Memorial Medical Center and LifeCare

Memorial Medical Center and LifeCare Hospitals were distinct care operations within the same hospital complex, a physical arrangement that became consequential during Hurricane Katrina. LifeCare’s patients and staff depended on evacuation decisions made amid Memorial’s wider crisis, while the shared building later joined the two institutions in a criminal investigation into patient deaths. Their connection was not merely geographical: it shaped who could reach patients, which drugs were available, what witnesses observed, and how evidence was interpreted.

Shared Site and Unequal Histories

LifeCare operated a patient unit on Memorial’s seventh floor, with its own patients, staff, pharmacy, and leadership. The arrangement placed separate care operations inside a common building, where corridors, rooms, and clinical spaces became points of contact during the emergency and, later, locations investigators revisited. Memorial’s older institutional history also carried its own significance. The hospital opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, and was among the last Southern hospitals to integrate. Jannie Burgess, a Black licensed practical nurse who had worked for decades in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes, could care for patients at private hospitals but could not receive care at Baptist for more than four decades after its opening. That history did not define the later LifeCare relationship, but it underscores that the shared site had not always offered equal access to care.

The connection between the organizations became most immediate during the evacuation. Memorial physicians established an exception to the usual prioritization of the sickest patients and those dependent on machines: patients with do-not-resuscitate orders would go last. Four such patients were in Memorial’s intensive care unit, including Jannie Burgess and Helen Breckenridge. A do-not-resuscitate order meant that a patient whose breathing or heartbeat stopped should not be revived; it was not a request to forgo rescue. Yet the evacuation rule made the distinction consequential across the hospital’s care environment, including LifeCare’s seventh-floor unit.

Evacuation Decisions and Patient Advocacy

The effects of that distinction appeared differently on different floors. At Memorial, transporters stopped moving a bed-bound patient after seeing her DNR order and maneuvered other patients around her. Staff were instructed not to tell her daughter that the order was the reason. When a worker later told the remaining staff to leave the floor, the nurses refused to abandon the woman. They explained to her daughter that she could ask for the order to be discontinued; she did so, making clear that her consent to DNR status had not meant consenting to leave her mother behind. After a doctor removed the order, the patient was moved toward the helipad and survived that immediate ordeal.

On LifeCare’s seventh floor, Angela McManus learned that her mother, Wilda, would also be deferred because she had a DNR order. She pleaded to rescind it, but LifeCare staff told her no doctor was available to do so. The contrast exposes the practical interdependence of the two operations: the evacuation priority affected LifeCare patients, but a family’s ability to change a patient’s order depended on access to a clinician at a moment when the building’s normal systems were failing. The shared institution could therefore impose a common consequence without ensuring that every patient or family had equal means to respond.

The limits of the hospital’s role as a shelter were also visible outside its patient units. A family with young children arrived by boat and was turned away. Bryant King objected to Memorial chief executive L. René Goux, urging the hospital to help them, while Karen Wynn believed the hospital had reached its capacity. The people refused were nearly all African American, as was Wynn; King was offended by the racial pattern but did not make race the stated basis of his appeal. The episode places the Memorial–LifeCare relationship within a wider emergency in which the hospital was both an evacuation site and a resource-constrained institution, while people outside its care remained exposed.

The Seventh Floor and the Medication Evidence

The seventh floor later became the most important point of contact between the institutions in the inquiry into patient deaths. LifeCare pharmacist Steven Harris reported that the pharmacy had lost its entire supply of morphine—125 vials of 10 milligrams each—as well as dozens of injectable Versed and Ativan vials. Other controlled drugs remained, a pattern investigators regarded as selective removal rather than an ordinary burglary. During a later tour of the closed hospital, Harris identified Anna Pou and two Memorial nurses, Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, as people he had seen in LifeCare’s physical-therapy charting room on September 1.

The physical spaces preserved fragments of the work performed there. Pou revisited Room 7312, where she had responded to a Code Blue, and the nursing station, where a laryngoscope and other equipment remained. The crash cart, ventilator, and monitor in the room were evidence of an attempted resuscitation, a detail relevant to the contested interpretation of what happened on the floor. The same building held both records of efforts to save patients and the locations associated with alleged injections.

