Diane Robichaux

Diane Robichaux, LifeCare’s assistant administrator and incident commander in New Orleans, was seven months pregnant when she tried to manage evacuations during Hurricane Katrina. At Memorial Medical Center, she worked amid failing communications, uncertain access to transport, and changing assumptions about which patients were included in evacuation plans. Her experience later became important to the investigation of what happened to LifeCare patients on the seventh floor, particularly because she witnessed discussions about the patients, the staff, and the possibility of sedation.

Identity and Assignment

Robichaux took on the incident-command role for LifeCare’s New Orleans hospitals so that the senior administrator could leave the city before the storm with his family, including a child with special needs. She was responsible for patients at Memorial Medical Center and at another LifeCare campus near the New Orleans airport. During the crisis, she had backup power but limited telephone and Internet access, making coordination across the hospitals and with the company’s Shreveport colleagues difficult.

The evacuation problem was part of a wider breakdown in transportation. Many New Orleans residents could not leave independently, the city’s plans to transport them had serious gaps, and traffic blocked ambulances as well as private vehicles. Acadian paramedics at Memorial were ready to help, but Robichaux initially understood that LifeCare was awaiting direction from corporate officials. An on-site paramedic was surprised by that delay, believing Acadian had a transport contract with LifeCare and could assist directly.

Trying to Secure Transport

In the late morning, Robichaux went to Memorial’s incident command leaders with a list of LifeCare’s most critical patients and explained that LifeCare was trying to move its own patients. Memorial leaders told her that its helipad was operating and that LifeCare could use it. She relayed that information through a chat connection to Robbye Dubois, LifeCare’s senior vice president for clinical services, in Shreveport.

Robichaux sent Dubois a count of 53 LifeCare patients still needing evacuation from Memorial; two of the original 55 had died. Seven patients depended on ventilators, one used an assisted-breathing device, and five needed dialysis. The count exposed a consequential coordination failure: Memorial’s evacuation request to a Coast Guard coordinator in Alexandria, Louisiana, covered about 200 people, slightly more than Memorial’s own patient total, but LifeCare’s patients had not been included. Robichaux alerted colleagues in Shreveport to the omission after the apparent offer of space on the airlift was withdrawn.

She continued to seek clarification about who could be evacuated and by which agency. Around five in the afternoon, she told the LifeCare New Orleans administrator, who had left with his family, that Tenet Healthcare’s patients were being lined up for evacuation, a discouraging contrast for LifeCare’s staff. Using a pharmacy computer on the seventh floor, she pressed Shreveport for specifics about whether FEMA had actually said the Coast Guard airlift could include LifeCare. After another trip to Memorial’s command center, she understood that Memorial was using the Coast Guard, rather than FEMA, to take its patients to Baton Rouge en route to other Tenet facilities. She then urged that Memorial take at least some of LifeCare’s most critical patients if possible.

Corporate approval and ground transport remained uncertain. Robbye Dubois told a LifeCare colleague that she was waiting for approval to dispatch ambulances, a process expected to take hours. After speaking with a Tenet representative past nine that evening, Dubois reported that water levels might prevent trucks from reaching the hospital until morning. The plan was for ambulances to wait at a staging area, with critical patients leaving first and LifeCare being notified when the first patient departed. Robichaux was therefore managing a plan whose timing and practical access remained unsettled.

When the elevators stopped working, Robichaux told Memorial incident commander Susan Mulderick that LifeCare would need additional people to carry its most critical patients downstairs safely. Mulderick said the men she could provide had gone to bed, and Robichaux agreed to wait until daybreak. The delay would also give LifeCare time to send ambulances to transfer patients to its other hospitals. The arrangement offered a smoother handoff amid crowded regional hospitals, while also keeping LifeCare patients within the company’s own system.

Changing Plans and the Airboat Proposal

The following evacuation efforts included a proposal from Mark and Sandra LeBlanc, who told Robichaux they had brought airboats to Memorial and planned to find more. They explained where patients could be dropped off, and Sandra pointed out that ambulances would be needed at the landing site. Robichaux contacted LifeCare’s corporate representative in Shreveport to ask whether ambulances already headed to the previously discussed staging area could instead be diverted to a boat location near Ochsner Medical Center. Her colleagues said they would try, and would also attempt to locate ventilator patients who had left earlier and arrange transfers to other LifeCare hospitals.

