Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (55 page)

“We feel that they had abused their rights as medical professionals,” Foti added, pointing out that the arrests had nothing to do with the other doctors and nurses who had cared for patients under the most adverse conditions. These three were different. “We’re talking about people that pretended that maybe they were God.”

He explained why his investigators and prosecutors had worked so hard on the case. “We are entrusted to look after the safety of our senior citizens, our children, people that need help.

“For those voices that cannot speak, we will speak.” He thanked several members of the team by name, including lead case agent Virginia Rider.

Foti took questions. He asked the reporters to speak up because he had a head cold and his ears were blocked. When a reporter mentioned the word “euthanasia,” he stopped her short.

“This is not euthanasia. This is plain-and-simple homicide,” he said, careful to note that it was subject to being proved in court. “We have probable cause to say that this was homicide.” Most of the reporters used the inflammatory quote without including the attorney general’s caveats.

Foti emphasized that the women gave the injections just as helicopters and boats were emptying the hospital. “During all this time, there were people getting out of there,” he said, placing his hands in front of him as if holding the scene. “Do not all of us deserve the best chance we have to live?” he asked.

Foti warned that more counts might be brought against the women. “This case is by no means finished.” Other health-care workers were still being investigated. “I would probably say there will be more arrests,” he said.

“I want to say that this is an allegation. Every person, under our Constitution, has a right to trial and is presumed to be innocent.” Now that the three women had been arrested, prosecuting them was up to Orleans Parish district attorney Eddie Jordan and, if he chose to pursue indictments for murder, a grand jury.

“Thank you very much. I appreciate your indulgence,” Foti concluded, leaving the podium after thirty minutes.

LATER IN THE AFTERNOON, Rick Simmons sat before a smaller cluster of microphones at a conference table in his high-rise office in a New Orleans suburb. Although there had been no perp walk,
Simmons accused Foti of arresting the three women to get mug shots for a “media event” that would bolster his reputation. Law enforcement officials would be better used “patrolling the streets of New Orleans,” Simmons sneered.

He emphasized there had been no formal charges against Anna Pou and that the power to prosecute rested not with Foti but with the office of Orleans Parish district attorney Eddie Jordan. “Mr. Jordan has agreed to my request to be able to meet with him and present any evidence we might wish to present,” he said, noting that while that was unusual, this was not a usual case. “I certainly intend to try to dissuade him from taking any action.”

Simmons held up a copy of the affidavit. “It’s just a piece of paper with allegations on it,” he said. “Like every piece of paper, it has two sides.”

He leaned on his forearms toward the microphones. “There’s no motive here”—he shook his head—“and there’s no homicide.”

He spoke of the deteriorating conditions at Memorial.

“It sounds as if you’re saying there were extenuating circumstances,” one reporter said.

“Oh, by all means. More than just extenuating. I think there were circumstances tantamount to a defense.”

Simmons explained that twenty elderly LifeCare patients had been moved from Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish to a higher floor at Memorial before the storm, creating a concentration of acutely ill patients with what he called Relocation Stress Syndrome. “It’s a phenomenon, that people in elderly positions, if you move them around a lot, they get disoriented, it creates more problems, not to mention your medication problems, et cetera, et cetera.” As evidence, he said, “a lot” of the patients who had left Memorial alive had since died (at least six, he would later say in another forum).

Some reporters seemed interested; others tried to keep Simmons on point. “Is your client innocent?” one had asked earlier in the conference.

“Yes. No doubt. Absolutely.”

“Well, was there euthanasia if there wasn’t homicide?”

Simmons refused to answer. “There’s no criminal misconduct. That’s, I mean, I hate to start using the definitions other people use, ’cause it’s used for so many contexts of end-of-life issues and things like that, so. There’s no criminal conduct.”

“Were people injected with morphine and other drugs?”

“Again, I have to get into the facts of the affidavit and talk about it.” He shook his head. “There are circumstances in which we will present our side of the case of what happened and that’s all I can say at this point.”

“Who are you guys blaming? Do you feel abandoned by the state?”

“Yes. If you look at what happened on Wednesday to Thursday when a lot of these events occurred, the state of Louisiana
abandoned
the hospitals,” he said, lacing his words with a tone of acid disgust. “Where was the state of Louisiana on September first? It wasn’t at Memorial Hospital, I can tell you that!”

He defended Tenet, with whose lawyers he was cooperating, saying the hospital company had rescued patients from Memorial and the state had not.

