National Medical Services, Inc.

National Medical Services, Inc. was the forensic toxicology laboratory asked to analyze tissue from people whose bodies were recovered at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina. Its work supplied investigators with concrete evidence of drug exposure, but the results did not by themselves settle how much medication had been given or what caused each person’s death. The distinction between detecting a drug and proving a particular mechanism of death became central to the investigation.

Role in the Investigation

Initially, the condition of the remains appeared to make toxicological testing difficult. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard told Special Agent Virginia Rider that the bodies had decomposed in the heat for more than a week and that, for example, blood could not be sampled to check for lethal drug levels. Investigators nevertheless pursued tissue analysis, a different route to evidence.

On September 22, state and federal investigators brought tissue samples from eighteen bodies to National Medical Services, Inc., in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The laboratory’s assignment was specific: test the material for drugs relevant to the investigation into deaths at the hospital. The samples’ origin and the number of cases made the laboratory findings a substantial evidentiary strand, though not a complete account of the circumstances of any individual death.

Testing and Preliminary Findings

Laboratory technicians extracted the samples into small, metal-capped containers and processed them using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. On October 6, the laboratory’s head, Robert Middleberg, called the attorney general’s office with preliminary results. Virginia Rider placed the call on speakerphone so prosecutor Butch Schafer and another special agent could hear the findings directly.

Middleberg reported that nine of the eighteen cases tested positive for morphine. He said that about five or six additional cases were positive for Midazolam. These were preliminary findings about substances detected in the submitted tissue. The reported figures did not specify whether the groups overlapped, and they did not establish a dose or, on their own, show that a drug caused a particular death.

Limits and Interpretation

The results required interpretation in light of the patients’ clinical histories and the condition of the postmortem tissue. Middleberg cautioned colleagues that concentrations in tissue could have changed because the bodies had remained in the heat before sampling; interpreting such results was therefore less straightforward than interpreting blood tests from living patients. Investigators began reviewing the available medical records case by case rather than treating a laboratory number as a self-sufficient conclusion.

Experts also disagreed about what the findings could prove. Coroner Frank Minyard consulted another expert, Steven B. Karch, and placed considerable weight on Karch’s opinion, which was also shared by a toxicologist retained by Anna Pou’s attorney. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden argued that uncertainty about the precise dose did not remove the significance of the detected drugs: he told Minyard that the patients had received Versed and morphine shortly before death and that there was no competing cause of death. That was Baden’s interpretation of the evidence, not a conclusion established by the preliminary laboratory results alone.

Evidentiary Significance

The laboratory’s contribution was consequential but bounded. Its analyses gave investigators measurable evidence that morphine and Midazolam were present in some of the tested remains, strengthening the factual basis for examining medication use at Memorial Medical Center. At the same time, the postmortem condition of the tissue, uncertainty about concentrations, and the need to consult medical records left further questions for expert and investigative judgment.

National Medical Services, Inc. thus served as a point where physical evidence entered a broader dispute over causation and responsibility. The testing could identify drugs in the samples; deciding what those detections meant for individual deaths required additional evidence and interpretation.