Lindy Boggs Medical Center

Lindy Boggs Medical Center was a Tenet-owned hospital in New Orleans and a sister institution to Memorial Medical Center. During Hurricane Katrina, it lost power and almost all communication while floodwater overwhelmed its defenses. The hospital’s evacuation unfolded in stages: boats and firefighters moved some people toward helicopter pickup, but critically ill patients were left behind when rescuers withdrew. Later investigations examined whether staff had been encouraged to hasten the deaths of patients who remained. The hospital’s story thus joined a practical question—how to move patients through a flooded city—to a profound dispute over what care was owed to those who could not leave on their own.

Isolation and a delayed rescue

On Tuesday evening, Tenet regional business director Michael Arvin called Louisiana’s emergency medical services bureau from Dallas. He reported quickly rising floodwater around Lindy Boggs Medical Center and Memorial, noting that one of the hospitals had lost electricity, and requested state assistance. Within an hour, the hospitals were logged as a high-priority evacuation mission. A volunteer was sent from Baton Rouge to meet a group of fifty-five boats and help evacuate both facilities.

The plan did not come together. The volunteer later reported that he never connected with the boats; he had been told they had been stopped because of darkness and reports of snipers. He joined other emergency workers at the I-10 and Causeway Boulevard Interchange instead. The account places Lindy Boggs within a wider rescue effort shaped by poor communication and fears about security: even when a mission had been identified and boats dispatched, the hospital’s patients did not receive prompt relief.

The NBC program Dateline later described conditions at Lindy Boggs as similar to those at Memorial: no electricity, almost no communication, and a rescue that came late. Water had overtopped the hospital’s floodgates. The facility had no helipad, and rescuers could not count on ambulances waiting on dry ground after a boat trip. At first, staff ferried only able-bodied people who were not patients. On Wednesday, firefighters arrived and directed small boats toward a berm near a post office, where helicopters could collect evacuees.

Evacuation categories and those left behind

The roughly 150 patients were sorted into A, B, and C categories. Some doctors and nurses believed the most critically ill, classified as C, should be taken out first. The doctors and firefighters directing the operation instead placed them last, apparently concerned that adequate medical care might not be available at the drop-off points. When reporter Hoda Kotb asked firefighter Chris Shamburger why this was the procedure, he gave little explanation, describing it as the way evacuations were done.

Acting chief of staff Glenn Johnson recalled marking patients’ foreheads with their category letters. The act troubled him: he thought of people being marked like cattle. Yet he also made an exception to the classification system. When the husband of a paralyzed patient offered to carry her, Johnson changed her mark from C to A, describing it as his one act of mercy that day. Staff carried patients down multiple flights of stairs using sheets, a makeshift method that underscored both the building’s limitations and the physical work required to get people to boats.

The rescue stopped before it reached everyone. Firefighters were instructed to withdraw before sundown because of safety concerns. They left critically ill, hospice, and long-term acute-care patients at the hospital and did not return. A small group of medical staff and other rescuers came back on Thursday, September 1, and began taking survivors out in a small, stolen flatboat; additional patients were evacuated on Friday. Johnson himself left by helicopter on Wednesday, August 31, but was dropped at the freeway cloverleaf with the patients rather than taken directly to safety.

Staff decisions and disputed accounts

The later criminal inquiry examined what happened after nearly all of the hospital’s 175 staff members had escaped. On the advice of fire officials, staff members had put on gowns and drawn C marks on themselves so that they would appear to be patients eligible for military helicopter evacuation. Some photographs showed staff posing in the gowns, with red triage letters on their clothing and skin. The images became part of a troubling contrast: while patients remained behind, many workers had found a way to leave.

A respiratory therapist asked what would happen to the patients left at the hospital and was told that eventually someone would have to euthanize them. Anesthesiologist James Riopelle rejected that idea. He believed the hospital was not about to sink, that it was close to dry ground, and that drinking water was available; although rescue had been slow, he expected it to improve. He had already decided to disobey orders to leave, in part because dozens of pets—including his own—were at the hospital. Two colleagues who also had pets stayed with him. They found themselves with the animals and about twenty-five extremely fragile patients, many of whom had DNR orders. Riopelle later said he saw patients die and moved three bodies to the entrance to deter looters.

Accounts of medication and patient deaths remained contested. Staff member Elaine Bias alleged that she saw ventilators turned off and patients without family members injected with what she believed was morphine, after which they died. Riopelle denied euthanizing patients or giving morphine, and suggested that Bias and Jessie Lynn LaSalle may have misunderstood his intentions while feeling abandoned. He also argued that morphine would not have endangered LaSalle’s ventilator-dependent husband because the ventilator was operating pneumatically from the hospital’s oxygen supply. The inquiry therefore recorded both allegations and denials rather than a single uncontested account.

Findings and wider significance

About twenty-seven bodies were recovered at Lindy Boggs, including patients from the separately owned Genesis Specialty long-term acute-care hospital; some patients had died before the storm. The total was lower than at Memorial, but the proportion of deaths was similar because Lindy Boggs had fewer patients overall. Toxicology testing found morphine in nearly a quarter of twenty-one bodies tested, although only one had levels that appeared unusually high. Those results contributed to the investigation but did not, by themselves, resolve the disputed circumstances of individual deaths.

Two young transplant patients who had remained at the hospital were evacuated by boat the following day and died weeks later from infections. Their families believed abandonment and inadequate care had contributed. They brought malpractice claims against Riopelle, the transplant doctor, the hospital, and Tenet; the claims against the two doctors were later dismissed. The lawsuits also referred to a strong suggestion that patients be euthanized. The attorney general’s office continued to investigate Lindy Boggs, and the book describes the inquiry as uncovering a more troubling story than the public television report had conveyed.

Lindy Boggs also figures in a broader comparison of hospital responses. New Orleans’s public Charity Hospital endured similarly severe, and in some respects worse, conditions, had more than twice as many patients as Memorial across its two campuses, and took until Friday afternoon to complete transfers; fewer than ten patients died there. Accounts from Charity described staff continuing care and sustaining morale through frequent meetings, a flashlight talent show, painting, and laughter. That contrast does not erase the constraints at Lindy Boggs, but it makes the hospital’s evacuation more than a story of floodwater and equipment failure: triage rules, fragmented rescue, institutional choices, and the treatment of patients unable to advocate for themselves shaped who remained, who left, and what could later be known about their care.