Rose Savoie

Rose Savoie was a ninety-year-old patient at LifeCare Hospitals, whose unit occupied the seventh floor of Memorial Medical Center. She had acute bronchitis and a history of kidney problems. On September 1, 2005, she was seen alive that morning, witnessed receiving an injection, and was dead by afternoon. Her case became one of the four deaths cited in arrest warrants against Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo, and later remained unsettled in the record her family sought to complete.

Identity and Health

Savoie was among the LifeCare patients receiving care inside Memorial Medical Center during the crisis after Hurricane Katrina. Her medical history mattered to the later investigation: kidney problems could affect how the body processed drugs, complicating efforts to infer from tissue samples how much medication had been given and when. The available evidence offers little personal biography beyond her age, illness, family, and final days in the hospital.

Before the disaster, her records described a patient who was doing better. A physician’s progress note dated August 25 said she was “Actually doing better”; the last physician progress note, from August 27, recorded “No new medical complaints.” These entries later supported her family’s account and gave investigators a baseline against which to consider the events immediately before her death. They do not, by themselves, establish her condition on September 1 or explain the medication found after death.

The Seventh-Floor Witness Account

On the morning of September 1, Memorial nurse Kristy Johnson accompanied a taller nurse into Room 7305. Johnson introduced the nurse to Alice Hutzler, touched Hutzler’s hand, and said a little prayer. Johnson tried not to watch the nurse’s actions, but saw her inject Savoie, Hutzler’s ninety-year-old roommate. Savoie murmured, “That burns,” and Johnson saw that her arm was puffy. Investigators later identified the nurse as Lori Budo.

A LifeCare nurse subsequently told investigators that both Savoie and Hutzler had been alert and stable late that morning. Savoie died that afternoon, along with the other eight remaining LifeCare patients. The sequence transformed Johnson’s recollection from an observation made during a hurried hospital evacuation into significant eyewitness evidence: she had seen Savoie alive, seen the injection, heard her response, and learned that she died hours later.

Savoie’s case was included in Virginia Rider’s arrest-warrant account. The affidavit drew on interviews with LifeCare staff and alleged that Pou had said the patients would receive lethal doses, while staff members were told they were not expected to leave any living patients behind. It also stated that Johnson watched Budo inject Savoie. These were allegations presented to support warrants, not a final judicial finding about what happened to Savoie.

Toxicology and Forensic Disagreement

Toxicology testing found morphine and midazolam in Savoie’s remains. The results were part of a wider investigation: among the eighteen Memorial bodies initially tested, nine were positive for morphine, and roughly five or six also tested positive for midazolam. Later, Robert Middleberg’s laboratory found morphine or midazolam, or both, in twenty-three of forty-one bodies from Memorial and LifeCare that it analyzed. Those findings established drug presence, but interpreting concentrations in bodies recovered after prolonged exposure to heat was more difficult than interpreting blood tests from living patients.

The experts therefore considered toxicology alongside medical histories, treatment records, and the timing of deaths. Kidney or liver disease could affect drug accumulation; the investigators also asked whether the drug combination could suppress breathing, whether doses had been repeated, and whether the timing fit the known sequence of deaths. For Savoie, her kidney history was relevant to those questions, but the available evidence does not supply a definitive reconstruction of her dosing or the precise mechanism of her death.

Cyril Wecht marked Savoie’s death as homicide, as he did seven of the other eight seventh-floor patients he reviewed. Michael Baden considered all nine deaths homicides. Their judgments were disputed. Frank Minyard consulted Steven Karch, who argued that causes of death could not reliably be determined from bodies left in extreme heat for ten days and recommended classifying the cases as undetermined. Baden countered that the drugs were present and that there was no competing cause of death; Wecht argued that some detected levels were exceptionally high. His small experiment on the effects of heat and humidity on drug levels offered another piece of evidence, but it was not definitive or independently published.

Family and an Unfinished Record

Savoie’s family remained part of the story after the forensic dispute moved behind closed doors. Her grandson, Doug Savoie, repeatedly asked for her death certificate. In 2010, five years after the hurricane, he was told the coroner had not finished it. The copy sent to the family that year gave no cause of death and was stamped “under investigation.” As of August 2013, the family still had not received a completed certificate.

The uncertainty was not simply a disagreement among experts: it persisted in the public and family records. Minyard’s position was difficult to pin down. Draft letters prepared in 2007 said he maintained that only Savoie’s and Emmett Everett’s deaths were homicides among the seventh-floor cases, while his statements about what he told the grand jury remained secret. Autopsy reports obtained after legal challenges left the classification-of-death fields blank, and Savoie’s certificate remained incomplete years later. Her case thus joined a direct witness account and positive toxicology findings to an unresolved official conclusion—a death treated as homicide by some forensic reviewers, but never fully settled in the documentation available to her family.