Ewing Cook and Jannie Burgess

Ewing Cook and Jannie Burgess were linked by a brief but consequential episode of care at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina: after finding Burgess in the ICU on August 31, 2005, Cook gave spoken orders for repeated morphine injections. The doses later drew forensic scrutiny, but the experts reviewing her case did not conclude that they established homicide. Burgess’s advanced cancer and prior morphine treatment made her death difficult to classify, leaving the record with both a striking medication history and an expressly undetermined finding.

Burgess’s History and Place at Memorial

Burgess had worked for thirty-five years in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes. Before entering nursing to support her children, she had held jobs including taxi dispatcher and secretary to a mortician. Her professional life unfolded alongside a stark racial exclusion: with light-brown skin, she could care for patients at many private hospitals but could not receive care at them. Born just months after Memorial opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital, she waited more than four decades before she could be a patient there.

At the time of the crisis, Burgess was seventy-nine and had advanced metastatic uterine cancer. She was one of four patients with do-not-resuscitate orders in the ICU. Memorial’s doctors had decided that DNR patients would be evacuated last, an exception to the general priority for patients most dependent on life support or other medical assistance. A DNR order meant that a patient should not be revived after breathing or heartbeat stopped; it did not itself mean that the patient should be excluded from rescue. The evacuation rule therefore shaped the circumstances in which Burgess remained in the hospital as other ICU patients were airlifted.

Cook’s Orders During the Crisis

Cook found Burgess after climbing the stairs in the heat on Wednesday, August 31. Her chart recorded that, from 7 a.m. until Cook arrived that afternoon, a nurse had given her one 4-milligram morphine injection. The chart described a history of intermittent, relatively small doses for pain: at most once an hour, typically two to four times a day, with the largest previously documented single dose being 6 milligrams.

After Cook’s arrival, a nurse administered morphine on his spoken orders seven times between 2:10 and 3:35 p.m., at 15 milligrams each time. The total—105 milligrams in an hour and a half—was more than five times the largest amount Burgess had previously received during an entire day of hospitalization, according to the chart. The difference between that recorded pattern and the new series of orders became central to the later examination of her death. The evidence establishes the orders and doses; it does not, by itself, establish Cook’s intent or prove that morphine caused her death.

Forensic Review and an Undetermined Finding

Investigators faced substantial limits in assessing deaths at Memorial. The bodies had remained in the heat for more than a week before recovery, making blood testing unavailable and raising questions about whether decomposition altered drug concentrations. Tissue samples could still be tested, and experts considered those results alongside medical records rather than treating a drug finding alone as a complete explanation of death.

In Burgess’s case, the chart documented the unusually large amount ordered by Cook, but the experts also weighed her advanced cancer and the fact that she had received morphine before the crisis. Cyril Wecht described her as not a clear, strong case and marked her death undetermined, recommending that she not be included in a legal case. Two other ICU patients left behind with Burgess also tested positive for morphine, at lower concentrations; Wecht did not classify their deaths as homicides either. These case-specific judgments distinguished the conspicuous dosing history from a definitive conclusion about cause or criminal responsibility.

Significance of the Relationship

The Cook–Burgess relationship is documented most clearly through a narrow sequence: a critically ill patient remained in an increasingly dangerous hospital under an evacuation policy that placed DNR patients last; Cook found her; and his verbal medication orders produced a marked departure from her earlier recorded morphine use. The later review did not erase that discrepancy, but it also did not convert it into a finding of homicide. Burgess’s case thus sits at the intersection of emergency care, a consequential evacuation classification, and the limits of forensic interpretation after prolonged exposure to heat.