Emmett Everett

Emmett Everett was a 61-year-old patient at LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans whose death during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation became one of the most consequential cases in the investigation of deaths at Memorial Medical Center. Paralyzed and weighing about 380 pounds, he was difficult to move, but witnesses described him as conscious, alert, and intent on surviving. For his wife, Carrie Everett, and for investigators who later examined the seventh-floor deaths, his case resisted any easy reduction to a question of medical prognosis: he had a family, plans to return home, and repeatedly expressed concern about being left behind.

Identity and Life Before the Storm

Everett was a Honduran-born laborer whose life changed when a sudden spinal-cord stroke left him paralyzed at about fifty. Carrie, a small woman, became his daily caregiver. She helped transfer him into his wheelchair so that he could sit in their yard, read the Bible, spend time with their dog, and play with his seven-year-old granddaughter, whom he called his eyes. The book presents these routines not as incidental biographical details but as evidence of a shared life continuing around his disability: family visits, the yard, a familiar pet, and the granddaughter riding on his knees.

His dependence on care did not mean that he had accepted a life apart from his family. Carrie had cared for him for years, and he did not want to be placed in a nursing home. When his condition required hospitalization, he was at LifeCare awaiting colostomy surgery intended to relieve chronic bowel obstruction. Carrie visited him every day. When LifeCare patients at the Chalmette campus were transferred to Memorial Medical Center, she was told to remain at home. Everett called to say that he had arrived safely and brought a photograph of his granddaughter with him. That reassuring call was the last communication Carrie received from him.

Trapped at Memorial

Carrie spent the storm trapped with her children and grandchildren in a house in New Orleans Ninth Ward as floodwaters rose. A boat pilot rescued her, and she eventually reached Houston. From there she tried to find out what had happened to Everett, but the people she contacted by telephone passed her from one person to another. She worried day after day without knowing where he was or whether he was safe. The separation was not simply a family misfortune: it left her unable to learn what was happening inside the hospital, reach her husband, or intervene on his behalf.

On the seventh floor, Everett’s size became a practical obstacle in evacuation discussions. LifeCare staff were concerned about how to move the nine patients remaining there, including him, and had little confidence they could manage the task alone. Two patients were reported to have temperatures of 104 and 105 degrees. When Anna Pou learned that Everett was conscious, Diane Robichaux recalled, the group considered whether people could carry him down the stairs and lift him through an opening to a helicopter. The staff concluded that this would not be possible. Pou then asked whether a staff member Everett trusted would be willing to sedate him. Robichaux brought in a strong nurse, Andre, but stopped the proposal and said he would not do it.

The evacuation problem did not erase Everett’s own account of his condition. On the morning of Thursday, September 1, 2005, Robichaux and Kristy Johnson went into his room, 7307, to see how he was doing and discuss how to get him out. He said he felt a little dizzy and might need oxygen. Later, as volunteers came to help carry LifeCare patients downstairs, he asked whether they were ready to go. Respiratory therapist Terence Stahelin said Everett called him into the room, shook his hand, and thanked him for what the staff had done. Stahelin said volunteers then decided not to carry Everett because of his weight. He later pointed out that a flat roof was next to the seventh floor and that a window might have been opened to move Everett across to the helicopter pad; the investigators did not establish that he had proposed this option at the time.

A Patient’s Wishes and the Evidence

Caregivers described Everett as still engaged with the people and events around him. On Thursday morning, Cindy Chatelain helped gather food for him. He ate breakfast, was alert and oriented, worried about Carrie, and asked whether three former roommates who had left were all right. He also voiced concern about his own fate and asked Chatelain not to let the staff leave him behind. She promised they would not. The account turns that promise into a measure of the distance between the care he expected and the eventual uncertainty surrounding his death.

Investigators later heard sharply consequential accounts of what happened on the floor. In Virginia Rider’s arrest-warrant affidavit, drawn chiefly from interviews with Diane Robichaux, Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris, LifeCare witnesses described being told that the patients were not expected to make it out and that they should speak with Pou. The affidavit said Pou told Mendez that the patients would receive a lethal dose and that LifeCare staff should leave. It also recorded that Pou was told one patient was conscious and weighed 380 pounds, that she asked for him to be sedated, and that LifeCare staff refused. Harris said he supplied morphine, Versed, and injection materials. These were allegations assembled in an investigative document, not a finding that resolved every dispute about intention or cause of death.

The medical and legal assessments nonetheless made Everett’s case stand apart. When forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht reviewed the deaths, he classified Everett and seven other seventh-floor patients as homicides; the remaining patient, Elaine Nelson, was marked undetermined. Michael Baden considered all nine deaths homicides. Coroner Frank Minyard, wrestling with the broader uncertainty of the Memorial cases, likewise considered Everett an unequivocal homicide and believed the drugs caused his death. He regarded some of the other patients as too ill for him to reach the same conclusion with confidence. His uncertainty about those cases did not extend in the same way to Everett, though he recognized that a defense might argue that Pou had been trying to sedate patients and misjudged the amount required for a very large man.

Family, Aftermath, and Significance

Carrie told Rider that her husband had wanted to live and gave investigators the only photograph she had of him. It showed Everett sitting in a cafeteria in front of a Coca-Cola machine, holding a fork and a plate of food, dressed in a tie and white shirt. The ordinary setting and clothing offered a counterweight to the case file’s emphasis on his paralysis and weight: the image showed a husband and father in a recognizable moment of daily life. Schafer began calling Everett the case’s poster child, a label that stuck because his situation made the human stakes of the allegations difficult to abstract.

Everett’s wife, son, and daughter joined a wrongful-death suit that named Anna Pou’s employer, Louisiana State University. The family’s filing stressed that he had been awake, alert, and oriented during the relevant period. On a CNN broadcast marking a Katrina anniversary, Carrie challenged the authority by which hospital staff had made decisions that, in her view, took his life from him. She wanted Pou to accept responsibility, but she also described the loss in domestic terms: she would rather have been bathing him, helping him dress, laughing, arguing, and caring for him than living without him. She believed that if she had not been trapped in the flooded Ninth Ward, her presence might have prevented what happened. That belief expressed the painful counterfactual of a caregiver cut off from the person she had cared for, not proof of what would have occurred.

Everett’s story also continued through the consequences for those who had cared for him in the hospital. Chatelain’s husband and daughter later attributed her escalating use of alcohol and prescription narcotics, the loss of her nursing license, and her death in her early fifties from acute pancreatitis to the distress she carried over Everett’s death. Her daughter recalled the depression that followed. The account does not make Chatelain’s later fate a substitute for Everett’s; it shows how the promise not to leave him behind became a lasting burden for a caregiver as well as a point of anguish for his family.

As an individual case, Everett’s death sharpened the distinction between a patient’s physical dependence and an assumption that his life no longer warranted rescue. His weight and paralysis complicated evacuation, but the evidence also records his awareness, his concern for his wife and former roommates, his readiness to leave, and his explicit wish not to be abandoned. That combination made his case a central test in the book’s account of Memorial: the argument over what happened to the patients could not be separated from the particular people whose choices, relationships, and hopes the crisis placed at risk.