In later interviews, LifeCare nurse Kristy Johnson supplied further testimony. She said she had seen Pou draw fluid from vials into syringes, had seen Pou and Memorial nurses carrying syringes, and had escorted them to patients’ bedsides. Johnson described being present for some injections and holding patients’ hands or praying with them. At Wilda McManus’s bedside, Johnson said, Pou told the patient she would give her something to make her feel better. In another room, Johnson saw a Memorial nurse inject Rose Savoie; Savoie said that it burned, and Johnson noticed swelling in her arm. By that afternoon Savoie and the other remaining LifeCare patients were dead. These accounts became eyewitness evidence, but they were testimony about particular actions, not by themselves a complete resolution of intention or cause of death.

Investigation, Toxicology, and Disputed Conclusions

The investigation depended on evidence gathered across both institutions. Because the bodies had decomposed in heat for more than a week, Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard initially doubted that autopsies could establish whether lethal drugs had been administered. A pathologist advised that drugs might remain detectable in liver, brain, muscle, or abdominal fluid. Investigators then sent tissue samples from eighteen Memorial bodies to National Medical Services, Inc. In an early report, the laboratory found morphine in nine cases and midazolam in roughly five or six others. Later, testing of forty-one bodies from Memorial and LifeCare found morphine, midazolam, or both in twenty-three.

Those results did not settle how much medication had been given, when it had been administered, or whether it caused a particular death. Postmortem tissue testing differed from testing blood in a living patient, and prolonged heat could affect drug concentrations. The experts therefore compared laboratory findings with clinical records, including illness, kidney or liver problems, respiratory support, medication orders, and the recorded timing of death. For Alice Hutzler, a ninety-year-old LifeCare patient, the drugs were found in liver, brain, and muscle tissue even though her chart showed no prescription for them; the record described her as resting comfortably the previous afternoon and contained no documented distress that night. Such details prompted investigation, but the broader evidentiary problem remained: detection, dose, physiological effect, and criminal intent were separate questions.

The experts disagreed sharply. Steven Karch argued that drug levels in bodies exposed to extreme heat could not reliably establish the amount present before death and advised leaving causes undetermined. Michael Baden emphasized that morphine and Versed were present shortly before death and said there was no competing cause of death. Cyril Wecht considered some levels exceptionally high and conducted a small, unpublished experiment comparing samples exposed to hot, humid conditions with refrigerated samples; he found no significant difference. The dispute mattered to both organizations because the patients and samples came from their shared hospital setting, while the conclusions could not simply be transferred from a positive test to proof of a specific dose or intent.

Institutional Entanglement and Aftermath

The arrest affidavit joined evidence from LifeCare witnesses, Memorial personnel, pharmacy records, and toxicology. It alleged that Susan Mulderick had said LifeCare patients were not expected to make it out and that LifeCare leaders needed to speak with Pou. It further alleged that Pou told LifeCare staff patients would receive lethal doses and that Harris supplied morphine, Versed, and injection materials. The affidavit cited Johnson’s account of a nurse injecting Savoie and toxicology findings for four patients, including Emmett Everett, Savoie, Ireatha Watson, and Hollis Alford. A judge signed warrants alleging second-degree murder. These were allegations supporting charges, not a final judicial determination of guilt.

The investigation also made the shared site a contested record. Investigators and Harris inspected the LifeCare pharmacy; Pou later toured Memorial with her lawyer and Landry and Budo, identifying rooms connected to her recollection of the crisis. The same rooms and equipment could be presented as evidence of treatment efforts or examined alongside witnesses’ accounts of medication use. The institutional relationship thus remained unresolved in the evidence itself: Memorial and LifeCare shared patients’ paths, supplies, and physical space, but the surviving records and recollections assigned actions to particular staff and left their meaning disputed.

After the storm, staff at public Charity Hospital described continuing care for patients despite severe failures and transferring all patients only on September 2; fewer than ten patients died there. The comparison does not make Charity and the Memorial–LifeCare complex interchangeable, but it shows why the conditions of the emergency alone could not explain every institutional decision. Within the shared Memorial and LifeCare setting, evacuation rules, access to doctors, drug supplies, and the boundaries between the two operations shaped both the patients’ immediate prospects and the later inquiry into their deaths.