October 1, 2005

October 1, 2005, was a turning point in the investigation of deaths at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina: Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer led a warrant-authorized search of the hospital, shifting the inquiry from witness accounts toward records, drugs, and other physical evidence. The search did not settle what had happened. Instead, it opened a difficult evidentiary phase in which postmortem toxicology, clinical records, the timing of deaths, and the reliability of recollections all required scrutiny.

From witness accounts to a warrant

Before the search, witnesses from LifeCare Hospitals had given investigators accounts that reinforced one another. They alleged that Anna Pou had gone to the seventh floor to end the lives of the nine remaining patients; two said she had directly described her intention as lethal. The patients had died, but investigators still needed to establish whether the alleged plan had been carried out and who, beyond Pou, might have participated. Rider sought medical records, evacuation plans, computer hard drives, employee contact information, pharmacy records, and medical waste that might contain discarded drug vials or syringes.

To obtain access, investigators had to persuade a judge that a crime was likely to have occurred at the hospital. Rider reviewed Louisiana law and prepared an affidavit summarizing accounts from Diane Robichaux, Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris. The application sought items necessary to prove second-degree murder, a charge whose state definition included murder committed with specific intent to kill. Investigators did not plan to seek the death penalty; manslaughter or negligent homicide remained possible lesser charges. The judge granted the warrant, authorizing the search that began on October 1.

The hospital search

On Saturday morning, Rider and Schafer joined twenty-two special agents and two Louisiana State Police crime-scene investigators for the search. The team had driven from Baton Rouge and arrived at the hospital at about nine o’clock. It was the largest search team Rider had ever worked with. She presented the warrant to Memorial’s security supervisor, while experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assessed the air and determined that agents could safely enter.

The hospital covered two city blocks and remained without electricity, making the search physically difficult. Rider carried the equipment she ordinarily brought on warrant raids, including flashlights, a radio, handcuffs, pepper spray, and firearms. Heat and the effort of moving through the building limited her ability to search; she left the seventh floor to colleagues, including Schafer, who went upstairs with other agents. The floor mattered because it was where the LifeCare patients at the center of the allegations had been treated.

Building and testing the evidence

The warrant search took place amid a wider effort to establish what had happened to patients whose bodies had remained in the heat before recovery. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard initially told Rider that autopsies might be of little use: decomposition made blood sampling, for example, impossible. A volunteer pathologist explained that drugs could persist in other tissues, including liver, brain, and muscle, or in fluid that collected in the abdomen. At the attorney general’s request, Minyard agreed to seek autopsies and tissue samples from roughly one hundred people who had died at hospitals and nursing homes in Orleans Parish after the storm.

On September 22, investigators had taken tissue samples from eighteen Memorial Medical Center bodies to National Medical Services, Inc., a forensic toxicology laboratory in Pennsylvania. In a later discussion of results from those eighteen cases, the laboratory reported morphine in nine and midazolam in about five or six more. Those findings documented the presence of drugs, but they did not by themselves establish the dose, the timing, the cause of any individual death, or the intent behind treatment. As investigators later reviewed postmortem results, the long exposure to heat and the patients’ clinical histories complicated interpretation; the laboratory director urged colleagues to assess each case alongside its medical records.

A contested record

The inquiry also had to distinguish contemporaneous evidence from recollection that might have changed after the event. By the time allegations reached the media, witnesses could have been prompted to remember details, but reporting and conversations among witnesses could also have influenced what they recalled. Several LifeCare witnesses had discussed their experiences after the evacuation and consulted a written timeline. Schafer, Rider, and their colleagues therefore sought additional interviews that would avoid leading questions, as well as written and physical records created closer to the events.

Records about the timing of deaths became especially important. Memorial pathologist John Skinner and laboratory director David Heikamp had walked through the hospital after the evacuation to identify the dead and record their locations. Richard Deichmann and René Goux had earlier asked Skinner to keep track of deaths. The notes and the men’s later recollections could help establish when patients died, giving investigators another way to assess whether drug findings and witness accounts fit the documented sequence.

Later expert review underscored why October 1 began an evidentiary struggle rather than providing a resolution. Minyard consulted Steven B. Karch, who argued that drug levels in bodies exposed to heat for many days could not reliably establish causes of death and advised leaving the medical causes undetermined. Michael Baden countered that the drugs’ presence shortly before death mattered even if exact doses could not be reconstructed; Cyril Wecht disputed the suggestion that decomposition necessarily explained the high levels found in some cases. Minyard weighed these conflicting views against the prospect of a trial and reasonable doubt. The search therefore stands within a larger investigation shaped by both the pursuit of specific responsibility and the wider failures surrounding the disaster—an institutional context that later accounts connected to earlier warnings and missed opportunities to strengthen New Orleans’ defenses.