Anna Pou and Steven Harris

Anna Pou and Steven Harris’s relationship in the Memorial case was documented through the movement of medication and supplies during the evacuation and through Harris’s later statements to investigators. A LifeCare pharmacist, Harris became a key witness connecting Pou to drugs used on the seventh floor, while the meaning of that connection remained subject to disputes about the toxicology evidence and the patients’ deaths.

Medication and Supplies

During a search of the shuttered hospital, Harris accompanied a prosecutor and his attorney to the LifeCare pharmacy. He confirmed that the pharmacy’s entire stock of morphine—125 vials of 10 milligrams each—was missing, along with dozens of injection vials of Versed and Ativan. Other controlled drugs remained, a pattern investigators understood as selective removal rather than a general burglary. The missing inventory established a specific supply context, though it did not alone identify who had taken or used each drug.

Harris’s account went further than the inventory. In a later interview, he said he had seen Pou standing beside Emmett Everett’s bed. His attorney had also told investigators in a confidential proffer that Harris supplied Pou with additional morphine and Midazolam. In the account assembled for the arrest-warrant affidavit, Harris was described as having given Pou morphine, Versed, and injection supplies. These statements made him a direct link in the investigators’ account of how medications reached Pou during the crisis.

From Pharmacist to Witness

Harris’s importance to the investigation developed over time. The first warrant affidavit drew chiefly on interviews with four LifeCare witnesses, including Harris. It placed his reported provision of drugs and supplies alongside other witnesses’ accounts of Pou’s presence on the seventh floor and the administration of injections to patients. Toxicology findings for four LifeCare patients named in the affidavit were also included; pathologist Cyril Wecht concluded that each had died from a lethal amount of the drugs.

In December, investigators interviewed Harris again. Prosecutor Butch Schafer and Special Agent Virginia Rider were seeking testimony that could withstand scrutiny in court, and they revisited interviews with key LifeCare witnesses to check consistency and elicit details not previously volunteered. Harris’s later account of seeing Pou by Everett’s bed strengthened the evidentiary connection beyond the pharmacy inventory and his reported supply of medication. The book presents this as an investigative development, not as a final adjudication of Harris’s or Pou’s legal responsibility.

What the Evidence Could Establish

The distinction between drug access, drug exposure, cause of death, and intent remained consequential. Tests on tissue from Memorial and LifeCare patients found morphine or Midazolam, or both, in 23 of 41 bodies analyzed by Robert Middleberg’s laboratory. But the remains had been exposed to heat before sampling, and postmortem tissue concentrations were harder to interpret than blood tests in living patients. The experts therefore examined each patient’s clinical history alongside the laboratory results rather than treating a positive result as a complete explanation of the death.

The medical examiner’s and experts’ disagreements further limited what could be inferred from Harris’s account alone. Michael Baden argued that the drugs’ presence shortly before death mattered even if the precise dose could not be reconstructed; Wecht considered some measured levels exceptionally high and tested whether heat and humidity altered drug levels in tissue samples. The evidence connected Harris to the supply of drugs and to Pou’s presence at Everett’s bedside, while the broader case still required separate judgments about exposure, medical causation, and criminal intent.