Karen Lagasse

Karen Lagasse’s experience at Memorial Medical Center turns an evacuation into a prolonged separation from her mother, Merle, and then into a search for answers. She tried to protect Merle’s breathing as the hospital’s equipment and evacuation arrangements changed, was forced away while her mother was being moved, and spent ten days seeking confirmation of what had happened. Her later lawsuit and continuing questions keep the distinction between a reported death and a fully explained death at the center of her story.

Family and Merle’s care

Karen’s mother, Merle Lagasse, was seventy-six and had lived with emphysema before learning, shortly before Hurricane Katrina, that she had incurable lung cancer. Merle had been lively in earlier years: she volunteered in schools, worked reception at a beauty salon, and loved and rescued feral cats. As her health weakened, Karen hoped that her care might include more active measures, including physical therapy. Their close relationship is shown not just in Karen’s presence at the hospital, but in the practical work she undertook there and the fear she carried for Merle and the cats left at home.

Merle’s former emphysema doctor, Ewing Cook, had been frank about the limits of treatment. He prescribed home oxygen, and Merle chose a long cord that let her walk more freely through the house; she sometimes went out with a portable oxygen tank. Cook also greeted her with the darkly joking remark, “you’re gonna make a beautiful corpse.” The comment upset Karen, though Merle took from it the word “beautiful.” The phrase returned painfully after Merle’s death, when Karen wondered whether her mother had even become the beautiful corpse Cook had imagined.

A little over a week before the storm, Merle was admitted to Memorial after reacting badly to a pain-medication patch. Her newer doctor, Roy Culotta, worked to ease her pain, breathlessness, and anxiety. Before the hurricane he prescribed high-flow oxygen through a Vapotherm machine connected to the hospital’s wall supply. He also ordered a thoracentesis kit for a procedure that could remove fluid constricting Merle’s lung and temporarily ease her breathing. The procedure had not been performed when the storm disrupted care. On Monday, after the wind and rain had abated, Karen encountered Culotta in the parking garage as he said he was going home to shower. The kit remained unopened beside Merle’s bed.

Watching care and plans change

When the air-conditioning failed, Karen tried to cool her mother with a box fan and ice packs. She also went to pray in the dark, empty chapel for Merle and for the cats at home. On Tuesday night, the high-flow oxygen machine’s alarm began sounding. The respiratory therapist had stopped making visits, and Karen felt that the fourth-floor nurses took a long time to identify the cause as the power loss. Staff removed the failing Vapotherm and replaced it with a less effective mask connected to the hospital’s bulk oxygen supply. Merle seemed to be working harder to breathe, so Karen fanned her with a piece of cardboard bearing the hospital company logo.

At first, nurses told Karen that Merle would be among the first patients evacuated because she depended on breathing equipment. But a doctor asked whether Merle could sit in a wheelchair, and Karen thought she could not. When patients able to walk or sit in wheelchairs began leaving the floor first, Karen understood that the plan for her mother had changed. The change was consequential: Merle’s need for oxygen did not translate into an early departure, and Karen had to watch the evacuation proceed without knowing when or how her mother would be moved.

When Merle’s turn came, a nurse transferred her oxygen tubing from the wall nozzle to a regulator on a green metal cylinder. Karen noticed that the thoracentesis kit was still at the bedside and asked whether it should go with them. The nurse replied, “Oh, they’re not going to do that now.” Volunteers lifted Merle on her bed sheet and carried her toward the stairwell. They initially started down with her headfirst, then backed up and turned her feet-forward. On a lower floor, Merle was laid flat among other patients waiting near the machine room; Karen saw that the position made breathing more difficult. A nurse turned up the cylinder’s oxygen flow and urged that Merle be moved at once.

Separation during evacuation

As staff prepared to move Merle toward the heliport, Karen was told to leave the area. She began walking away, then heard her mother say, “Karen,” followed by, “I can’t breathe.” Karen turned back and saw that Merle’s oxygen tank had been disconnected as she was about to be passed through a narrow opening in the wall leading to the parking garage. Karen shouted that her mother could not breathe without oxygen and demanded that it be reconnected. A woman in scrubs who appeared to be in charge told her, “You don’t know what’s going on.” Others watched as Karen argued and was assured that Merle would receive oxygen on the other side.

Karen was again told to leave. Angry and frightened, she decided she had to get out too; she went down to the emergency-room ramp in an effort to board a boat and begin searching for wherever Merle would be taken. Her aim was not simply to reach safety but to avoid leaving her mother alone. The evacuation broke that effort apart: staff controlled Merle’s movement, while Karen had to depart without knowing her destination or even whether the oxygen had been restored.

Search, loss, and burial

Karen made it out of Memorial by boat and ended up at the overcrowded New Orleans Convention Center, where she slept outside on the street, afraid for her own safety. Someone there told her that her mother had died at the hospital, but Karen refused to accept the report as confirmation. She persuaded friends to call emergency rooms across Louisiana and Texas. The search continued for ten frantic days, until a Tenet Healthcare official called to say that Merle was on a list of people believed to have died during the evacuation.

Months later, Karen was permitted to return to the hospital garage and sift through debris for her mother’s personal effects. The objects were remnants of a shared life in a Lakeview neighborhood that had been lost to flooding. Karen buried Merle on Valentine’s Day in a metal coffin sealed by funeral-home workers with a rubber gasket to contain the odor of decomposition. She argued that the body bag should be removed before her mother was placed in the coffin, but the workers refused. The decision added another indignity to a loss whose circumstances Karen still could not reconstruct.

Lawsuit and unanswered questions

Karen’s civil suit described the moment Merle’s oxygen mask was removed before she was passed through the machine-room wall. It identified the worker as an unknown health-care employee, “Jane Doe,” and presented the episode in clinical language: “At that time, decedent yelled out that she could not breathe.” The petition said that both mother and daughter asked for the mask to be replaced, “but Jane Doe refused such a directive.” The legal account fixed the dispute on a concrete moment in the evacuation, while also reflecting how little Karen knew about what followed their separation.

A year after the storm, Karen still had not been told what happened to Merle after they were parted. Investigators for the attorney general had interviewed Culotta, but their interview was not shared with her. Karen believed that her mother had died through Culotta’s negligence and the hospital’s failure to prepare properly for a disaster. She wondered how long Merle had suffered in the heat and whether she had continued to receive oxygen and pain medication. Those remained questions in Karen’s account, not established answers.

Karen sued Culotta, Memorial Medical Center, its chief executive, René Goux, “Jane Doe,” and the internal-medicine director, Richard Deichmann. Her lawyer had found that Deichmann wrote and self-published a memoir describing his role in the evacuations; Karen was surprised to learn that he had been named in her case because he was also her own internist. Through the evacuation, the search, the burial, and the lawsuit, Karen’s account follows a daughter’s attempt to recover both her mother and the missing knowledge of her final hours. The unopened procedure kit, the changed evacuation order, and the disconnected oxygen mark separate failures and uncertainties; together they explain why, even after Merle’s death was reported, Karen’s search for what happened did not end.