider escorted Pou to the backseat of the car and made sure she did not hit her head as she entered. With the help of a colleague, Rider fastened Pou’s seat belt.

They drove thirteen miles, with other agents following them, to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in Scotlandville, where Rider told Pou she would be booked as a fugitive. The sound of this concerned Pou, whose brother was a federal fugitive. Rider explained that it didn’t mean Pou was running from the law, only that she was being picked up in East Baton Rouge on a warrant from another parish.

At the prison Pou was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed. It was nearly ten thirty p.m. She looked straight into the camera with wide eyes, questioning brows, and lips closed and downturned like a child stunned by an unjust punishment. It was a look that communicated shock and devastation. It was an accusatory look. It was a look that asked:
How could you?

HER HANDS that had just performed surgery were being cuffed again and hooked to a chain attached to a loop at the front of a belt at her waist. Rider and a male agent escorted her back to the car. The male
agent asked if she was OK and offered her a water bottle, opening it for her. She found she could drink from it while shackled.

Small things made her grateful. They didn’t cuff her behind her back for the ninety-mile journey. “I don’t think you’d be comfortable going all that way with your hands behind your back like that,” one of the officers said.

During the trip, Pou prayed quietly.
She prayed for God to help her family get through this. The agents seemed courteous; they asked her several times if she was all right. One, after speaking with a colleague by phone, told her that her lawyer, Rick Simmons, had been notified and would meet them at the Orleans Parish Prison. They arrived just before midnight.

She had to go to the bathroom, but even this she was not free to do on her own. The short agent with the dirty-blond hair accompanied her. When Pou finished on the toilet, she asked for assistance. Virginia Rider helped Pou pull up her scrub pants.

Rick Simmons wasn’t there yet. Pou was booked. It shocked her to read “PRINCIPAL TO SECOND DEGREE MURDER 4 COUNTS,” handwritten on the booking form. She was made to sit for another photograph under a harsh overhead light. This time she looked into the distance, not meeting the camera’s gaze. Assistant Attorney General Butch Schafer offered her his phone, and she chose to call her mother first, then her husband, Vince. Schafer kept her off to the side so she wouldn’t be sent to a holding cell with other prisoners. She signed a property bond for $100,000 and was given a subpoena requiring her to return with that sum of money and her passport by Thursday. Simmons arrived, and Pou was released on her own recognizance forty-five minutes after being booked, after midnight on Tuesday, July 18.

Pou went to stay at her mother’s house in New Orleans. After the arrest, her mother advised her to entrust herself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She told her to hope and to trust. Pou’s husband, Vince Panepinto,
told her how hurt he was for her. “I’ve watched you work so hard and sacrifice so much and always be there for everybody, not just patients,” he said, Pou would later tell reporter Julie Scelfo. “It hurts me so much to see this happen to you of all people.” On the morning after Pou’s arrest, two friends arrived. They gave her a silver charm with the image of
Our Lady of Prompt Succor, which was a statue of the Virgin Mary that had been sculpted in France and brought to an Ursuline convent in New Orleans in the early nineteenth century. Prayers to Our Lady of Prompt Succor were thought to result in quick intercession. Pou’s friends told her to put on the medal, never remove it, and never underestimate the power of her family.

TUESDAY, JULY 18, 2006

VIRGINIA RIDER wore a light summer suit to the afternoon press conference at the attorney general’s office in Baton Rouge. She went to stand, hands crossed before her, in a gaggle of tall male colleagues gathered in a conference room already abuzz with reporters. Butch Schafer walked in behind her wearing a polo shirt with a patch over his heart in the shape of the “Louisiana boot,” the attorney general’s office logo. He was the only man not in a dark suit and tie. He had stayed behind in New Orleans overnight to monitor the booking process and ensure the arrest paperwork was correct. He had only just walked back into the building in Baton Rouge. A riot of microphones was perched atop a podium emblazoned with the state seal and surrounded by flags. Attorney General Foti’s media staff passed out copies of the arrest warrants in dark-blue folders and asked reporters to add their names to a sign-in sheet.

The gray-haired attorney general entered the room, ambled in front of Rider, and walked stiffly to the podium amid strobelike flashes and the clatter of camera shutters. “Afternoon, everybody,” he began without notes, slowly scanning the room as he spoke.

“Memorial Hospital is a hospital in the city of New Orleans—a big hospital, been there a long time. Inside that hospital, they have another hospital called Lakeside. Lakeside has acute care patients.”

“LifeCare,” his spokeswoman, Kris Wartelle, whispered from a chair beside the podium. He halted, turned, and peered at her through rimless glasses. “LifeCare,” she corrected him. He craned his neck to bring his ear closer to her, and she said the word a third time, a little louder. “LifeCare.”

“Has acute care patients,” he repeated, not acknowledging his mistake. “These were some of the people that it was alleged that they were killed by lethal injection.”

Foti turned to his notes and announced the arrests the previous evening of Pou and two nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, for four counts of principal to second-degree murder. “ ‘Principal’ means that you assisted or participated with the act,” he said, explaining later that it was not yet clear exactly who had injected which patient with morphine and what he called “mazdolome,” a mispronunciation of the drug midazolam, or Versed. He held up two fingers. “Either one of them can kill you, but when you use
both
of them together it becomes a lethal cocktail that
guarantees
they are going to die.” He paused, blinking, for emphasis.

The reporters recognized a good quote, a quote that telegraphed Foti’s message succinctly and provocatively. The problem was that viewers with any medical training knew that it was false. The drug combination could indeed be fatal, but could also be used safely if given with care.