James Riopelle

James Riopelle was an anesthesiologist at Lindy Boggs Medical Center during the hospital’s evacuation in Hurricane Katrina. He stayed behind with two colleagues, caring for animals and roughly twenty-five extremely fragile patients after most of the staff had left. Later, two relatives described offers of morphine that they understood as suggestions to hasten patients’ deaths. Riopelle denied giving morphine to patients or euthanizing anyone, leaving his role at the center of a contested account of abandonment, care, and intention.

Position and Decision to Stay

The available account identifies Riopelle as an anesthesiologist and a past president of the state humane society coalition. Earlier in the day, he had decided he would not leave the hospital’s sixty or seventy pets, including his own, simply because authorities ordered him to evacuate. His resolve followed a visit years earlier to Dachau: he had made himself a pledge not to comply with what he considered misdirection. Two other employees who also had pets—a nurse director and a respiratory therapist—chose to remain with him.

The prospect of leaving patients behind had not, Riopelle later said, occurred to him. The order to evacuate and the reality that all patients might not be taken out had initially seemed different matters. Once he and his colleagues were left with both the animals and about twenty-five highly vulnerable patients, that distinction became urgent. Many of the patients had do-not-resuscitate orders, and Riopelle saw some die. He also dragged three bodies to the hospital entrance in an effort to deter looters.

Morphine and Conflicting Accounts

On the first evening, Riopelle visited Elaine Bias, a twenty-eight-year-old awaiting a liver transplant. Her mother, who had also stayed behind, told him that her daughter was in pain. The pharmacy was locked, but another staff member had given Riopelle morphine to use if any animals needed to be euthanized. With no other medication available, he offered Bias’s mother a 10 mg dose for her daughter. He warned that the drug might be fatal because her liver failure would impair her ability to break it down, said he did not know what dose would be safe, and urged caution. He described it as a medicine that could help her sleep.

Bias later recalled the exchange differently in important respects. She said Riopelle had told her to put her daughter to sleep and demonstrated how to inject the morphine into her IV line. She refused. Her understanding was influenced by an earlier conversation with a staff member, who had reportedly said after an administrative meeting that certain patients would not be evacuated and would be given morphine. That prior information shaped how she interpreted the offer; her account and Riopelle’s description of his purpose did not match.

Jessie Lynn LaSalle, whose husband had recently undergone a liver transplant, also said Riopelle repeatedly offered morphine. She recalled him telling her that rescue would not come and that she should let him give her husband the drug so he could die comfortably. LaSalle, furious, sent him from the room; she said he told her she could find him upstairs with the animals if she changed her mind. Riopelle later said he did not recall offering morphine to her. His explanation for the conflicting recollections was that the relatives might have misunderstood his intentions because they felt abandoned.

The patients’ medical circumstances also differed. LaSalle’s husband was on a ventilator adapted to run pneumatically from the hospital’s compressed oxygen supply after the power failed. Riopelle later argued that morphine, even if offered, would not have depressed the man’s breathing or endangered him in that situation. The account records that explanation as his, not as a resolution of the disagreement over what he said or intended.

Denial and the Limits of the Evidence

Riopelle denied euthanizing patients and denied administering morphine to any of them. The allegations were set against a broader and uncertain picture inside Lindy Boggs Medical Center: some patients remained on life support, and Bias alleged that she saw ventilators turned off and patients without family present injected with what she believed was morphine. Her allegation concerned events she said she witnessed; it does not establish that Riopelle performed those actions.

Approximately twenty-seven bodies were recovered from Lindy Boggs, including many from Genesis Specialty, a separately owned long-term acute-care hospital in the building. Toxicology tests detected morphine in nearly a quarter of the twenty-one bodies tested, but only one had a level that appeared unusually high. Those results describe findings across the recovered bodies, not a determination that Riopelle administered the drug or caused any particular death. The evidence presented about him therefore rests on sharply different recollections, his denial, and toxicology results that do not by themselves identify who gave medication or why.

Patients’ Outcomes and Aftermath

Both transplant patients were taken out by boat the following day. Each died weeks later of infections that their families believed resulted from abandonment and inadequate care. The families filed medical-malpractice claims against Riopelle and the transplant doctor, as well as against the hospital and its owner, Tenet. The claims against the doctors were later dismissed. They included what the families described as a strong suggestion that the patients be euthanized, but the dismissal and the later deaths do not settle the disputed question of what Riopelle offered or intended.

Riopelle’s account belongs to a wider evacuation crisis in which patients, staff, and animals were left in conditions of severe danger. At Lindy Boggs, the decision to stay placed him between an evacuation order and the vulnerable beings still inside; the morphine allegations then made the distinction between offering symptom relief and intending death a matter of competing testimony. His actions are reported alongside the limits of what investigators could establish, rather than as a settled finding of either deliberate killing or unambiguous comfort care.