“No living patients would be left behind”

The assurance that no living patients would be left behind became one of the most consequential expressions associated with the evacuation crisis at Memorial Medical Center. Susan Mulderick described it as reassurance to people afraid they would die inside the hospital; later, Virginia Rider’s investigation placed a similar phrase in the evidentiary chain surrounding allegations that patients had been given lethal drugs. Its significance lies in that collision: a promise of collective rescue could be heard as an assurance that everyone would be evacuated, yet investigators examined it beside testimony about patients who, witnesses said, were not expected to make it out.

A promise made under siege

On Thursday morning, September 1, 2005, staff members and family members stopped Mulderick to ask whether they would ever get out of the hospital and how the patients could be brought to safety. In a later interview with Rider, Mulderick acknowledged that she might have told LifeCare employees that no living patients would be left behind. She said she was sure she had repeated the assurance to dozens of people, describing an effort to reinforce that the group would leave together and that every patient would go.

The surrounding words make the statement’s reassuring purpose explicit. Mulderick recalled telling people that everyone was going and that they would get out. In her account, the phrase answered a fear of abandonment: patients, families, and staff were trapped in an increasingly dangerous hospital and did not know whether evacuation would reach them. The promise did not describe how rescue would be organized or guarantee when it would happen; it offered the assurance that no one would be excluded from the eventual escape.

The phrase in the investigation

By the time Rider interviewed Mulderick in early January 2006, the assurance had entered a very different setting. Mulderick knew investigators might ask about remarks that others had interpreted as suspicious or incriminating. She had seen a copy of the secret search-warrant affidavit, sent to a Tenet Healthcare attorney, that set out the allegations under investigation. Rider asked directly whether Mulderick had made a statement to the effect that no living patients would be left behind.

Mulderick did not deny saying it. She allowed that she might have, and explained the questions and fears she had been trying to answer. She also described conversations with Anna Pou on the same Thursday morning: Mulderick had asked whether some patients could receive something for suffering, anxiety, or pain. She said Pou agreed but was unsure what to give them, so Mulderick said she would ask Ewing Cook to speak with Pou. Mulderick said she did not see medication being administered and did not know whether Pou followed up. When Rider later asked whether Mulderick had discussed euthanasia with anyone, the interview moved from the assurance itself to the charged interpretation of events around it.

From reassurance to alleged evidence

The phrase’s investigative force became clearer in Rider’s arrest-warrant affidavit. Drawing mainly on interviews with four initial LifeCare witnesses—Diane Robichaux, Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris—the affidavit connected Mulderick’s reported assurance to accounts that LifeCare patients were not expected to make it out and that LifeCare leaders needed to speak with Pou. The witnesses’ wording was not identical: they reported that staff members were “not going to leave any living patients behind.” The affidavit placed that statement beside testimony that Pou appeared on the seventh floor, told Mendez that patients would receive a “lethal dose,” and said LifeCare staff should leave.

Other details in the affidavit gave the phrase a specific and grave context. According to the account, Pou was told that one patient was aware but weighed 380 pounds; she asked for him to be sedated, and LifeCare staff refused. Harris said he provided Pou with morphine, Versed, and injection supplies. Johnson said she showed Pou and two Memorial nurses to patients’ rooms and watched a nurse later identified as Lori Budo inject Rose Savoie. Savoie responded, “That burns.” Toxicology results showed morphine and midazolam in four patients named in the affidavit. These details were allegations assembled by investigators, not a verdict, but they explain why a phrase originally described as reassurance was scrutinized alongside testimony about medication and death.

Meaning shaped by retelling

The expression does not settle what Mulderick intended; her interview account and the witnesses’ statements gave investigators material to assess, not a single uncontested meaning. In Mulderick’s explanation, the assurance promised that everyone would be rescued. In the affidavit, a related formulation appeared within a narrative alleging that some patients were not expected to survive and that lethal doses were administered. The difference between the two readings is not merely a change in wording. It is the difference between being promised inclusion in an evacuation and being described as part of a group whose survival was already in question.

The phrase therefore marks a reversal in the story’s language: words offered to counter fear of abandonment later became part of the record used to frame alleged crimes. Its repetition mattered because the hospital’s frightened occupants needed reassurance, while investigators needed to determine what had been said, what it meant, and how it related to the patients’ treatment. The statement’s meaning remained entangled with that unresolved distinction between a promise to bring every patient out and the allegations that some patients were given drugs from which they died.