Andre Gremillion

Andre Gremillion was one of Emmett Everett’s nurses at Memorial Medical Center. His account of a conversation in the hospital’s physical therapy charting room became important to the investigation of the treatment of LifeCare patients: it conveyed how he understood a request to sedate Everett, while leaving investigators without the direct eyewitness link to injections they were seeking.

The Request to Sedate Everett

Later that morning, Anna Pou came upstairs and discussed Everett’s prospects in the physical therapy charting room. Gremillion joined the conversation and was asked to sedate him. He backed out of the room crying. His reaction was not merely a refusal without explanation: in a later interview, he recalled words from Pou that shaped how he interpreted the request.

A Warning That Haunted Him

In a late-December interview, Gremillion said a recent conversation with his nursing director, Gina Isbell, had brought back a reason for his distress. He recalled Pou telling him, “If you don’t feel comfortable, don’t do it, because it will come back and haunt you. The first time I did it, I wasn’t ready and it haunted me for two years.” Gremillion remembered the remark as part of the same encounter in which he was asked to medicate Everett; he described Pou’s account of an earlier experience as having stayed with her for two years.

After leaving the room, Gremillion passed Isbell, who saw that he was upset and tried to put an arm around him. He continued down the hallway to a nursing station in an alcove, then hit the corner of a wall in an effort to get control of himself. He told investigators that Pou’s comment had made him think “they were going to give Mr. Everett something to let him go.” The phrase records his interpretation of what was being proposed, rather than a witnessed injection or a confirmed account of what happened to Everett.

Investigative Significance and Limits

Virginia Rider, Butch Schafer, and their colleagues interviewed Gremillion several times early in the investigation. His recollection supplied a disturbing account of the request and of Pou’s warning, and it showed that he understood the proposed medication as connected to letting Everett die. But Rider and Schafer still lacked a true eyewitness who could directly link Pou’s words to injections of LifeCare patients. Gremillion’s evidence therefore mattered both for what it suggested about the meaning of the conversation and for what it could not establish: he recounted a request, a remembered warning, and his own conclusion, not firsthand observation of injections.