Cheri Landry—Lori Budo

Cheri Landry and Lori Budo were colleagues at Memorial Medical Center whose shared exposure to the hospital’s Katrina crisis continued into the years of investigation that followed. Both faced questions about injections given to patients during the evacuation, and both endured the loss of clinical work and the threat of prosecution. Their relationship is most clearly shown not through a documented history of friendship before the storm, but through concrete acts of support afterward: Budo salvaged a small part of Landry’s ruined household, and the women kept in contact even when their lawyers warned them not to speak to one another.

Colleagues in the evacuation crisis

Landry and Budo worked in the Memorial ICU and were among the nurses called to work during the hurricane. Their subsequent accounts to the grand jury concerned patients on the seventh floor of LifeCare and, in Landry’s case, patients on the second floor as well. Landry said she had injected as many as four LifeCare patients and two second-floor patients. She acknowledged that she did not know the seventh-floor patients’ medical conditions or medications and had assumed they had DNR orders. Budo likewise said she did not know the seventh-floor patients’ conditions or DNR status; she testified that she injected two of them with morphine and midazolam. Their accounts placed the two nurses within the same disputed chain of care, although the record describes distinct actions by each rather than establishing that they acted together at each bedside.

The crisis’s consequences outlasted the evacuation. The nurses became subjects of an investigation into the patients’ deaths, and their professional identities were recast by the question of what had happened inside Memorial. Their shared workplace gave them a common point of reference, but their accounts also exposed them to scrutiny over what they knew, what they believed about the patients, and what procedures they had followed. The closeness of their predicament did not erase those differences: Landry described injecting more patients, while Budo’s testimony concerned two LifeCare patients.

Budo’s help after Landry lost her home

After Landry’s house was damaged so badly by flooding that it had to be demolished, Budo went to retrieve a few belongings. She picked through the foul muck, took the salvaged items home, and washed and sterilized them for her friend. The recovery amounted to only a couple of boxes from a lifetime’s possessions. Its small scale makes the gesture especially tangible: Budo could not restore Landry’s home, but she could preserve objects from it and return them clean enough to keep.

The loss of the house was only one part of Landry’s post-storm burden. She was also the primary caregiver for her ailing mother, and she told a supporter that losing her job was worse than losing everything she owned. She questioned whether she and Budo would ever be able to work as nurses again. Budo, meanwhile, was the main breadwinner for her family, with two children in college. Their pressures were not identical, but both depended on nursing income while the investigation made it difficult or impossible to continue clinical work. Budo’s rescue of Landry’s belongings was one direct response to a loss that neither professional support nor legal representation could undo.

A shared support network, unequal pressures

After the arrests, colleagues and supporters organized practical help for the nurses. A support fund invited people to send cards and letters as well as money. Memorial ICU colleagues sold plastic bracelets and car magnets, arranged food and other acts of kindness, and asked Landry and Budo to prepare itemized budgets so the fund could provide monthly allowances for bills, food, and clothing. The women also received legal-fee support from Tenet, and the hospital’s medical staff gave each nurse $10,000. Supporters sought to maintain a three-month reserve in the fund, with one donor promising to cover a shortfall.

That assistance did not make their circumstances interchangeable. Landry had lost her home and was responsible for her ill mother; Budo supported a household that included two children in college. Neither had the professional fallback available to Anna Pou, who had a university job when she could not practice clinically. For Landry and Budo, the inability to work threatened not only their standing as nurses but also the ordinary financial obligations of middle-class life: mortgages, rent, and car loans. Landry found it humbling and strange to have others pay her bills, describing the experience as feeling like someone else’s life. At a joint interview, Budo wept. The shared fund offered material relief, but the dependence it created also marked how far their lives had shifted from work and self-sufficiency.

Contact under legal pressure

The nurses’ lawyers advised them not to talk to each other, because communication could be portrayed as collusion. Landry and Budo, along with others, disregarded that advice enough to check in and ask how the other was doing. This continued contact was a modest but meaningful form of mutual support: it persisted despite the risk that even ordinary communication might be interpreted through the investigation. The evidence does not present it as a coordinated legal strategy; it shows the women maintaining concern for one another while their lawyers tried to limit exposure.

Their testimony also left them linked in the public and legal record. Landry said she had not known the seventh-floor patients’ conditions and had believed they were dying; Budo gave a similar account of her own limited knowledge and described injecting two patients. Both said the patients appeared to be near death, but neither’s testimony supplied familiarity with their underlying medical circumstances. The parallel accounts placed them in a common professional and moral crisis without making their individual roles identical.

The relationship that emerges is therefore defined by both shared vulnerability and particular acts. Budo’s recovery of Landry’s possessions, their continued check-ins despite legal warnings, and their reliance on the same circle of coworkers and donors show a bond carried through disaster, unemployment, and scrutiny. The record offers no neat resolution to their professional uncertainty; instead, it leaves the two nurses facing the same unanswered question of whether they could return to nursing, while bearing different losses and a common burden.