United States Eastern District of Louisiana United States Attorney's Office

Federal prosecutors in southeastern Louisiana entered the investigations into deaths at hospitals and nursing homes after Hurricane Katrina, examining whether the cases could support federal charges. Their involvement opened another investigative avenue, but the boundary of federal jurisdiction sharply limited what they could pursue as murder cases.

A Concurrent Federal Inquiry

The U.S. attorney for southeastern Louisiana opened investigations concurrent with local inquiries into deaths at hospitals and nursing homes, treating possible violations of the federal health-care fraud statute as a potential basis for federal action. The office’s work intersected with the investigation of alleged suspicious deaths on the seventh floor of Memorial Medical Center: when Prosecutor Butch Schafer and Special Agent Virginia Rider interviewed LifeCare witnesses, a federal investigator who had previously worked in the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit joined them.

That participation did not make the federal inquiry a straightforward murder prosecution. The office’s role developed alongside state and local investigations, with investigators testing whether any federal statute could apply to the deaths.

The Limits of Federal Jurisdiction

Schafer, Rider, and colleagues consulted the U.S. attorney in New Orleans about possible federal charges. Murder ordinarily fell to local authorities, and the deaths at Memorial Medical Center had not occurred on federal land or in the course of another federal crime. The deceased also did not appear to belong to a category, such as high government officials, that would bring the alleged murders within federal jurisdiction.

Investigators considered whether causing a death while depriving someone of civil rights under color of law, or committing murder to further a drug offense, might provide a federal basis. At that point, however, neither theory appeared applicable to the Memorial cases. The consultation thus clarified the gap between the seriousness of the allegations and the narrower circumstances in which federal law could reach them.

A Charge Rejected, Not a Case Resolved

The most serious federal charge the group could imagine applying was quickly rejected: an inappropriate narcotics-prescribing conviction might carry a sentence of about five years. Schafer and Rider regarded that possibility as badly mismatched to the alleged deaths, comparing it to punishing a hit-and-run killer for expired license tags.

That judgment concerned the possible federal charge, not a final determination of what had happened at Memorial. The evidence and the question of responsibility remained under investigation by other authorities; the material available here does not establish a federal prosecution or its eventual outcome. The office’s significance in the account lies in this limited but consequential role: it examined whether federal law could reach the deaths, while the jurisdictional and charging constraints left the central criminal inquiry largely to local authorities.