Anna Pou—Emmett Everett

Anna Pou—Emmett Everett

Pou’s relationship with Emmett Everett was that of physician and patient during the Memorial crisis, but it became the case’s sharpest point of legal and moral uncertainty. Frank Minyard, the Orleans Parish coroner, came to regard Everett’s death as an unequivocal homicide, even as he struggled to determine Pou’s intent and to classify the other deaths. Everett’s case thus stood both as a specific allegation against Pou and as a test of what the available evidence could establish.

Physician and Patient in the Crisis

Everett was a patient on LifeCare’s seventh floor at Memorial Medical Center. His wife, Carrie, had cared for him for nine years after he lost the use of his legs and control of his bladder. That history gives their relationship a concrete shape beyond the case file: his dependence on care was part of their shared life, not simply a medical condition cited after his death.

Carrie was not present when the injections took place. She and other family members had been made to leave LifeCare shortly beforehand. During the crisis, she was trapped with her children and grandchildren in the flooded Ninth Ward. The separation mattered later not only because it kept her from intervening, as she believed she might have done, but because it left her without firsthand knowledge of what happened to her husband. She wanted an explanation as well as accountability: she wanted Pou to accept responsibility, and she wanted to understand the purpose of the actions that preceded Everett’s death.

Evidence and Minyard’s Judgment

The effort to establish what happened faced a basic forensic difficulty. Memorial’s bodies had remained in heat for more than a week before recovery, and Minyard initially believed that autopsies would be of little use; blood could not be sampled to check drug levels. Investigators were therefore concerned that eyewitness accounts and empty morphine vials might not suffice to prove a crime. A volunteer pathologist pointed out that drugs could remain detectable in more durable tissues or in fluid that accumulated after death, leading to tissue testing.

The broader laboratory results did not, by themselves, settle the questions of dose, timing, cause, or intent. In an early set of eighteen Memorial samples, nine tested positive for morphine and several others for midazolam. Later, Robert Middleberg’s laboratory found morphine or midazolam, or both, in twenty-three of forty-one bodies from Memorial and LifeCare. Those figures describe the wider investigation; they do not identify Everett’s individual result in the evidence presented here. Middleberg cautioned that postmortem tissue toxicology was harder to interpret than blood testing in living patients, particularly after prolonged exposure to heat. The experts therefore considered the records and clinical histories alongside the laboratory findings.

Minyard consulted Steven Karch, who argued that drug levels in bodies exposed to extreme heat could not reliably establish causes of death and recommended leaving the cases undetermined. Michael Baden countered that, regardless of whether the precise dose could be reconstructed, the drugs were present and there was no competing cause of death. Minyard also heard Cyril Wecht’s argument that some measured levels were very high, supported by a small, unpublished test of drug samples subjected to hot, humid conditions. The competing interpretations left Minyard anticipating a trial dominated by expert disagreement and reasonable doubt.

Within that uncertainty, he drew a distinction between Everett and the other patients. He believed the drugs were the technical cause of Everett’s death and said he would stake his life on the conclusion that it was homicide. He was less certain about several other deaths, including whether to classify them as homicides. Yet Minyard did not claim to know Pou’s purpose. He reasoned that she might have intended sedation and, in Everett’s case, might have overestimated how much was needed because of his size. That was a possible defense he imagined, not a proven account of Pou’s thinking.

The Charges and the Grand Jury

The district attorney’s office prepared a ten-count bill for the grand jury: one count of second-degree murder concerning Everett and nine counts of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, one for each LifeCare patient on the seventh floor, including Everett. The central legal question was whether the evidence established that Pou had a specific intent to kill. Minyard’s confidence about the medical classification of Everett’s death therefore did not itself resolve the distinct question of Pou’s intent.

The grand jury declined to indict Pou on any of the counts. Its decision left Minyard’s assessment of Everett’s death separate from a criminal finding of guilt: the case did not proceed to trial, and the indictment was rejected in full. Carrie and other relatives were not called to tell the grand jury what they knew. The attorney general’s team argued that their testimony was essential to a full account of the patients’ condition and the care being provided; it also feared that the grand jury might hear no LifeCare witnesses. The absence of Carrie’s account was especially consequential in a case where Minyard’s proposed charge rested on Everett’s death but the family member most closely involved in his care had been absent from the hospital at the decisive time.

Carrie Everett’s Loss and the Relationship’s Aftermath

Carrie said she would rather have had Everett alive and continued caring for him—bathing him, changing his diaper, and sharing the ordinary joking and arguing of their life together. Her account resists the reduction of his dependence to an argument about whether his life was worth saving. The care he needed was part of a relationship she valued, and his disability did not diminish her wish to have him back.

She also believed that being present might have changed events. Had she not been trapped in the flooded Ninth Ward, she thought she could have confronted Pou and prevented her from entering the room. The book presents this as Carrie’s conviction, not as something that can be verified: her absence left her with grief and a counterfactual, rather than a direct account of the encounter.

The relation between Pou and Everett consequently remains defined by an unresolved divide. Minyard regarded Everett’s death as the clearest homicide in the cases he examined, but the grand jury rejected the charge against Pou, and the evidence did not conclusively establish her intent. Carrie’s testimony about their life together supplies a different kind of certainty: Everett was her husband, someone whose care and companionship she wanted to continue. His case joins those two registers—the contested forensic and legal judgment, and the family’s unambiguous loss—without allowing either to erase the other.