Michael Morales and Butch Schafer

Michael Morales and Butch Schafer came to the Memorial Medical Center investigation with different roles, priorities, and expectations of authority. Morales, a homicide prosecutor in the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, was assigned to a case already investigated by another state office; Schafer, working with investigator Virginia Rider, wanted to continue examining the deaths and the possible responsibility of people beyond the three medical professionals facing arrest. Their uneasy relationship became a contest over collaboration and control, and the order that ended Rider and Schafer’s work narrowed what their investigation could pursue.

Different Offices, Different Starting Points

Morales had followed the case’s legal filings for District Attorney Eddie Jordan, including Anna Pou’s effort to keep her post-storm conversations with a Tenet attorney private. But following pleadings was not the same as participating in an investigation. The attorney general’s office had not asked Morales to join its yearlong inquiry, and the district attorney’s office generally left investigations to police unless an investigative agency specifically requested prosecutorial involvement. When Morales became more directly responsible for the case, he faced a substantial assignment without having been part of the work that had produced it.

The institutional separation shaped the later dispute. The attorney general’s investigators had proceeded without the district attorney’s office; now Morales understood the investigation to be moving into his prosecutorial jurisdiction. Schafer and Rider, however, expected their accumulated knowledge to remain useful after the district attorney claimed the right to prosecute. The two sides thus approached cooperation from opposite directions: Morales saw an investigative team acting without his office, while Schafer and Rider hoped their work would be welcomed into the next phase.

Morales’s Ambivalence and Schafer’s Momentum

Morales was a young homicide prosecutor with only about two years of experience prosecuting homicides. He was regarded as smart by colleagues, but the Memorial case was arriving in a city already marked by a high murder rate and a poor record of bringing perpetrators to justice. The investigation began absorbing much of his time. At the same time, he saw the case as unlike a typical homicide: the alleged conduct had occurred amid mass danger and military involvement, and he felt he was being asked to apply civilian criminal law to a war zone. He understood why the deaths merited investigation, but was uneasy about how the circumstances should be judged.

That uncertainty contrasted with Schafer and Rider’s continuing commitment to the inquiry. They had pursued testimony and evidence, including serving a subpoena on Pou’s outspoken boss, Dr. Dan Nuss. Morales did not view this as helpful cooperation. In his view, as the prosecutor, he should have been the one signing subpoenas. The investigators’ step irritated him and reinforced the sense that the attorney general’s office had proceeded on its own terms. His response was not to absorb their work into a shared process, but to ask that it stop until the grand-jury investigation was underway.

A Dispute Over the Scope of the Case

The disagreement was about more than procedure. Schafer regarded the investigation as extending in several directions beyond the three people already facing arrest. He wanted to examine the conduct of other doctors, nurses, and staff, and to explore whether corporate responsibility or even a conspiracy might be involved. He and Rider also hoped the district attorney would grant immunity to health workers who had offered potentially important testimony. Morales’s office, by contrast, was preparing to take charge of a case whose allegations concerned particular deaths and particular accused people.

The broader evidence presented difficult questions for any prosecutor. At a meeting with forensic experts, the pattern they discussed included positive drug tests among nearly all tested patients who died after helicopters and boats had arrived on Thursday morning: all nine tested patients from the LifeCare floor, nine patients from the second-floor lobby, and Merle Lagasse. Morales had not been part of the preceding year’s investigation, and the experts’ conclusions did not resolve the legal or contextual uncertainties he felt. His ambivalence was not the same as dismissing the deaths; he recognized the need for an investigation while questioning the application of ordinary homicide principles to an emergency he understood as resembling a war zone.

The Order to Stop and the Documentary Record

Morales drafted a letter for Eddie Jordan asking Attorney General Charles Foti’s office to cease investigating until the grand-jury inquiry began, arguing that continued parallel work would not help the case. The order was a severe blow to Schafer and Rider. They had hoped the district attorney would prosecute while inviting the attorney general’s team to assist. Instead, their authority to continue the inquiry was curtailed, including their opportunity to pursue possible additional charges and seek immunity for witnesses.

By the time of the arrests, Rider and her colleagues had collected about 50,000 pages of documentary evidence. When the district attorney’s office requested a case summary, Rider prepared one that grew increasingly detailed. Colleagues with experience dealing with that office warned that such a lengthy submission might not be wanted, but she reasoned that prosecutors seeking indictments would need as much information as possible. Foti intervened to broker a compromise: Rider would produce both a short executive summary and a more detailed report keyed to the records. Organizing the material began to occupy her days. The episode made the conflict concrete: Schafer and Rider were still trying to preserve and communicate the breadth of their investigation, while Morales’s office controlled whether and how their work would enter the prosecution.

Evidence, Memory, and the Limits of Collaboration

The friction also unfolded against concerns about the reliability of witness accounts. After allegations appeared in the media, investigators recognized that news could prompt memories but might also shape them. Several LifeCare witnesses had spoken after the evacuation and consulted on a written timeline. Schafer, Rider, and their colleagues therefore needed to interview more witnesses without leading them and to gather physical and contemporaneous written records. The need for careful corroboration made the loss of a cooperative investigative relationship consequential: evidence had to be preserved and organized even as authority over the case shifted.

The book’s account likewise distinguishes later recollections from records made during the crisis. It draws on interviews as well as photographs, emails, notes, diaries, official and expert materials, and other sources, while acknowledging that memories can differ and that the author was not present at the hospital. Within that larger account, Morales and Schafer represent competing institutional approaches to an unsettled case: one prosecutor weighing jurisdiction, proof, and the exceptional circumstances of the disaster; one investigator determined to follow the evidence outward. Their conflict did not establish the truth of the allegations. It shaped who could investigate them, which lines of inquiry could continue, and how a large body of evidence would be presented to the people responsible for deciding whether to prosecute.