Lori Budo

Lori Budo was a Memorial Medical Center ICU nurse whose Katrina experience joined an exhausting hospital evacuation to a criminal investigation into patient deaths. In the early hours of August 31, 2005, she imagined returning to the hospital and joked with colleagues about a movie version of their ordeal; later, she was arrested over alleged injections on the seventh floor. Her testimony, the evidence identifying her in connection with Rose Savoie, and the costs of the case to her work and family life make her one of the nurses through whom the book traces both the emergency and its long aftermath.

Identity and the Evacuation

Budo worked the night shift alongside Cheri Landry and was part of a nursing community whose members had trained and grown professionally together. After midnight on August 31, the eighth-floor ICU nurses celebrated getting their non-DNR patients out safely despite the heat, confusion, and physical demands of the evacuation. Two nurses remained to care for the two surviving DNR patients. The group’s brief celebration took place amid uncertainty about whether they would ever work together at the hospital again. Nurse manager Karen Wynn feared they would not. Budo disagreed and said she expected to return.

That confidence appeared alongside a lighter, imaginative response to the day’s events. When someone suggested the evacuation could become a television movie, Budo pictured Demi Moore playing her. She assigned the role of Landry to Kathy Bates, while male ICU nurses who had carried patients to the helipad in the heat were cast in her imagined version as tough heroes. The joking did not erase the hardship around them; it offered the exhausted staff a way to picture themselves as a group after a day that might scatter them.

Budo’s daughter, then eighteen, was with her at the hospital, and their striped kitten, Honey, was in a kennel in the garage. Hospital rules prohibited animals inside, but after working the Saturday night shift before the storm, packing on Sunday, and spending more than two days on hurricane duty, Budo went with her daughter to bring Honey upstairs in the dark. She regarded the cat as part of the family and wanted the three of them together. As she returned to her colleagues, she aimed her flashlight behind them; in her later account, she described sensing a threatening presence following them. The episode ties a small act of family protection to the unusual restrictions and fatigue of the evacuation.

Patient Care and the Allegations

The later case centered in part on events on the seventh floor of LifeCare Hospitals, which operated a unit inside Memorial. In the account assembled by investigators, Kristy Johnson accompanied a taller Memorial nurse into a patient room and later identified the nurse as Budo. Johnson reported seeing the nurse inject Rose Savoie, a ninety-year-old patient with acute bronchitis and kidney problems. Savoie said that the injection burned, and Johnson noticed that her arm was puffy. A LifeCare nurse told investigators that Savoie and her roommate had been alert and stable late that morning. Savoie died that afternoon, along with the other nine remaining LifeCare patients.

Rider’s arrest affidavit placed that eyewitness account within a broader set of allegations. It said that Budo and Landry had joined Anna Pou on the seventh floor, where patients were given drugs and LifeCare staff were told to leave. The affidavit named four patients whose deaths were at issue in the initial murder charges; toxicology tests found morphine and midazolam in those patients, and pathologist Cyril Wecht concluded that the drugs had been present in lethal amounts. These were the investigators’ allegations and expert conclusions, not a finding that Budo had been convicted of a crime.

Budo later testified that she had injected two seventh-floor patients with morphine and midazolam. She said she did not know their medical conditions or whether they had DNR orders, but that they appeared to be dying. Her account resembled Landry’s in those respects, though the nurses described different numbers of patients they had injected. The testimony also raised questions about Memorial’s sedative policy: the policy called for a physician’s initial assessment, informed consent, a recorded medical order, and continuous monitoring with emergency equipment available. The nurses’ testimony, as described in the account, indicated that these procedures had not been followed. The case therefore turned not only on what drugs were found or who administered them, but also on the circumstances and safeguards surrounding their use.

Arrest and Professional Consequences

Budo was arrested at home, where her husband and two teenage children were present. The arrests shocked her Memorial colleagues, who feared that the investigation might extend beyond the three women. Tenet said it had assisted the Louisiana attorney general’s investigation and asserted that, if the allegations were true, the doctor and nurses had acted without the hospital’s or its key physician leaders’ knowledge or approval. The company continued to cover the nurses’ legal expenses, but it also told Budo and Landry that their services would no longer be needed. They had been only weeks away from returning to work at Memorial’s surgical institute as it prepared to reopen.

The loss of work carried particular weight for the nurses. Unlike Pou, who retained a university position, Budo and Landry had no comparable job to fall back on if they could not practice clinically. Budo was the main breadwinner in her family, with two children in college, and had ordinary expenses including housing and car payments. For Landry, who had lost her home and supported an ailing mother, the arrest and employment consequences were also severe. The shared case did not leave the two nurses in identical circumstances, but it placed both their professional identities and financial security under strain.

Their coworkers organized practical and financial help. Nurses created a support fund, solicited donations and messages of encouragement, sold bracelets and car magnets, and arranged food and other assistance. Budo and Landry submitted itemized budgets and received monthly help for bills, food, and clothing. The hospital’s medical staff gave each nurse $10,000, while supporters sought to keep a reserve in the fund. The aid helped with immediate needs, but it did not restore the certainty of a nursing career. At a joint interview, a reporter described Budo weeping, while Cathy Green recalled that conversations with the women could move abruptly from calm to tears.

Friendship, Testimony, and Memory

Budo’s friendship with Landry became visible in a specific act of recovery after the storm. When Landry’s flood-damaged house had to be demolished, Budo went to retrieve a few possessions from the muck. She took several boxes of items home, washed and sterilized them, and returned what she could salvage. The objects represented belongings accumulated over a lifetime; the work of cleaning them was a form of support that did not depend on public argument about the case.

The prosecution later subpoenaed Budo, Landry, and Memorial nurse manager Mary Jo D’Amico to testify before the grand jury about Pou. The district attorney had decided not to prosecute the nurses at that point, but required their testimony under an order protecting them from use of their statements, and information derived from them, in a criminal case, subject to exceptions such as false statements or noncompliance. Their lawyers challenged the subpoenas through the state supreme court. Because murder had no statute of limitations, the possibility of future prosecution remained a concern for the nurses and their counsel even with that protection.

Budo’s place in the record is also shaped by how her story was told. She wrote Katrina Through Our Eyes: Stories from Inside Baptist Hospital, a fictionalized account based on the experiences of ICU staff and their families; the names were generally changed, while the details were reported to track with other sources. She declined the book’s author’s requests for an interview through her attorney. Her refusal leaves her own published account as one mediated form of testimony, alongside the investigators’ records and her grand-jury statements.

The book’s portrayal holds together details that might otherwise be separated: the nurse who expected to return to a familiar workplace, brought her daughter and kitten close during the evacuation, and helped salvage her friend’s possessions; and the nurse who acknowledged injecting two patients while facing allegations tied to deaths on the seventh floor. It does not collapse those different records into a simple verdict. Instead, Budo’s trajectory shows how the emergency’s immediate bonds and decisions continued into years of investigation, lost work, legal dependence, and public judgment.