Karen Lagasse and Merle Lagasse

Karen Lagasse and her mother, Merle Lagasse, are joined in the account by an evacuation that separated them, a search that lasted ten frantic days, and questions that remained unanswered a year later. At Memorial Medical Center, Merle depended on oxygen; after Karen escaped by boat, she did not know whether her mother had received oxygen or pain medicine, how long she had suffered in the heat, or what had happened between their separation and her death. Karen’s efforts to find Merle and learn how she died became both an intimate family story and part of the broader legal reckoning over care and evacuation at Memorial Medical Center.

A Mother and Daughter Separated

The account of their separation emerges most concretely through Karen’s later lawsuit. According to its description, an unidentified health-care worker, named in the petition as “Jane Doe,” removed Merle’s oxygen mask before she was passed through a wall in a machine room. The petition says Merle yelled that she could not breathe. Karen and her mother both pleaded for the mask to be replaced, but the worker refused. These are allegations presented in a civil filing, not a settled account of every moment of Merle’s care; they nevertheless preserve the distress of a specific exchange at the point when the two women were being separated.

The separation continued beyond the hospital. Karen made it out of Memorial Medical Center by boat and ended up at the overcrowded New Orleans Convention Center. Afraid for her own safety, she slept outside on the street. There, someone told her that her mother had died at the hospital. Karen refused to believe the news. The contrast between the two women’s circumstances is stark: Merle was missing inside an evacuation crisis, while Karen, herself displaced and frightened, had no reliable way to establish where her mother was or what had happened to her.

Ten Days of Searching

Rather than accept the report, Karen recruited friends to call emergency rooms across Louisiana and Texas. Their search lasted ten days. It ended not with a reunion or an account of Merle’s last hours, but with a call from a Tenet Healthcare official, who told Karen that Merle was on a list of people thought to have died during the evacuation. The delayed confirmation converted the uncertainty of the search into bereavement without resolving its central questions: the list identified Merle as presumed dead, but did not explain what care she had received after Karen left.

Months later, Karen was allowed to return to the hospital garage and sift through debris for Merle’s personal effects. The objects she recovered were described as surviving artifacts of the life mother and daughter had shared in the Lakeview District, a neighborhood then lost to flooding. The search for belongings was therefore also a search through the remnants of their shared home and ordinary life. What could be recovered was limited to objects among the debris; the account does not describe them as providing answers about Merle’s treatment or death.

Burial and the Unfinished Account

Karen buried her mother on Valentine’s Day. The funeral home workers placed Merle in a metal coffin sealed with a rubber gasket intended to contain the odor of decomposition. Karen argued that they should remove the body bag before placing her mother in the coffin, but they refused. That refusal added another indignity to a process in which Karen had already been denied certainty about the circumstances of Merle’s death. She was also disturbed by the possibility that Merle had not become what her doctor, Ewing Cook, had morbidly imagined as a “beautiful corpse.” The phrase sharpens the distance between an abstract, clinical way of speaking about death and the daughter’s confrontation with her mother’s body and burial.

The burial marked a physical end, but it did not close Karen’s search for an account. A full year after the evacuation, she still had not been told what happened to Merle after they were separated. Investigators for the attorney general had interviewed Merle’s doctor, Roy Culotta, but that interview was not shared with Karen. She believed her mother had died because of Culotta’s negligence and the hospital’s failure to prepare adequately for a disaster. She continued to wonder how long Merle had suffered in the heat and whether she had received oxygen and pain medication. The evidence records these as Karen’s beliefs and unanswered questions, not as a definitive finding about the cause of death or the care Merle received.

The Lawsuit and Its Questions

Karen sued Culotta, Memorial Medical Center, its chief executive, René Goux, “Jane Doe,” and Richard Deichmann, director of the internal medicine department. Her lawyer had discovered that Deichmann had written and self-published a memoir, Code Blue: A Katrina Physician’s Memoir, which disclosed his central role in the evacuations. Deichmann was also Karen’s own internist; she was initially surprised to learn that her attorney had sued him in her name. That discovery placed a familiar physician within the institutional account Karen was trying to scrutinize, while the suit named both the alleged individual caregiver and people responsible for medical and hospital leadership.

The petition gave legal form to the family’s account of Merle’s distress, while the wider litigation concerned the hospital’s backup electrical system, evacuation plan, and patient care during the disaster. Karen’s case asked who had removed Merle’s oxygen and refused to replace it, but the information available to her did not answer what followed. The relationship at the center of the story is therefore rendered through both attachment and an evidentiary gap: Karen searched, recovered what belongings she could, buried her mother, and pursued accountability, yet remained without the interview that might have helped explain Merle’s final hours.

A Personal Loss in a Wider Crisis

The circumstances at Memorial Medical Center formed part of a broader pattern of disputed evacuation and care. Families of patients who died or were injured brought claims alleging inadequate preparation, failed evacuation policies, abandonment, and euthanasia. At the public Charity Hospital, by contrast, staff continued treating patients in their rooms under similarly grave or worse conditions, and fewer than ten patients died, despite the hospital’s flooding, loss of power and basic services, and delayed evacuation. That contrast does not establish what happened in Merle’s case; it situates Karen’s questions within a crisis in which different hospitals’ decisions and outcomes came under scrutiny.

For Karen and Merle, however, the larger controversy never displaced the particular sequence of loss: a mask removed, a plea refused according to the lawsuit, a boat ride away from the hospital, ten days of searching, debris sifted for personal effects, and a burial whose indignities remained vivid. The account gives no final explanation that resolves Karen’s doubts. Its ending is instead defined by the persistence of those questions and by the daughter’s attempt, through litigation, to make the circumstances of her mother’s death answerable.