Arrests of Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo over alleged patient murders

The arrests of Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo over alleged patient murders turned the deaths of patients at Memorial Medical Center into a public test of criminal accountability, medical judgment, and the state’s response to disaster. The case emerged from an evacuation crisis in which patients were classified for removal, families struggled to understand the consequences of DNR orders, and staff worked amid danger and unreliable information. After the arrests, supporters of Pou mounted a public defense, while prosecutors continued investigating what the nurses knew and what had happened to patients.

The crisis behind the case

Memorial’s evacuation decisions were made in conditions shaped by failing infrastructure, rising water, and fear. Radio reports repeatedly claimed that martial law had been declared, although it had not. Reports of looting and violence circulated alongside accounts of residents trapped by floodwater, including a family in Gentilly surrounded by about nine feet of water. At Memorial, people arriving by boat sought food and shelter, while hospital staff worried that the visible helicopter evacuations would draw more people to the facility.

Within the hospital, the distinction between a do-not-resuscitate order and an instruction to forgo rescue became consequential. Physicians had decided that DNR patients would be evacuated last, although a DNR order meant that a patient should not be revived after breathing or heartbeat stopped; it did not itself mean that the patient was terminal or should be left behind. When one patient’s daughter learned her mother was being deferred, she asked to cancel the order. Her response exposed the gap between consent to withhold resuscitation and consent to abandon a patient during evacuation.

The confusion was not confined to one floor. On LifeCare’s seventh floor, Angela McManus learned that her mother, Wilda, was also being deferred because of a DNR order and asked staff to rescind it, but no doctor was available. Meanwhile, Bryant King protested when a family with small children was turned away from Memorial. These episodes formed part of the larger circumstances in which the later allegations were interpreted, without themselves resolving what happened in the deaths under investigation.

Arrests and competing accounts

By February 2007, a new Orleans Parish special grand jury was expected to consider the Memorial deaths. Assistant District Attorney Michael Morales planned to use the jury as an investigative body, allowing jurors to help determine what evidence they wanted to examine rather than simply presenting them with a completed case and seeking an indictment. He described the matter as unusually complicated.

As public attention gathered around the grand jury, Pou’s supporters became more vocal. A national professional organization for head and neck cancer surgery criticized the decision to proceed, presenting Pou’s conduct as heroic and warning that prosecuting her could discourage health professionals from volunteering in future emergencies. Such advocacy strengthened Pou emotionally, but she later described feeling alone, abandoned, and betrayed in the days before the grand jury convened. An old friend took her to the Father Seelos Shrine and St. Mary’s Assumption Church, a place the friend described as one of healing.

Pou’s defense also challenged the conduct and motives of Attorney General Charles Foti. On the day before the first anniversary of Pou’s arrest, her lawyer, Rick Simmons, filed a sharply worded lawsuit seeking state payment of her legal fees in several civil cases brought by families of the dead, including the family of Emmett Everett. The filing argued that Louisiana had abandoned Pou and others during Katrina and was abandoning her again by denying a civil defense. It compared Foti’s public conduct to that of a North Carolina prosecutor who had been disbarred after trying a case in the media and misleading the public about evidence. The suit further alleged that Foti had used the arrests to advance his reelection prospects, attaching an invitation to a high-priced fundraiser held shortly after the arrests. These were allegations made by Pou’s side, not findings established by the lawsuit.

The nurses as witnesses

The week after a fundraiser for Pou, the district attorney subpoenaed Landry, Budo, and Memorial nurse manager Mary Jo D’Amico through their lawyers. The accompanying letter said the district attorney had decided not to prosecute the women, but required them to testify before the grand jury about what they knew concerning Pou. Their testimony and evidence derived from it would be protected from use against them in a criminal case, except if they lied or otherwise failed to comply.

The arrangement did not erase the nurses’ exposure to future prosecution. Their lawyers fought the subpoenas through the state supreme court, pointing out that murder had no statute of limitations and that cases could still be built from other evidence. They also cited the Danziger Bridge shootings, in which seven New Orleans police officers were accused of shooting unarmed civilians after the storm and then attempting to cover up what happened. Officers compelled to testify under similar immunity had nevertheless later been indicted by a special grand jury. The comparison expressed the lawyers’ concern about the risks of compelled testimony; it did not establish that the Memorial nurses would face the same outcome.

Public meaning and unresolved questions

The arrests and ensuing grand-jury struggle unfolded against arguments about preparedness as well as individual responsibility. Commentators questioned why plans had not been made for patients before a storm that was known to be coming. The contrast with Charity Hospital sharpened that question: despite flooding, loss of power and basic services, a delayed evacuation, and grave threats around the facility, staff there said they continued caring for patients in their rooms, and fewer than ten patients died. The contrast supplied another account of what medical workers endured and how institutions responded, rather than a simple answer to the Memorial allegations.

Pou’s supporters increasingly framed the case as a threat to doctors working in emergencies. At the same time, the prosecution’s effort to investigate the Memorial deaths, and the nurses’ resistance to compelled testimony, kept the focus on evidence and legal responsibility. The episode thus widened beyond the original allegations: it became a dispute over whether public advocacy could define the meaning of the deaths before a jury or judge had ruled, and over how far emergency conditions could shape the assessment of care.