August 29–September 1, 2005 (Memorial crisis)

August 29–September 1, 2005 (Memorial crisis) is the central period of the book’s account of Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina, but its narrative significance extends beyond the four days themselves. The crisis became the subject of a long investigation into patients’ deaths, and the book follows how witnesses, records, and forensic evidence were assembled into competing accounts. Its chronology is therefore both a record of events and an examination of how those events could be reconstructed afterward.

The Crisis and Its Aftermath

The book recounts what happened at Memorial Medical Center during and after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, including the later arrest of medical professionals accused of hastening patients’ deaths. Its scope reaches from the immediate emergency into the legal and public response: the author began researching in February 2007, after the crisis, and had previously published an account in 2009. The time span is thus defined not only by the storm and evacuation, but by the delay between the hospital events and the investigation that sought to explain them.

The narrative draws on more than five hundred interviews with hundreds of people, including doctors, nurses, hospital staff and executives, patients’ family members, government officials, attorneys, and researchers. The author was not present at the hospital. That distance matters to the account’s structure: the events are reconstructed through people with different vantage points, alongside materials produced during the disaster and its aftermath, rather than presented as a single witness’s continuous experience.

Records and the Reconstruction of Time

Contemporaneous documentation provides one way to anchor the chronology. The book’s account uses WWL Radio broadcasts from August 29 through September 1, 2005; the transcripts were prepared from digital audio furnished by the station. It also draws on photographs, videotapes, emails, notes, diaries, online postings, and other reporters’ and investigators’ interview transcripts. Weather reports, floor plans, electrical diagrams, and expert reports prepared during civil litigation supply further evidence about the conditions and setting in which events unfolded.

The distinction between records and later recollection is especially important because memories can fade or change. The book notes that some accounts of conversations were disputed, that some people declined to speak, and that dialogue in quotation marks came either from interview recollections or from transcripts and other primary sources. Where one person recounted an important conversation, the author generally sought to contact the other participants. The resulting narrative preserves significant disagreements rather than treating every remembered detail as settled fact.

Witnesses, Memory, and Investigation

The investigation itself encountered the problem of memory contamination. As allegations entered the media, investigators had to consider that news coverage might prompt memories but could also shape them. Research cited in the book describes recollections of alleged crimes as fallible and vulnerable to new information and discussions among witnesses. Several LifeCare witnesses had spoken after the evacuation and consulted on a written timeline of their experiences, circumstances that made careful, independent interviewing important.

Virginia Rider, Butch Schafer, and their colleagues responded by seeking further witnesses without leading them or suggesting what they should remember, while collecting as much physical and written evidence from the time as possible. The book describes the inquiry as initially stalled: early interviews had been unfocused, and the investigators had not yet been sure what information they needed. As more allegations became public, the task was not simply to gather testimony but to distinguish independent recollection from accounts that might have been influenced by shared discussion or media reports.

Evidence of the Hospital’s Final Hours

Some records and observations helped establish the sequence of deaths. After the evacuation, Memorial pathologist John Skinner and laboratory director David Heikamp walked through the hospital on a Thursday afternoon to confirm that everyone had left and record the names and locations of the dead. Earlier that week, Richard Deichmann and René Goux had asked Skinner to keep track of deaths. Skinner and Heikamp’s notes and recollections later became important evidence for determining when patients died.

Witness testimony supplied another part of that chronology. Kristy Johnson accompanied a Memorial nurse into LifeCare room 7305 and witnessed the nurse administer an injection to Rose Savoie. A LifeCare nurse later told investigators that Savoie and her roommate had been alert and stable late that morning; by afternoon, Savoie and the other nine remaining LifeCare patients were dead. Johnson’s account gave Rider and Schafer an eyewitness to the room’s events. A separate three-day meeting about the deaths drew on interviews, handwritten notes, forensic charts, toxicology reports for forty-one bodies, autopsy reports, and death certificates. Together, these forms of evidence show how the book moves from the compressed emergency of the four-day crisis to the slower, contested work of establishing what happened and when.