The shifting plans did not resolve the staff’s uncertainty. When Gina Isbell, frantic and searching for Robichaux, asked what was happening, Robichaux told her that Memorial staff had arrived and were taking over the care of LifeCare’s patients. She was in tears as she explained that she believed the patients would not be evacuated. Her account conveys a stark gap between the earlier expectation of ambulances and the sense, on the floor, that no departure was coming.

The Seventh-Floor Discussions

On the morning of Thursday, September 1, Robichaux went with colleagues to speak with Mulderick. In her later account, Mulderick said the plan was not to leave living patients behind. When Robichaux returned to LifeCare’s seventh floor, she found Anna Pou, who told her she had already spoken with LifeCare’s nurse leader and was arranging to meet with nurses. Robichaux recalled Pou saying that the patients would not survive, though she later qualified her recollection of the exact words. Pou asked whether Robichaux wanted LifeCare staff to remain on the unit. Robichaux said she did not.

Robichaux raised the case of Emmett Everett, a 61-year-old patient who was conscious, paralyzed, and weighed 380 pounds. Pou said she had not known that any of the patients were conscious. With two Memorial nurses present, the group considered whether Everett could physically be carried down the stairs and lifted through an opening to reach a helicopter. When the possibility of asking a LifeCare staff member to sedate him arose, Robichaux identified a strong nurse named Andre, then stopped the suggestion and said he would not do it. She gathered her staff and left the floor. Before they went downstairs, Pou told her that LifeCare staff should not feel responsible and that Pou would take responsibility, including for concerns about their professional licenses.

A separate recollection by Robichaux and physical medicine director Kristy Johnson gives a more immediate view of Everett that morning. They went to Room 7307 to check on him as they tried to work out how he could be removed from the hospital. Everett said he felt dizzy and might need oxygen; Robichaux told him that he was already receiving oxygen and that a window had been opened. They spoke about the noise outside. Everett then asked whether they were ready to leave, and Robichaux replied that they were working on it. The exchange records his expectation of evacuation at the same time that staff were struggling to determine whether carrying him out was possible.

Investigation and Aftermath

Robichaux later recounted the crisis to investigators while participating by phone with two LifeCare attorneys. Her account included the staff’s overnight attempts to keep patients alive in the heat, using rubbing alcohol and gravity-fed intravenous fluids to cool them. She also described the seventh-floor conversations and the statement she attributed to Mulderick about not leaving living patients behind. Investigators’ later summaries drew on her account alongside those of Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris; those accounts formed a central part of Virginia Rider’s affidavit describing the alleged events. The affidavit presented allegations, not a final determination of what had occurred.

The records also preserve uncertainty about the timing of an earlier discussion of a possible Coast Guard evacuation. Mulderick recalled LifeCare staff approaching her at about 1:30 a.m., before the power failed, when assembling people to move patients had become difficult. Robichaux’s recollection, reflected in a LifeCare timeline prepared after the disaster, placed the conversation closer to 11:30 p.m. The discrepancy illustrates the limits of reconstructing a night when communications within the hospital were difficult and staff had dispersed.

After the evacuation, Robichaux stayed overnight at Dubois’s home. The next morning, the two cried as Robichaux described what had happened; this was how LifeCare’s corporate officials learned of the events. Robichaux and other senior leaders were called to the company’s headquarters in Plano, Texas, where they received support and counseling over the weekend. After Labor Day, LifeCare’s lawyers decided to report the potentially criminal events to government officials and offer cooperation, believing that prompt disclosure was the corporation’s best protection against charges.

Robichaux was also present in Plano when Memorial pathologist John Skinner called with names of patients he had documented as dead before leaving the hospital. The names included all nine seventh-floor patients and other patients LifeCare staff had not known had died. Robichaux passed a colleague a written question asking whether Skinner knew the causes of death. He did not. Her question captures the uncertainty that followed the emergency: even after the patients’ deaths had been reported, their causes remained unknown to the witness seeking clarification. By the time investigators spoke with her again, Robichaux had had her baby; her role had shifted from an overwhelmed incident commander trying to arrange transport to a key witness whose recollections helped define the disputed record.