John Skinner

John Skinner was a pathologist at Memorial Medical Center whose work during the hospital’s Hurricane Katrina crisis later made him an important source of evidence. On the Thursday the hospital was being cleared, he and laboratory director David Heikamp walked through the building to check that everyone had left and record the dead and their locations. Their observations, made at the time, helped investigators reconstruct the timing of deaths. Skinner’s later account of encountering living patients on LifeCare’s seventh floor also placed him near the center of an unresolved conflict over what staff had seen and done there.

Pathologist and Recorder of Deaths

Earlier in the week, Memorial’s medical chairman, Richard Deichmann, and chief executive René Goux had asked Skinner to keep track of deaths. On Thursday afternoon, he and Heikamp made their way through the hospital, noting the names and locations of those who had died. The resulting notes and the men’s recollections acquired significance later, when investigators and medical experts tried to establish which patients had been alive at particular times and how the sequence of events unfolded.

This record-making role mattered because the hospital was not empty when the evacuation was nearly complete. On LifeCare’s seventh floor, patients remained after many of their colleagues had left. The names, locations, and apparent condition of people encountered there could bear on whether they had been alive and potentially eligible for rescue. Skinner’s observations therefore became more than a pathologist’s final accounting: they were part of the factual basis for reconstructing what happened in a setting where witnesses’ memories and accounts did not always agree.

Encounters on LifeCare’s Seventh Floor

Skinner and Heikamp encountered Anna Pou and nurse manager Mary Jo D’Amico beside a woman lying on a bed in the hallway near a nurses’ station. The woman was unconscious and breathing intermittently with difficulty. Heikamp was upset by the sound, which reminded him of his mother’s breathing before her death. Skinner explained that the breathing was agonal and reassured him that a patient in that condition had very little brain function and would not experience pain.

Skinner watched Pou try to make the woman’s intravenous line work, adjusting its valve and catheter. When that failed, Pou attempted to inject medicine into the woman’s thigh with a syringe. Skinner asked to speak with Pou privately. He later recalled telling her that he believed the patient was still alive, that she should be evacuated, and that he wanted to find help to carry her. Heikamp recalled Pou asking whether someone could go to the helipad and tell the doctor in charge that another patient needed evacuation; he left to do so.

Skinner then went with Pou into a patient room, where she tried to restore another woman’s intravenous line and asked whether Skinner thought the patient was alive. He judged that she was, though barely. In the room, he noticed a cardboard box containing what appeared to be syringes, gloves, tubing, and unopened medicine vials. He picked up a vial and identified it as morphine. The observation established the presence of the drug and supplies in the room; by itself, it did not establish who had administered any particular medicine or when.

Pou said she wanted to speak with a particular anesthesiologist before moving the woman from the hallway. Skinner went downstairs with her, but they found John Walsh, the chairman of surgical services, instead. Walsh later recalled that Pou sat beside him on a bench with her head in her hands and appeared upset. She said something about one or more patients dying and people questioning her. This encounter placed Skinner close to Pou at a moment when her actions were already becoming a source of concern, without resolving what had happened to the patients.

Conflicting Accounts and Investigative Uncertainty

Another account of the seventh floor came from LifeCare nurse Cindy Chatelain. She described a tall, thin, light-haired doctor who, she said, had visited while she was caring for the remaining nine patients. According to her recollection, the doctor said the situation was grave, that the patients would not make it, and that the course of nature would have to be hastened. Chatelain said she had corrected him when he described the patients as having do-not-resuscitate orders: she believed at least one did not have such an order, but was extremely obese. The doctor reportedly responded that the helicopters could not carry a patient of that weight, a claim that was not generally true, although some air-ambulance stretchers had weight limits.

Skinner fit Chatelain’s physical description, and he chaired Memorial’s infection-control committee. But the identification was uncertain. Chatelain said the doctor had introduced himself as Dr. Skinner with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Skinner later said that he was not the person she meant. He did not recall speaking with a LifeCare nurse on the seventh floor and denied that the reported language sounded like anything he would have said. Investigators also learned that Chatelain had been placed on probation by the nursing board shortly before the storm. These facts complicated the account but did not, on their own, establish what conversation had taken place or who had been present.

The investigation had to reckon with the possibility that media coverage and discussions among witnesses could alter recollections. Several LifeCare witnesses had consulted on a written timeline after the evacuation, and researchers had warned that memories of alleged crimes could be contaminated by later information. Investigators therefore needed more interviews, conducted without suggesting answers, along with contemporaneous physical and written records. Skinner’s testimony was one part of that larger effort, not a final resolution of the discrepancies.

Significance in the Record of the Crisis

The evidence associated with Skinner holds together two roles that do not settle neatly into a single judgment. He recorded deaths and later described trying to get help for a patient he believed was still alive; he also observed Pou attempting to work an IV and then use a syringe, and found morphine among supplies in a patient room. Those observations are specific, but their limits matter: the account does not identify the medication Pou attempted to inject into the hallway patient, and the presence of morphine in the room does not by itself prove its use on either woman.

Skinner’s place in the story is consequently both practical and evidentiary. His rounds and records helped preserve a chronology from a hospital where rescue options, patient classifications, and reports of death were contested. At the same time, the disputed identification by Chatelain shows how a witness could be made central to an allegation without the underlying encounter being securely established. The book presents his account alongside other testimony and the problems of memory rather than treating either his recollection or the accusation as a complete explanation.