John Kokemor

John Kokemor, an internal medicine specialist and former assistant to coroner Frank Minyard, emerges in the account of Memorial Medical Center’s evacuation as a doctor trying to turn a limited boat operation into as many departures as possible. His most consequential action was moving Horace Baltz and Baltz’s medically vulnerable sister to the head of the line. The gesture was remembered first as an effort to get them out; later, amid allegations that patients had been deliberately killed at the hospital, its meaning became contested.

Identity and Place in the Evacuation

Kokemor’s professional identity is given succinctly: he was an internal medicine specialist who had previously served as an assistant to Frank Minyard. During the crisis, however, the narrative shows him not through a description of his medical practice but through the choices he made at the crowded ambulance ramp. Boats were arriving, and a uniformed man’s call, “All women and children!” sent people streaming toward the ramp as though it might be their last chance to leave. In that pressured setting, Kokemor focused on getting people aboard quickly.

The urgency was not detached from his own fear. Like others in the hospital, he was concerned for his life. He kept a credit card in case he got out and a driver’s license so that others could identify him if he did not. Those practical objects convey how closely escape and the possibility of death sat together: one was for whatever came after survival, the other for identification if survival failed. His preparations do not make him an observer of the danger. They place him among those exposed to it.

The Boats and the Decision to Move Baltz

The evacuation ramp also became a point of conflict over who should be transported. CEO René Goux confronted the doctors about loading family members onto boats. The doctors’ answer was that they had gone to the drop-off point that morning and marshaled resources, including ambulances, in order to get patients out. Kokemor expressed the broader predicament directly: “Everybody’s a patient, including us.” The remark challenged a clean division between caregivers and those needing rescue. In the evacuation, staff members and patients alike faced danger, while every place on a boat remained consequential.

Kokemor feared that the boats would stop running at five thirty. Patients were slow to get onto the ramp, and if his expectation proved right, those still there would spend another night in the hospital. His immediate objective was therefore speed: get as many people on each boat as possible. Among those he singled out were two of Memorial’s oldest doctors, one of them Baltz. Kokemor also wanted Baltz’s older sister and her daughter, an intensive-care nurse, to leave. He judged that the sister and niece had medical problems and were not doing well, and told them, “I’ll move you to the front of the line,” before urging them to get out.

Baltz had not asked to leave, but accepted the offer. His colleagues Ewing Cook and Susan Mulderick hugged him tearfully and told him they loved him. Their unusual emotion made the departure feel unlike an ordinary goodbye. As two men in camouflage caps helped Baltz into the unstable boat, he held one man’s rifle while that man assisted other passengers. Baltz looked back at the hospital, convinced he was watching it die. Kokemor’s act had helped carry him away from the building, but it also placed him at the center of a decision that Baltz would later revisit under a very different interpretation.

Suspicion and Competing Interpretations

After the deaths at Memorial became a subject of controversy, Baltz reconsidered what he had heard and seen. He recalled an overheard conversation on the second floor on Thursday morning, September 1, in which a doctor said, “Our most difficult job will be to convince the nurses that what we ask them to do is all right.” When Baltz asked what the discussion concerned, he was told that some patients could not leave on their own and would need to be “helped.” He briefly wondered whether the doctor meant euthanasia, dismissed the thought as absurd, and left. The account does not establish Kokemor’s presence in this conversation or identify him as its speaker.

Baltz nevertheless believed Kokemor knew his opposition to euthanasia and associated him with what he called the “Governor Lamm philosophy.” Their relationship was already strained: they had practiced together briefly in the early 1980s and then separated, and each held the other in low regard. Against that history, Kokemor’s decision to place Baltz at the front of the boat line could be recast as an effort to get him out of the hospital before euthanasia could proceed. The action itself is documented; the alleged purpose is a later interpretation, not a fact established by the evacuation scene.

Kokemor rejected that interpretation, calling the claim a “fabrication” and describing it as a product of Baltz’s guilt over the death of a longtime patient. That patient, a seventy-eight-year-old woman with advanced Parkinson’s disease, had been admitted by Baltz for safety before the storm because she depended on electrical equipment. He had admitted her during hurricane threats throughout her eight-year illness and, at her request, had given her a Do Not Resuscitate order. Her sister and caregiver was separated from her at Memorial. The woman’s death surprised Baltz; because she could not speak for herself, he wondered whether she might have been euthanized and resolved to find out what had happened. This context explains why Kokemor’s evacuation decision became entangled with suspicion, but the available account does not show that Kokemor treated or caused the patient’s death.

The Meaning of a Practical Act

Kokemor’s place in this episode rests on a tension between the action’s immediate circumstances and the story later attached to it. At the ramp, he was trying to move people before the boats stopped, and he included Baltz and his relatives among those he thought should leave. The scene offers concrete evidence of his concern about survival: his preparations for identification, his calculation of the remaining evacuation time, and his effort to move people aboard. It also records the later distrust between him and Baltz, which made the same act open to sharply opposed readings.

That tension does not resolve the broader dispute about what happened to patients at Memorial. It does, however, mark a limit on what can be concluded about Kokemor from this episode. His choice to prioritize Baltz’s departure is clear; the claim that he did so to clear the way for euthanasia is presented as Baltz’s suspicion and is denied by Kokemor. The evacuation scene thus preserves both the practical urgency of the decision and the way a gesture made under emergency conditions could acquire a second, accusatory meaning afterward.