The Search of Memorial Medical Center was a warrant-authorized investigation into allegations that patients had been given drugs with the intention of ending their lives during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. On October 1, 2005, Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer led a large team through the still powerless hospital to seek evidence that could corroborate witness accounts. The search yielded drug records and medical items relevant to those allegations, but it did not by itself resolve what had been administered, why, or whether the drugs caused the deaths.

The investigation and the warrant

LifeCare witnesses had given investigators accounts that reinforced one another. They alleged that Dr. Anna Pou had gone to the seventh floor to end the lives of nine surviving patients; two witnesses recalled her directly describing her intention as lethal. The patients had died, but investigators still needed to establish whether the alleged plan had been carried out, who else had participated, and whether physical evidence supported the witnesses. Rider’s list of requested material included records for every deceased patient, evacuation plans, computer drives, employee information, pharmacy records, and medical waste that might contain discarded vials or syringes.

The previous visit by investigators had met an unwelcome response, so Rider and Schafer expected that the hospital would not agree to a voluntary search. Schafer consulted his superiors about possible charges while Rider reviewed Louisiana law and prepared an affidavit. It summarized accounts from Diane Robichaux, Therese Mendez, Kristy Johnson, and Steven Harris and sought items necessary to prove second-degree murder. Under the state’s definition, that offense required specific intent to kill. The investigators did not seek a first-degree murder charge; they considered the circumstances inconsistent with pursuing the death penalty, while lesser charges remained possible. A judge granted the warrant.

The case unfolded against the conditions inside Memorial during the disaster: patients and staff had faced failed power distribution, heat, and a difficult evacuation. The hospital’s main generators stood above flood level, but essential parts of the electrical system were vulnerable to water. Earlier, doctors had also decided that patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders would be evacuated last, although such an order meant that a patient should not be revived after breathing or heartbeat stopped; it was not itself a determination that the patient had a terminal condition. Those circumstances formed part of the background investigators had to assess, not a substitute for evidence about particular patients or particular doses.

The October 1 search

The next day, Rider and Schafer joined twenty-two special agents, including investigators from the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and the federal health department’s inspector general’s office, along with two Louisiana State Police crime-scene investigators. The team drove from Baton Rouge and arrived at about nine in the morning. It was Rider’s largest search operation to date. She gave Memorial’s security supervisor a copy of the warrant, and specialists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention checked the air before the agents entered.

The hospital covered two city blocks and remained without electricity. Agents worked through the building with flashlights; the heat made moving through rooms and climbing stairs difficult. Rider searched several floors but left the seventh floor to Schafer and other agents. A security guard’s passkey opened most doors, but the Memorial and LifeCare pharmacies had to be forced open with a battering ram. Investigators also encountered a nursery whose painted walls were covered in black mold. The search was documented with photographs and video, and computers and a server were removed for later examination.

The conditions also challenged some public accounts of the hospital’s shortages. Schafer found water bottles stacked high, along with canned food in the kitchen and supplies distributed around the building. The observation did not answer the questions about patient care or medication, but it gave investigators a concrete basis to question claims that the hospital had simply run out of food and water.

Items recovered and their significance

In the pharmacies, a forensic scientist inventoried morphine, and agents seized pharmacy records. Among them were three prescriptions dated September 1, 2005, for large amounts of morphine, signed by Anna Pou. The prescriptions established that the drugs had been ordered; by themselves, they did not establish who received medication, how much was administered, or what a prescriber intended.

On LifeCare’s seventh floor, investigators found boxes of morphine ampoules left in the open at a nursing station beneath windows facing the helipad. In the garbage can in Room 7305, shared by Rose Savoie and Alice Hutzler, they found a translucent bag full of syringes like the one Steven Harris had described. In Emmett Everett’s room, they seized a saline push syringe from a bedside table beside a box fan; a meal tray remained nearby. In the second-floor lobby, multiple morphine vials and boxes sat on a blue tray. The team also removed digital equipment in hopes of recovering records and turned the seized medical items over to the state police laboratory for fingerprint and drug-trace analysis. Rider’s laboratory request identified Anna Pou and described the suspected case as involving multiple patients at Memorial.

Investigators returned four days later with permission from Tenet officials and a Tenet attorney. They found additional syringes and medical waste in the LifeCare therapy charting room, where witnesses had said they sat and spoke with Pou about Everett. Elsewhere in Memorial they located Pou’s employment agreement, a staff roster, and the hospital’s emergency policies and procedures. The second visit supplemented the warrant search with material that could help reconstruct both staff roles and institutional procedures.

Forensic evidence and its limits

The physical search formed only one part of a larger evidentiary chain. Investigators had initially feared that the bodies, exposed to heat for more than a week before recovery, would not yield usable samples. Frank Minyard had told Rider that decomposition made blood testing for lethal drug levels impractical. A volunteer pathologist, however, advised that drugs could remain detectable in liver, brain, muscle, or abdominal fluid. At the attorney general’s request, tissue samples were collected from deceased patients in New Orleans, including eighteen Memorial patients, and sent to National Medical Services, Inc., in Pennsylvania for testing.

When toxicologist Robert Middleberg reported on the first eighteen cases, nine were positive for morphine and about five or six for Midazolam. Later analysis found morphine, Midazolam, or both in twenty-three of forty-one bodies from Memorial and LifeCare. These results established drug presence in the sampled tissues, but they did not automatically establish dose, timing, cause of death, or intent. The bodies’ prolonged exposure to heat could have affected concentrations, so Middleberg urged the reviewers to consider each patient’s clinical history alongside the laboratory findings.

That case-by-case work raised further questions: whether a patient had received one large dose or repeated doses; whether kidney or liver disease could have slowed the processing of medication; whether the combination could dangerously suppress breathing in someone not on a respirator; and whether the possible effects aligned with the known or recorded times of death. Alice Hutzler, a ninety-year-old LifeCare patient being treated for pneumonia, was one example the experts examined. Morphine and Midazolam were detected in her liver, brain, and muscle, but neither appeared in her chart, which had been kept current until a few hours before her death was recorded. The available record described her as resting comfortably the previous afternoon and did not document pain or distress that night.

Disputed interpretations

The same evidence prompted sharply different assessments. Steven Karch, whom Minyard consulted, argued that drug concentrations in bodies exposed to high temperatures for many days could not reliably establish the medical cause of death; he recommended leaving the causes undetermined. Michael Baden countered that uncertainty about the precise dose did not erase the significance of finding the drugs shortly before death when no competing cause was evident. Cyril Wecht likewise argued that some measured levels were very high. He tested whether hot, humid conditions changed drug levels in samples from known overdose deaths and found no significant difference from refrigerated samples, though the study was small, unpublished, and not independently validated.

The search therefore produced corroboration, not a self-contained verdict. Prescriptions, open ampoules, syringes, witness descriptions, patient records, and toxicology findings each answered different questions and carried different limitations. Their value depended on how well they aligned patient by patient, and experts disagreed about how much the postmortem results could establish. The event’s significance lies in that evidentiary transition: allegations made in the aftermath of a failed evacuation became a physical and forensic investigation, while the recovered evidence sharpened the inquiry without removing uncertainty about causation or intent.