Eddie Jordan

Eddie Jordan was the Orleans Parish district attorney who inherited the prosecutorial decision in the case against Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo after their arrests over patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina. His significance lies in the divide between investigation and prosecution: the attorney general’s office had built a large case without involving his staff, but the decision whether to seek indictments ultimately belonged to Jordan’s office and a grand jury. He faced public pressure, political complications, and a record whose medical meaning remained disputed.

Office and political position

Jordan had been elected in 2003 as the first African American district attorney in Orleans Parish. The book describes him as already facing public and institutional controversy before the Memorial case reached its decisive prosecutorial stage. Dozens of white employees had been fired and replaced with Black employees after he took office, and he was fighting a federal judgment against him for racial discrimination. When the Memorial arrests brought the case into public view, he also received angry letters from people objecting to his association with it.

The district attorney’s office was operating under difficult post-storm conditions. Floodwaters had ravaged its building, and staff had moved into cramped quarters with stained carpets and folding tables serving as desks. The office was responsible for prosecuting homicides in a city with a high murder rate and a poor record of bringing perpetrators to justice. The Memorial case would consume much of the time of its lead prosecutor, Michael Morales, while placing Jordan in the middle of a matter that was both unusually prominent and far removed from an ordinary homicide investigation.

A case inherited, not developed

The attorney general’s office had investigated the Memorial deaths for about a year without seeking to involve Morales or the district attorney’s office. That separation reflected different institutional practices: investigators and prosecutors in the attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit worked as teams, whereas district attorneys typically entered a case investigated by police only when the investigative agency requested their participation. Jordan’s office had therefore not been part of the inquiry as it unfolded, even though Jordan was later the elected official whose office would determine whether to pursue murder indictments.

The investigation had accumulated extensive material. Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer had gathered roughly 50,000 pages of documentary evidence, and Rider was preparing the case summary requested by the district attorney’s office. The forensic record was substantial but not self-interpreting. Eighteen tissue samples from Memorial bodies were initially tested; the laboratory reported morphine in nine and midazolam in about five or six more. In a later review of 41 bodies from Memorial and LifeCare analyzed by Robert Middleberg’s laboratory, 23 tested positive for one or both drugs. Yet the bodies had remained in heat before sampling, and experts warned that postmortem tissue results could not be read as simply as blood tests from living patients. The review therefore required the drugs, the medical records, the patients’ conditions, and the circumstances of death to be considered together.

Morales first encountered the experts’ work when he and his superior, Craig Famularo, attended a meeting at the coroner’s office. Their brief, skeptical visit struck Rider and the forensic pathologists as unusually hostile; the prosecutors left after about half an hour. Jordan himself is not described as attending that meeting. The episode nevertheless marked the transition from an investigation led elsewhere to a prosecution his office was expected to evaluate, while exposing how little the two offices had collaborated before that point.

Political pressures and competing interests

Jordan’s position was difficult to separate from the interests surrounding the case. Tenet Healthcare had money invested in New Orleans politics. Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, and several Tenet lawyers, like Jordan, were former federal prosecutors. Meanwhile, Charles Foti, the attorney general who had overseen the arrests, had staked his reputation on the investigation. The book presents the officials’ incentives as sharply different: Foti needed to establish that the arrests were justified, while Jordan stood to benefit politically if the case simply went away.

The investigation also arrived in a city still living with the disorder and danger that followed Katrina. Morales understood why the deaths warranted investigation, but felt he was being asked to apply civilian law to what seemed to him like a war zone. He was also concerned by another case involving police shootings on Danziger Bridge and by the prospect that people who did harmful things in a crisis might not fit the pattern of an ordinary criminal defendant. These were Morales’s reservations, not a stated directive from Jordan. The book makes that distinction explicit: Jordan did not tell his prosecutor to make the Memorial case disappear.

The dispute over who would investigate

The immediate institutional conflict emerged after Rider and Schafer subpoenaed Dan Nuss, Pou’s outspoken supervisor, to learn what he knew. Morales believed that, as the case’s prosecutor, he should be the one signing subpoenas. He regarded the attorney general’s team’s move as an encroachment, especially after his own office had been excluded from the yearlong investigation. Rather than invite the investigators into a shared process, Morales drafted a letter for Jordan asking Foti’s office to stop investigating until the grand jury investigation was underway, arguing that continued parallel work would not benefit the case.

The order was a severe blow to Rider and Schafer. They wanted to pursue leads beyond the three arrested women, including possible responsibility among other doctors, nurses, and staff, and a possible corporate dimension. They also hoped the district attorney would grant immunity to some health workers who had offered potentially important testimony. Halting the attorney general’s investigation thus narrowed the investigators’ ability to follow those avenues at that stage. The book attributes the letter’s drafting and the procedural grievance to Morales; Jordan’s office issued the request, but the evidence does not describe Jordan personally directing the details of the investigative dispute.

The decision left to the district attorney

At the announcement of the arrests, Foti emphasized that the accusations were allegations and that the women were presumed innocent. He explained that the next decision belonged to Jordan and, if Jordan pursued murder indictments, to a grand jury. The distinction mattered: the arrests did not constitute formal charges, and Foti did not control the eventual decision to prosecute.

Simmons quickly sought access to Jordan. He said the district attorney had agreed to meet with him so he could present evidence and try to dissuade Jordan from taking action. Simmons argued publicly that the arrest affidavit contained allegations rather than proof and that no homicide had occurred. Those statements represented the defense position, not a finding by Jordan or the grand jury. The account leaves Jordan at the point where investigative claims, medical uncertainty, legal responsibility, and public controversy converged; it does not portray him as having resolved those competing questions when the prosecution decision came before his office.