Julie Cullen

Julie Cullen was the forceful head of Charles Foti’s criminal division and one of the prosecutors most troubled by the grand jury’s handling of the Memorial Medical Center deaths. As the investigation advanced toward a decision on Anna Pou, Cullen and colleagues argued that jurors were reaching conclusions without hearing substantial evidence about LifeCare’s evacuation efforts, the patients’ care, and the deaths. After the grand jury declined to indict Pou, Cullen stated publicly that the deaths were homicides, sharply contrasting her position with the district attorney’s acceptance of the decision.

Role in the Investigation

Cullen’s role emerges most clearly in the dispute over what the grand jury had—and had not—been allowed to hear. By then Virginia Rider, the investigator who knew the details of the case, had been gone for months. Other officials in Baton Rouge remained consumed by the Memorial deaths and alarmed by the direction of the inquiry. They drafted a forceful letter to New Orleans District Attorney Charles Foti protesting that “essential evidence in this case is being ignored.” Cullen, identified as the forceful head of Foti’s criminal division, expressed these concerns in multiple, heated meetings with Assistant District Attorney Michael Morales.

The concern was not simply that the prosecution had chosen one interpretation of disputed events over another. The draft letter argued that grand jurors appeared to believe LifeCare staff had neglected their patients and had not tried to evacuate them. In the letter’s account, the jurors seemed to regard the case as “merely a conspiracy on the part of Life Care to escape liability for abandoning their patients.” Yet they had not been shown e-mails and text messages describing efforts by LifeCare employees inside and outside the hospital to arrange evacuation, or the confusing and mixed directions they said they received from Memorial staff. The letter also emphasized that LifeCare witnesses had given statements voluntarily, without immunity, and were ready to testify about their attempts to save patients.

Evidence Cullen’s Colleagues Said Was Missing

The draft letter’s complaint extended beyond the LifeCare communications. Its authors feared that LifeCare witnesses would not be called at all, leaving them unable to describe their work or challenge the assumptions presented by Memorial nurses. The question posed in the letter—“When will they be allowed to tell their stories?”—made the dispute one of access to testimony as well as interpretation. The grand jury had heard Memorial nurses early in the investigation, and one nurse had received immunity before prosecutors knew what she would say. Cullen’s division worried that an early, partial account could harden into the jurors’ understanding of the case before other witnesses had a chance to complicate it.

The state had also spent considerable funds on analyses by pathologists, toxicologists, coroners, and medical ethicists. Frank Minyard had recommended that the experts testify; most believed the deaths were homicides, and they had been notified to prepare. None was called. The draft letter likewise identified family members whose testimony, its authors argued, was essential to an accurate account of the patients’ condition and care: Carrie Everett, the wife of Emmett Everett, and Angela McManus and Kathryn Nelson, daughters of patients who had been made to leave LifeCare shortly before the injections. One draft further urged that Memorial doctors testify without immunity, noting that someone in the hospital had made decisions about which patients would be evacuated and that the seventh-floor patients who died were affected by those decisions.

The letter also warned that jurors might not know that doctors, including Horace Baltz, had contacted prosecutors in support of the case. Rider, despite her detailed knowledge, had not been called. Hearsay was admissible before the grand jury, and it was common for a lead investigating agent to summarize evidence; in this case, however, the investigators’ concerns centered on the accumulated effect of missing witnesses, absent expert testimony, and an incomplete presentation. Cullen’s meetings with Morales carried that institutional alarm into the prosecution’s internal discussions, though the record does not establish that her objections changed what the grand jury ultimately heard.

The Grand Jury’s Decision and Cullen’s Public Position

The grand jury was asked to decide whether the evidence established that Pou had “a specific intent to kill,” an element of second-degree murder under Louisiana law. It declined to indict her on all ten counts. In the courtroom, Judge Calvin Johnson read the counts and then the foreman’s handwritten conclusion: “Not a true bill.” The decision ended the criminal case in New Orleans, but it did not settle the disagreement over what the evidence showed or whether the investigation had presented it fully.

A crowd of reporters was waiting outside the courthouse, having received advance notice of the hearing. As Cullen left, she gave a concise statement of the position she had maintained within the investigation: “It’s our position that it was homicide.” Her wording preserved the distinction between the grand jury’s legal decision and the view held by those who believed the deaths warranted prosecution. In the same news cycle, District Attorney Eddie Jordan said he respected and agreed with the grand jury. Cullen’s statement therefore made public a conflict that had already been expressed in the draft letter and in her meetings with Morales.

Narrative Significance

Cullen appears less through private biography than through a record of contested procedure: a draft protest, disputes about witness selection, repeated meetings, and a statement on the courthouse steps. Her importance lies in insisting that the grand jury’s account was shaped by the evidence it received and by the evidence it did not. The letter’s inventory—evacuation messages, voluntary LifeCare statements, expert findings, family testimony, and doctors’ possible accounts—sets out how many different kinds of testimony Cullen’s colleagues believed could alter the picture presented to jurors.

The final contrast is deliberately stark. The grand jury’s “Not a true bill” closed the prosecution, while Cullen’s declaration that the deaths were homicides kept the underlying accusation in public view. The account does not show Cullen controlling the outcome, nor does it establish that the omitted testimony would have changed the verdict. It does show her helping articulate a procedural objection: that a consequential decision had been made after, in her division’s estimation, the jurors had not heard a sufficiently complete account.