THE ISSUE of larger responsibility and blame, regardless of whether it would be admissible in a court of law, was on many people’s minds. Individual decisions at the hospital had occurred in a context of failures of every sort. Over the eleven months since the storm, government agencies, private organizations, and journalists had churned out reports that analyzed and found fault with actions and inaction at nearly every level of every system. There were echoes of the 1920s, with advance warnings unheeded, investments not made, and aid being turned away. At least this time, some of the officials pointing fingers appeared to be pointing at themselves.

Why had the city flooded? A bad storm. The loss of a wetlands buffer.
Most of all, around New Orleans, the levee and flood control system—increasingly federalized after the 1927 Mississippi River floods and managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers—was grievously and predictably faulty. The failure to address its known weaknesses had saved money in the short term and now appeared outrageous.

Why, in the end, had more than a thousand died immediately in New Orleans—many of them in medical facilities, and many others poor and elderly—and an unknown number of others suffered and died in the aftermath due to stress and disruption of health care? So many reasons. The mayor’s delayed evacuation order. The lack of buses and drivers to move people out of town who had no cars of their own. Stubborn decisions to stay by people with the means to leave. Uncoordinated rescue efforts. Confusion and turf battles between different agencies and levels of government. Poor communications, not interoperable. Hospitals and nursing homes that didn’t evacuate before the storm and had not invested in backup power systems and backup water systems robust enough to withstand a prolonged emergency. Alarm over lawlessness, which interrupted rescues. It soon became clear that the fear of violence outweighed the actual violence, and that fear itself had compounded tragedy, as when first responders, including medical workers at the Superdome, were instructed to abandon their posts and their patients out of concern for their safety. “
Most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened,”
Times-Picayune
reporters asserted in an investigative story, part of a group that won a Pulitzer Prize.

Although real and troubling lawlessness and several murders and violent crimes occurred, rumors of homicidal gangs and “zombies” that had swirled from WWL to the rescue boat pilots to the halls of Memorial were revealed as overblown. Looters were sometimes foragers, searching for food and water. Gunshots assumed to have been aimed at rescuers may have been gunshots aimed, however misguidedly, at alerting those rescuers to the presence of desperate survivors. In the wake of the rumors, journalists began uncovering real and troubling evidence of several
white vigilante attacks on unarmed black men after
the storm, and of police misconduct, questionable shootings, and a cover-up.

Underlying the official response to the crisis was a lack of situational awareness—a view of the larger picture of what was happening and what needed to be done.

All of this had occurred against the backdrop of the knowledge, for years, that exactly such a scenario could occur. The
Times-Picayune
had written about it.
The Hurricane Pam exercises had modeled it.

The hospital was a microcosm of these larger failures, with compromised physical infrastructure, compromised operating systems, and compromised individuals. And also instances of heroism.

The scenario was familiar to every student of mass disasters around the world. Systems always failed. The official response was always unconscionably slow. Coordination and communication were particularly bad. These were truths Americans had come to accept about other people’s disasters.
It was shocking to see the scenario play out at home.

Life and death in the critical first hours of a calamity typically hinged on the preparedness, resources, and abilities of those in the affected community with the power to help themselves and others in their vicinity. Those who did better were those who didn’t wait idly for help to arrive. In the end, with systems crashing and failing, what mattered most and had the greatest immediate effects were the actions and decisions made in the midst of a crisis by individuals.

E-MAILS AND CALLS of support flooded into Pou’s home and Simmons’s office. The arrests of all three women had occurred well after the evening news, but they were amply covered the next day in New Orleans and around the world, complete with pitiful black-and-white mug shots. CNN carried much of Foti’s press conference live.
The online discussion threads of the
Times-Picayune
website filled with comments mostly favorable toward the medical professionals.

“I know if I was in a nasty hospital like that with 100 degree temperatures and I was suffering in pain, I would want them to off me too,” Timothy of Luling, Louisiana, wrote.

“To the family members whose loved ones died in Memorial, (and who I’m sure are suing the hospital), I have one question. Where were you? You obviously weren’t with your loved one while they were trapped in that hospital,” nurse Mark C. of Metairie, Louisiana, wrote.

Anonymous A of New Orleans blamed others: “Instead of arresting three women for alleged murder, we should put our Local, State and Federal Government on trial for this atrocity.”

J. Nisis of New Orleans went even further: “Enjoy your press conferences and photo-ops, Mr. Foti. I certainly won’t forget this incident the next time you’re up for re-election.”

But not everyone was sympathetic to Pou and the nurses. Writer DM Edwards of Marrero, who described having worked at another New Orleans hospital during the disaster, wondered exactly whose pain the medical workers had been trying to relieve: “Our whole purpose for being here was to aid the patients; not to kill them because we wanted them out of our misery.”