Steven Harris

Steven Harris, the pharmacist for LifeCare at Memorial Medical Center, occupied a consequential position between the hospital’s drug supply and the investigation that followed the deaths of LifeCare patients during Hurricane Katrina. He described hearing that patients were not expected to be evacuated, recalled Anna Pou telling LifeCare staff that lethal doses would be administered, and acknowledged providing her with morphine and injection supplies. His account gave investigators both a witness to key conversations and a record of how medication was obtained, while leaving open the distinctions between what he saw, what he was told, and what the evidence could establish about the patients’ deaths.

Role at LifeCare and the first interviews

Harris was LifeCare’s pharmacist during the storm and one of four initial LifeCare witnesses whose accounts became central to Prosecutor Butch Schafer and Special Agent Virginia Rider’s investigation. The witness interviews began with Diane Robichaux, LifeCare’s assistant administrator, who recounted conditions on the unit and her conversation with Pou. Robichaux remembered discussing the patients’ prospects and whether an employee could help sedate Emmett Everett, but she was uncertain whether she had personally heard Pou use the phrase lethal doses; she recalled that wording from Therese Mendez, LifeCare’s nurse executive. Harris later gave investigators a more definite recollection on that point.

The day after Robichaux’s interview, Harris spoke with Schafer, Rider, and their investigative partners. He said that he had heard Susan Mulderick state at a Thursday morning emergency meeting that she did not expect the LifeCare patients to be evacuated. Afterward, he went with Robichaux and Kristy Johnson to ask Mulderick what was planned. Her response, as Harris recounted it, was that they needed to speak with Pou. Harris and Robichaux then found Pou on the seventh floor. He told investigators that Pou said the patients would receive lethal doses. That account mattered partly because it was more direct than Robichaux’s uncertain recollection of the same phrase, not because the accounts were identical in every detail.

The discussion about Emmett Everett

Harris’s account centered in part on Everett, a sixty-one-year-old LifeCare patient who was conscious and aware of his surroundings but weighed 380 pounds and was paralyzed. Robichaux told Pou about his condition. Harris likewise recalled that the information was raised and that Pou asked for someone to speak with Everett or sedate him. LifeCare staff discussed whether he could physically be moved down the stairs and through an opening to reach a helicopter. They concluded that the transfer might not be possible, but a nurse asked to assist with sedation refused. The episode brought the practical obstacles to evacuation into direct contact with the question of what should be done for a patient who remained aware.

Harris described the requests for medication and supplies as well as the conversation. When he asked Pou what she intended to administer, she showed him a large package of morphine vials and additional loose vials. She requested syringes and vials of sterile saline, which could be used to flush medication through an intravenous catheter, and Harris provided them. He later said that Pou and two nurses prepared syringes of morphine. He did not know the nurses’ names at the time, though he thought he might be able to identify them.

Harris also recounted seeing Pou and the two nurses enter the rooms of patients who remained on the floor. Later, he saw the group heading toward a staircase carrying one or more translucent garbage bags. He understood that they had said they would return. Johnson told him that Pou had asked LifeCare staff to check on the patients and draw sheets over those who had died. These are distinct parts of Harris’s account: he reported seeing people enter rooms and later leave with bags, but the passage does not establish what the bags contained or that he witnessed what happened inside the rooms.

Leaving the floor and identifying the visitors

Harris went downstairs with other LifeCare administrative staff. They were prevented from walking through the area where patients were lying on the second floor. On one occasion he was allowed to pass quickly toward the parking garage with antianxiety medication for a LifeCare nurse who needed it. During that brief passage, he caught sight of Pou and the same two nurses in the restricted area. His position thus changed over the course of the evacuation: he had been involved in the seventh-floor medication exchange, but later could observe only briefly from an area he was permitted to cross.

During a subsequent visit to the shuttered hospital, Harris accompanied investigators and a Tenet attorney through the building. He pulled Schafer aside and said he recognized three women from LifeCare’s physical therapy charting room on September 1. He identified them as Pou and the two Memorial nurses who had joined her. That recognition linked his earlier description of the unnamed nurses to people investigators could identify, although his identification took place later, during the hospital visit, rather than at the time of the events.

Pharmacy records and the widening inquiry

On that visit, Harris confirmed that his entire stock of morphine was missing: 125 vials, each containing 10 milligrams. Dozens of Versed and Ativan injection vials were missing as well. Other controlled medications remained in the pharmacy, a contrast investigators regarded as consistent with selective removal rather than a general burglary. The missing stock established a concrete loss from the pharmacy, but by itself did not establish who had taken the drugs or how much any patient had received.

Harris’s attorney indicated that his client might have more to add and wanted to speak with Schafer before doing so. They planned to meet later that week. In December, when Harris was interviewed again, he said he had seen Pou standing by Everett’s bed. His attorney also stated in a confidential proffer that Harris had supplied Pou with additional morphine and midazolam. Schafer and Rider revisited key witnesses over time, seeking consistency and fuller accounts; they came to suspect that some witnesses had not volunteered everything in the first interviews. Harris’s later recollections therefore entered a developing record rather than a single, settled statement.

Evidentiary significance and limits

Investigators used the LifeCare witnesses’ accounts to seek a warrant for Memorial Medical Center, requesting records, pharmacy information, employee details, computer files, evacuation plans, and medical waste that might contain vials or syringes. Harris’s testimony contributed to the warrant affidavit and helped investigators connect alleged medication use with the pharmacy supply. It also supplied observations about Pou’s presence, the requested materials, and the movement of the group through the hospital. Yet those strands supported different kinds of conclusions: a witness’s report of a conversation, an observed action, missing medication, and proof of a patient’s cause of death were not interchangeable.

The limits became especially important as investigators considered toxicology. Eighteen Memorial bodies were sent for testing, and the first results found morphine in nine and midazolam in several others. Later, experts emphasized that interpreting drugs in tissue from bodies recovered after prolonged exposure to heat was difficult; they differed over how much the results could establish about dose and cause of death. Harris’s account of the supply and his observations offered an important human and material line of evidence, but they did not resolve those scientific disputes on their own. His role in the case is therefore defined by both its value and its boundaries: he helped investigators reconstruct what was requested and seen on the seventh floor, while the meaning of those events remained a matter of contested testimony, forensic interpretation, and legal judgment.