Baton Rouge enters the account as the starting point for a major search of Memorial Medical Center, one of the health facilities investigated after Hurricane Katrina. On October 1, 2005, a team of investigators drove from the city to the hospital, making Baton Rouge a point of connection between the state-led inquiry and the search at the center of the unfolding case.

A Base for the Investigation

After returning home from mourning his daughter’s death, prosecutor Butch Schafer began examining deaths at hospitals and nursing homes across the region. Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit opened investigations into every facility where patients had died. The inquiry sought to establish whether emergency plans had been followed and whether institutional decisions or failures had contributed to the deaths. Memorial’s corporate owners were asked to provide a list of deceased patients and the hospital’s disaster plan.

The Search Begins in Baton Rouge

Investigators sought a warrant after concluding that entry was unlikely to be consensual. The warrant application summarized witness accounts and requested items that could help prove second-degree murder. After a judge granted it, Schafer and Special Agent Virginia Rider joined twenty-two special agents and two Louisiana State Police crime-scene investigators. The group drove for an hour from Baton Rouge and arrived at Memorial at about nine in the morning on October 1. It was the largest search team Rider had ever joined.

From the City to the Search Site

The investigators approached with badges visible, and Rider gave a copy of the warrant to Memorial’s security supervisor. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts assessed the air and deemed it safe to enter. The hospital, which covered two city blocks, still had no electricity. Search teams had to work in difficult conditions: Rider carried the equipment used in a warrant raid, while some colleagues wore gloves and respirator masks. The journey from Baton Rouge thus led not to an ordinary inspection but to a large, physically demanding search of a darkened hospital, as investigators pursued evidence about the deaths.