Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office

The Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office became central to the investigation of deaths at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina. Its work involved examining remains recovered after prolonged exposure to heat, interpreting toxicology alongside patient records, and classifying deaths. The limits of the evidence—and uncertainty about how Minyard ultimately described some cases—kept those responsibilities under scrutiny.

Examination Under Difficult Conditions

At first, Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard told Special Agent Virginia Rider that examining the bodies would be useless: they had decomposed in the heat for more than a week before recovery, and, for example, blood could not be sampled to test for lethal drug levels. The obstacle was not simply the absence of a test result; it was that the condition of the remains narrowed what investigators could reliably learn from them.

Toxicology nevertheless yielded findings. In a reported set of eighteen cases, Minyard said nine tested positive for morphine and about five or six for midazolam. Those results established that the drugs were present in tested tissues, but did not by themselves settle what doses patients had received or whether the drugs caused their deaths.

Interpreting Toxicology

The office’s conclusions depended on interpretation as well as laboratory findings. Robert Middleberg cautioned that postmortem tissue results were less straightforward than blood tests from living patients, and that prolonged exposure to heat could have altered drug concentrations. He advised colleagues to consider each patient’s clinical history alongside the laboratory numbers. The group therefore reviewed available medical records case by case rather than treating a positive test as a complete account of cause of death.

Minyard consulted another expert, Steven Karch, while weighing what to tell the grand jury. He gave considerable weight to Karch’s opinion, which was also shared by a toxicologist retained by Anna Pou’s attorney. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden disputed the importance of uncertainty about dosage: he emphasized that morphine and Versed were present shortly before the patients died and that, in his view, there was no competing cause of death. The disagreement exposed a distinction that mattered throughout the investigation: evidence of drug exposure, an opinion about cause of death, and a conclusion about criminal intent were not interchangeable findings.

Death Classifications and Disputed Accounts

Minyard’s statements about the classifications also varied across accounts. He told the author that he had decided four of the nine deaths being considered by the grand jury were homicides. Drafts of a June and July 2007 letter prepared on behalf of Attorney General Charles Foti, however, stated that Minyard still classified only the deaths of Emmett Everett and Rose Savoie as homicides, with the other seven seventh-floor deaths remaining undetermined. The available account leaves unresolved whether Minyard had testified before the letter was written or later changed two classifications.

Minyard resisted specifying exactly what he told the grand jury, saying its proceedings were secret. The uncertainty was consequential because his role as coroner also required him to classify deaths in autopsy reports. The record presented in the book does not reconcile the different totals into a single settled account.

Public Records and Accountability

Under Louisiana law, autopsy reports were public records. When media organizations sought reports on people who had died during Katrina, Minyard initially refused to release them. The Times-Picayune and reporter A. C. Thompson separately sued and succeeded in obtaining the reports, but the copies Minyard provided left the classification-of-death fields blank.

The office’s significance in the Memorial investigation thus extended beyond laboratory work. Its findings were asked to bear on deaths whose physical evidence had deteriorated, while the public documents meant to record official conclusions did not always disclose a classification. The resulting disputes made the coroner’s office a point of intersection between forensic uncertainty, prosecutorial inquiry, and the public’s ability to examine the record.