Cheri Landry

Cheri Landry was a longtime intensive-care nurse at Memorial Medical Center whose responsibilities during Hurricane Katrina ranged from warning colleagues about immediate danger to helping coordinate the evacuation of patients. The crisis also placed her at the center of a criminal investigation: prosecutors alleged that she participated in injecting LifeCare patients with lethal amounts of medication. Her story therefore joins the practical work of nursing under catastrophic conditions to the unresolved questions of responsibility, evidence, and professional survival that followed the disaster.

Nurse and colleague

Landry had worked at Memorial for years and was a familiar presence on the night shift. Colleagues regarded her as an experienced ICU nurse; the narrative describes her as short and stout, with hooded eyes and an air of wisdom. In the hospital’s informal imagining of a television movie about the evacuation, she was cast as a tough, memorable figure. That affectionate image of a colleague who knew the work and its people would later sit beside the very different public identity imposed by her arrest.

Her professional life was embedded in a close-knit hospital community. Many nurses had grown up together there as professionals, and their relationships were tested when the storm turned the hospital into a place of danger and exhausting labor. Landry’s role was not confined to one unit or one task: she relayed urgent information, helped colleagues make decisions about evacuation, and remained among the staff members who continued working as conditions worsened.

Warning, evacuation, and care

When maintenance workers reported that windows were breaking, nurse manager Susan Mulderick called Landry, who was staying in the new surgery building across Magnolia Street with Anna Pou and others. Mulderick warned her to get the group out before the connecting bridge gave way or its windows shattered. Staff and family members then had to cross the exposed, swaying walkway. The warning made Landry a link between the hospital’s maintenance staff, its command structure, and the colleagues facing immediate danger in the separate building.

During the ICU evacuation, Landry was entrusted with the radio on the eighth floor. Helicopters were waiting at the helipad, but moving each patient took about forty-five minutes, and the staff were told that rescue aircraft were being lost and they needed to move faster. Landry passed that message to her colleagues. As the single elevator became an inadequate route, staff and relatives carried some patients down the stairwells on blankets, while others continued to work with the elevator. Her radio role connected the pressure outside the unit with the difficult, physical work of getting patients out.

Landry also helped protect a colleague’s family during the airboat evacuations. One pregnant ICU nurse, less than a month from her due date and already having contractions, resisted boarding without her grandmother. Landry and Karen Wynn agreed to care for the grandmother and an elderly aunt, allowing the pregnant nurse to leave. The decision placed the nurse’s and unborn child’s safety ahead of keeping the family together in the evacuation boat, while making clear that the older relatives would not simply be abandoned. In a crisis defined by limited space and uncertain transport, Landry’s part was to take responsibility for people who could not travel with the colleague she helped send to safety.

Medication allegations and investigation

The evidence surrounding Landry’s later prosecution began with the seventh-floor LifeCare unit. Pharmacist Steven Harris recognized her, along with Pou and another nurse, in the physical therapy charting room on September 1. Prosecutors’ account, based on witness interviews and later toxicology findings, alleged that Pou and nurses had gone to LifeCare patient rooms and administered medication. The four patients named in the arrest affidavit had morphine and midazolam in their bodies; the pathologist Cyril Wecht concluded that each had received a lethal amount. Those findings supported warrants alleging that Pou, Landry, and Lori Budo had intentionally killed the patients. The charges were allegations, not a verdict.

The affidavit described witness accounts of confusion over whether LifeCare patients would be evacuated and what Memorial staff intended to do. It reported that Landry and Budo were among the Memorial nurses who accompanied Pou to the seventh floor. A witness said that a nurse later identified as Budo injected Rose Savoie. The affidavit also described medication supplied by Harris and patients whose conditions and prospects were disputed. These accounts formed part of the prosecution’s case; they did not erase the distinction between what witnesses reported, what investigators inferred, and what a court had established.

Landry was arrested at work at a local hospital. She and Budo had been only weeks away from starting jobs again at Memorial’s surgical institute, which was preparing to reopen. Tenet told them their services would no longer be needed, although it continued to cover their legal expenses. The arrests unsettled colleagues who had worked with them and feared that more people in their professional community might be targeted. Tenet publicly disclaimed responsibility for the alleged acts, saying that the named doctor and nurses had made the decisions without the hospital’s or senior physician leaders’ knowledge or approval.

Testimony and the case against her

The district attorney later decided not to prosecute Landry, Budo, and Memorial nurse manager Mary Jo D’Amico, but compelled them to testify before the grand jury investigating Pou. Their testimony and evidence derived from it were protected from use against them, subject to the conditions of the immunity order. The nurses’ lawyers challenged the subpoenas through the state supreme court, arguing that testimony compelled under immunity did not eliminate the possibility of future prosecution based on other evidence.

According to a letter describing the proceedings, Landry testified that she had injected as many as four LifeCare patients on the seventh floor and two patients on the second floor. She said she did not know the seventh-floor patients’ medical conditions or medications, believed they were all going to die, and assumed those she injected had do-not-resuscitate orders. She also described some as appearing to have the gasping pattern associated with dying. The account presents her testimony as her understanding of the patients at the time, not as proof that the patients’ orders, conditions, or treatment decisions had been correctly established. Landry left the testimony with the impression that the jurors had treated her kindly and might be sympathetic to her.

Loss, support, and professional uncertainty

The crisis and the legal case imposed costs beyond the threat of prosecution. Landry had lost nearly all her possessions to Katrina’s floodwaters, and her damaged house eventually had to be demolished. She was also the primary caregiver for her ailing mother. Unlike Pou, she had no university position to fall back on while unable to practice clinically. The nurses’ professional exclusion left Landry questioning whether she and Budo would ever be able to work as nurses again.

Their coworkers organized a support fund, solicited letters and encouragement, and raised money through items such as bracelets and car magnets. When Landry’s house was demolished, Budo retrieved a few belongings from the muck, took them home, and washed and sterilized them for her friend. The small collection could not restore a lifetime’s possessions, but the act gave their friendship a concrete form. Colleagues also arranged food and other help, and the fund provided the two nurses with a monthly allowance for bills, food, and clothing. Landry found accepting that assistance humbling and strange: the ordinary independence of paid work had been replaced by reliance on a network of supporters.

The district attorney’s decision not to prosecute Landry did not end her involvement in the case: she was still compelled to testify about Pou, while the immunity order and the possibility of later prosecution remained concerns for her lawyers. In the evidence presented here, Landry’s arc ends in that unresolved position. She appears first as a trusted ICU colleague helping others navigate a failing evacuation, then as an accused nurse whose account of her actions was tested through investigation and grand-jury testimony. The contrast does not settle the moral or legal dispute. It shows how the same disaster that demanded rapid decisions and mutual care continued to shape her life through lost work, a destroyed home, and uncertainty about whether she could return to nursing.