Memorial Medical Center Class Action Settlement

The Memorial Medical Center Class Action Settlement resolved a civil lawsuit brought over patient deaths during Hurricane Katrina, but its $25 million resolution did not settle the families’ deeper questions about who had been judged worthy of rescue and whether the hospital’s decisions would change. The case settled shortly after trial began; years later, the allocation of compensation and the limits of legal accountability remained points of anger and dispute.

The Decisions Behind the Claims

The lawsuit concerned deaths amid the hospital’s evacuation crisis, when Memorial doctors had adopted a rule placing patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders last for evacuation. A DNR order meant that a patient whose heartbeat or breathing stopped should not be revived; it did not, by itself, mean that the patient was terminal or should be denied rescue. Yet the hospital’s medical chairman, Richard Deichmann, later said he understood DNR patients to have the least to lose if disaster struck. The difference between refusing resuscitation and being ranked last for evacuation became central to the moral stakes surrounding the deaths.

The book places those choices against the hospital’s longer history. Jannie Burgess, an African American nurse who had worked for decades in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes, could care for patients at private hospitals while being barred from receiving care at them. Memorial, then Southern Baptist Hospital, was among the last Southern hospitals to integrate. That history does not itself determine the lawsuit’s outcome, but it underscores how apparently administrative judgments about care and access sat within an institution shaped by unequal treatment.

Settlement and Allocation

The class action against Memorial was settled for $25 million in March 2011, shortly after the trial opened. The settlement brought the litigation to a close without resolving every family’s sense of what the case had established or what compensation meant. The book records that some families were dissatisfied with their class-action settlements and with outcomes in individual suits brought by families who had opted out.

A later allocation recommendation in the Preston case described payments of $167,229.73 for families of deceased patients, to be divided among survivors. The account notes that the number of children in a family could affect how far that sum went. The figures show how a settlement fund became a distribution among bereaved relatives, rather than a single judgment that could make the losses or the contested decisions legible in equal measure.

Individual Claims and Continuing Anger

Karen Lagasse pursued a separate claim on behalf of her mother, Merle Lagasse. Her suit settled through mediation for $270,000 before attorney fees, which were described as 33 percent. The payment did not satisfy her. She believed the amount was too small to force Memorial or the physicians involved to change their practices, so resolution of her claim did not amount, in her view, to accountability.

In January 2013, Lagasse framed her objection around the decision-making power exercised during the evacuation: “The whole fact doctors would decide who’s worthy to live, who’s not, who’s going to be evacuated and who’s not going to be evacuated, who’s going to be left and who’s going to take them out—what kind of morality is that?” She described herself as a small voice warning that the same decisions could affect another family. Her conclusion was blunt: “They got away with it; it’s not going to stop.” The settlement therefore ended a legal proceeding while leaving her central accusation—and her fear of recurrence—unanswered.

Significance and Aftermath

The case’s formal outcome and its human aftermath moved on different clocks. A multimillion-dollar settlement and a later allocation process supplied legal and financial closure, but they did not produce a shared account of whether the evacuation decisions were justified, whether the compensation was adequate, or whether institutional practice had changed. The continuing dissatisfaction recorded in the book makes the settlement less a final resolution than a point of contrast: the claims were resolved, while the families’ demands for recognition and prevention remained unsettled.