The evacuation of Lindy Boggs Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina became a study in how rescue decisions, institutional scarcity, and conflicting accounts can shape the fate of patients left behind. The hospital’s immediate crisis resembled conditions at Memorial Medical Center: power and communications were largely unavailable, rescue was delayed, and patients depended on a patchwork of boats, firefighters, and helicopters. But the evacuation’s public portrayal as a story of doctors enduring impossible conditions was later complicated by a criminal inquiry into what happened after most staff had left.

Conditions and Triage

Lindy Boggs had no helipad, and staff could not count on ambulances waiting on dry ground. At first, workers used boats to ferry able-bodied people who were not patients. On Wednesday, firefighters arrived and directed small dinghies and pleasure boats to carry patients to a berm near a post office, where helicopters could collect them. The approximately 150 patients were assigned categories A, B, and C. Some doctors and nurses argued that the most critically ill, the C patients, should go first. The doctors and firefighters directing the operation instead placed them last, apparently concerned that patients needing the most care might reach drop-off points without medical support. Asked to explain the protocol for a television report, firefighter Chris Shamburger offered little more than, “That’s the way things are done.”

For acting chief of staff Glenn Johnson, the system made the sorting visible in a disturbing way: he marked patients’ foreheads with permanent marker. He later described thinking, “Is this what happened, like, at Auschwitz or something? You know, where people were just marked like cattle.” Johnson made one exception for a paralyzed patient whose husband offered to carry her, changing her designation from C to A. He called it “my one act of mercy for the day.” The category assigned to a patient could determine whether that person was moved early or left waiting, even when staff themselves disagreed about the order of priority.

Rescue, Departure, and Those Left Behind

Lindy Boggs staff carried patients down multiple flights of stairs in sheets. Before sundown, firefighters were instructed to withdraw because of safety concerns; they left critically ill, hospice, and long-term acute care patients behind and did not return. A handful of medical workers and other rescuers came back on Thursday, September 1, taking survivors out in a small flatboat. Other patients were evacuated on Friday. These staggered departures left vulnerable people dependent on a small number of staff members, even as the hospital’s organized rescue effort contracted.

Johnson’s own departure underscored the gap between being evacuated and reaching safety. He flew out on Wednesday, August 31, but was dropped with his patients on the I-10 freeway cloverleaf rather than being delivered to a safe destination. The account of his work emphasized his distress over the decisions, his anger at the lack of outside help, and his resourcefulness in replenishing medicines amid punishing heat. The evacuation did not end when a helicopter lifted someone from the hospital: where a person was taken, what care was available there, and whether help would continue remained consequential.

The public-facing account also left out what happened after nearly all of the roughly 175 staff members escaped. On the advice of fire officials, staff members put on gowns and marked themselves with the C triage symbol so they would appear to be patients eligible for military helicopter evacuation. Photographs showed some grinning in loosely worn gowns, with red letters on their clothing or skin. This detail became central to the criminal inquiry and sharply complicated a narrative focused on the hospital workers’ own exposure and sacrifice.

Patients, Pets, and Allegations

The inquiry examined the situation of James Riopelle, an anesthesiologist who stayed with two other staff members, the hospital’s pets, and roughly twenty-five extremely fragile patients, many of whom had DNR orders. Riopelle, who had previously toured Dachau, had decided not to leave the animals behind. He later said he had not expected rescuers to leave all the patients. He saw some patients die and moved three bodies to the entrance to deter looters.

The presence of morphine led to conflicting accounts. On the first evening, Riopelle visited Elaine Bias, a young patient awaiting a liver transplant, after her mother said she was in pain. The pharmacy was locked, but a staff member had given Riopelle morphine in case pets needed to be euthanized. He said he offered Bias a 10 mg dose for her daughter and warned that it might be dangerous because the patient’s liver failure could prevent her from breaking down the drug. Bias recalled instead that he told her to put her daughter to sleep and demonstrated an injection into her IV line; she refused. She also said the allegation had been colored by an earlier conversation in which a staff member told her certain patients would not be evacuated and that “They will give them morphine to put them to sleep.”

Jessie Lynn LaSalle, whose husband had recently undergone a liver transplant, likewise recalled repeated offers of morphine. She said Riopelle told her no one was coming to rescue her husband and that she should let him give the patient morphine so he could “go at ease.” She sent Riopelle from the room. Her husband was on a ventilator powered by compressed oxygen after the electricity failed; Riopelle later argued that morphine would not have depressed his breathing in those circumstances. Riopelle denied giving morphine or euthanizing patients and said the women might have misunderstood his intentions while feeling abandoned. Bias alleged that she saw ventilators turned off and patients without family present injected with what she believed was morphine. The accounts remained contested, not interchangeable findings of fact.

Approximately twenty-seven bodies were recovered at Lindy Boggs, including bodies from Genesis Specialty, a separately owned long-term acute care hospital; some patients had died before the storm. Toxicology tests found morphine in nearly a quarter of the twenty-one bodies tested, but only one showed levels that appeared unusually high. Both young transplant patients were taken out by boat the following day and died weeks later of infections their families believed resulted from abandonment and inadequate care. Their families filed malpractice claims against Riopelle and the transplant doctor, both later dismissed, as well as against the hospital and its owner, Tenet.

Public Narrative and Wider Consequences

NBC’s Dateline report presented Lindy Boggs through Johnson’s anguish, the strain of treating patients in extreme heat, his efforts to obtain medicines, and his anger at the shortage of outside assistance. Anna Pou considered the program a powerful account of what it meant to be trapped as a physician and face such decisions. She said many viewers, including one of her sisters, told her they had not understood what she had endured until they watched it. The report’s sympathetic treatment of medical staff framed the flooding as the enemy; it also mentioned that the attorney general’s office was investigating Lindy Boggs.

Virginia Rider had initially helped with that investigation, which uncovered troubling material beyond the television account. The contrast between the stories mattered: a report could convey the pressure and isolation of the evacuation while still leaving out the staff’s staged appearance as patients and allegations about care after the main workforce departed. The available accounts do not resolve those disputes into a single explanation. Instead, the evacuation remains marked by both the improvised work of rescuing patients and the unanswered questions raised by the people who were not carried out in the first waves.