Warrant-authorized search of Memorial Medical Center

The warrant-authorized search of Memorial Medical Center on October 1, 2005, turned allegations about the deaths of LifeCare patients into a physical-evidence investigation. Agents searched the dark, heat-stricken hospital for records and drug evidence, finding morphine, syringes, and other materials that appeared to support witness accounts. The search advanced the case, but it did not settle the central questions of what had been administered, why, or whether the drugs had caused the deaths.

From Witness Accounts to a Warrant

Investigators Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer sought a warrant after LifeCare witnesses gave accounts that converged on Anna Pou. They alleged that Pou had gone to the seventh floor to end the lives of nine surviving patients; two said she had directly described her intention as lethal. The patients had died, but investigators still needed to determine whether the alleged plan had been carried out and who, if anyone, had participated alongside Pou. Physical evidence mattered because agreement among witnesses, by itself, could not answer those questions.

Rider assembled a list of material she wanted, including medical records for the deceased, evacuation plans, computer hard drives, employee names and contact details, pharmacy records, and medical waste that might contain discarded vials or syringes. Tenet had not supplied some of the requested material, and the investigators expected that a search would not be consensual. Schafer discussed possible charges with his supervisors while Rider consulted Louisiana law, which she was unfamiliar with in the context of alleged murder. She prepared an affidavit summarizing the accounts of Diane Robichaux, Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris, then applied for a warrant to seek items “necessary in order to prove the crime of second-degree murder.” Under the state definition, second-degree murder required specific intent to kill. Investigators did not plan to seek the death penalty; manslaughter and negligent-homicide charges remained possible alternatives.

The Search in a Dark Hospital

A judge granted the warrant. On Saturday morning, October 1, Rider and Schafer arrived from Baton Rouge with twenty-two special agents, including nearly all of the Louisiana State Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and agents from the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. Two Louisiana State Police crime-scene investigators joined them. It was the largest search team Rider had taken part in. She presented the warrant to Memorial’s security supervisor, and experts from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assessed the air before the team entered.

The hospital covered two city blocks and had no electricity. Rider carried the equipment used on a warrant search, including flashlights, a radio, handcuffs, pepper spray, and firearms. Some team members wore gloves and respirator masks; the heat made walking and climbing stairs difficult. Rider had high blood pressure and was out of shape, so she left the seventh-floor search to Schafer and others, who were eager to examine the area. She searched other floors, including a nursery where black mold had spread across the painted walls. The security guard’s passkey opened most doors, but agents needed a battering ram to enter the Memorial and LifeCare pharmacies. There, a forensic scientist inventoried morphine.

Materials Seized and Questions Left Open

Agents found morphine ampoules in boxes at a LifeCare nursing station on the west side of the floor, sitting openly on a desk beneath windows that faced the helipad. In room 7305, shared by Rose Savoie and Alice Hutzler, they found a translucent bag full of syringes, resembling the bag Harris had described. In Emmett Everett’s room, next door, they seized a saline push syringe from a bedside table beside a box fan. A cafeteria tray, still holding its plate, mug, and bowl, remained nearby. On the second-floor lobby’s blue tray, multiple morphine vials and boxes were also in plain view. The objects gave the investigation concrete leads, but their presence alone did not establish who had used them, on whom, or with what intent.

The search yielded many medical records, but not the particular records Rider had requested and had not yet received from Tenet’s attorneys. Schafer wondered whether company officials were withholding them because of possible criminal culpability, and whether responsibility might extend beyond an individual physician; these were questions, not conclusions established by the search. Agents removed computers and a server for examination by the state High Technology Crimes Unit, and documented their work with photographs and videotape. That evening Rider transferred seized medical items to the state police crime laboratory for fingerprint and controlled-drug analysis. On the request form, she identified Pou as the subject and wrote that she might have euthanized multiple patients at Memorial following Hurricane Katrina.

Follow-Up and Forensic Limits

Four days later, Rider and several others returned with permission from Tenet officials and accompanied by a company attorney. On the seventh floor they found additional syringes and medical waste in the LifeCare therapy charting room, where witnesses had said they sat and spoke with Pou about Everett. Elsewhere in the hospital, they located Pou’s employment agreement, a staff roster, and Memorial’s emergency policies and procedures. The return search expanded the documentary record while also adding material from a room linked by witnesses to their account of events.

The evidence had to be interpreted against the condition of the bodies. Frank Minyard initially told Rider that autopsies would be useless because Memorial’s dead had decomposed in the heat for more than a week; a blood sample, for example, could not be used to check for lethal drug levels. A volunteer pathologist advised that drugs might remain detectable in more durable tissues or in fluid collected in the abdomen. At the attorney general’s request, Minyard agreed to ask a federal disaster mortuary team to conduct autopsies and collect tissue from patients who had died in Orleans Parish after the storm. Investigators later sent tissue samples from eighteen Memorial bodies to National Medical Services, Inc., for forensic toxicology. In a report on eighteen cases, the laboratory director said nine tested positive for morphine and about five or six more for midazolam.

Those findings supported the conclusion that drugs were present in some bodies, but they did not, on their own, establish a dose, timing, cause of death, or intent. When experts later reviewed forty-one Memorial and LifeCare bodies tested by the laboratory, twenty-three were positive for morphine, midazolam, or both. The interpretation remained contested because prolonged heat and decomposition could affect postmortem concentrations, while patients’ medical histories could affect how drugs accumulated and how dangerous they were. The search therefore marked a consequential shift: allegations now had seized objects, records, and laboratory results to be tested against them, but the chain from drug exposure to individual death and criminal responsibility still required careful, disputed inference.