Anna Pou and Susan Mulderick

Anna Pou and Susan Mulderick’s documented relationship during the Memorial Medical Center crisis centers on a series of conversations about patients’ suffering, anxiety, and medication on Thursday, September 1, 2005. Mulderick later said that she had asked Pou to consider giving patients something for comfort and that Pou had agreed, though she was unsure what to give. The account placed Mulderick, a senior hospital leader, in the role of raising the question, and Pou, whom Mulderick described as the primary doctor on the second floor, in the role of responding to it. Investigators later treated the conversation as significant, but the available accounts leave important differences between what Mulderick remembered, what other witnesses reported, and what records showed.

Their Positions in the Crisis

The conversations took place during a breakdown of ordinary hospital operations. Patients and staff faced a prolonged evacuation under dangerous conditions, and Mulderick later said that people repeatedly asked whether they would be able to leave. In her interview with investigators, she recalled telling staff and families that all of them would get out. The reassurance and the medication discussion belonged to the same Thursday-morning effort, as she presented it: patients were afraid and suffering, and she wanted their distress addressed while evacuation remained the overriding concern.

Mulderick told investigators that she viewed Pou as the primary doctor on the second floor and had spoken with her several times that morning. This placed Pou in a position to make or advise on clinical decisions for patients there, while Mulderick’s account presented her as an administrator communicating concerns and seeking a physician’s help. The distinction matters to the relationship: Mulderick said she raised the need for medication, but described the clinical response as Pou’s to determine. The record does not establish that the two women had a settled plan or that their conversations covered a single, specific set of patients.

Mulderick’s Account of the Medication Discussions

Asked what the conversations concerned, Mulderick said she had asked whether some patients could be given something for what she considered their suffering, anxiety, and pain. She recalled that Pou agreed, while saying she was not sure what to give. Mulderick then said she would ask Ewing Cook to speak with Pou, and reported that she did so. In her account, the exchange moved from a general concern about distress to a request for another physician’s input; she did not describe a detailed medication decision made between herself and Pou.

Mulderick also emphasized the limits of what she knew. She told investigators that she had not seen the medications being given and did not know whether Pou followed up on the discussion. When asked whether she and anyone else had discussed euthanizing patients, she denied such a discussion. Asked more specifically whether they had discussed palliative care that might relieve pain while speeding the dying process, she again denied it, characterizing their conversations as being about comfort rather than hastening death. Her answers therefore both connected her to the initial request and set a boundary around what she said she had intended and witnessed.

The Investigative Record and Its Tensions

The interview took place in early January 2006, after Mulderick had learned that investigators might ask about statements attributed to her at the hospital. She knew the allegations in part from a copy of the secret search-warrant affidavit sent to a Tenet attorney. Virginia Rider asked whether Mulderick had said that no living patients would be left behind. Mulderick allowed that she might have used the phrase, explaining that staff and families feared they would die in the hospital and that she had repeatedly tried to reassure them that everyone would be evacuated. The interview thus placed her promise of universal evacuation beside the separate question of what she had told LifeCare employees about the patients’ prospects.

Rider’s later arrest-warrant affidavit relied chiefly on accounts from four LifeCare witnesses. They reported that Mulderick had said LifeCare patients were not expected to make it out and that LifeCare leaders needed to speak with Pou. According to the affidavit, Pou then appeared on the seventh floor, said patients would receive a lethal dose, and directed LifeCare staff to leave. Those were allegations assembled from witness interviews, not statements established by Mulderick’s own account of her discussion with Pou. The contrast is central: Mulderick described seeking comfort care and promising evacuation, while the affidavit presented witness accounts that connected her words about evacuation to a later, allegedly lethal medication decision.

Medication records introduced another complication. Mulderick offered Ativan as an example of a drug that could relax patients, but prescriptions seized from the pharmacy showed that Pou and other doctors had already prescribed Ativan and other ordinary comfort medications during the disaster. That evidence made Mulderick’s explanation—that she thought Pou might need guidance from Ewing Cook about what to give—difficult for investigators to reconcile with the existing prescriptions. It did not, by itself, establish what happened in the conversations or what Pou administered; it sharpened the question of why Mulderick described the exchange as she did.

What the Relationship Reveals

The record preserves an asymmetrical but consequential professional relationship. Mulderick was involved in leading the hospital’s response and said she initiated the request to address suffering; Pou was the physician she consulted, and Cook was the colleague she said she brought into the discussion. Yet Mulderick’s account stops short of documenting a shared decision, a specific order, or her observation of medication being administered. The gap between raising a concern, authorizing or prescribing treatment, and witnessing its use remains important to understanding both the relationship and the investigation.

Their conversations also became a test of how the language of comfort functioned amid a crisis in which evacuation, clinical triage, and patient survival were intertwined. Mulderick consistently characterized the request as palliative care, while investigators examined whether medication discussions were connected to decisions about patients who might not be rescued. The evidence supports neither collapsing the two women’s roles into one nor treating Mulderick’s recollection as a complete account of Pou’s actions. Instead, their relationship is revealed through a narrow but consequential chain of recollection, referral, and disputed interpretation: Mulderick said she asked, Pou agreed to consider the patients’ needs, and the meaning and consequences of that exchange remained contested.