St. Rita’s Nursing Home was both a nursing home whose residents died by drowning during Hurricane Katrina and the center of a later prosecution that became entangled with the broader argument over who was responsible for protecting vulnerable people. Its story in the book extends from the vulnerability of nursing-home residents to the acquittal of its owners and the political consequences for the attorney general who brought the case.

Name and Vulnerability

The nursing home was named for Rita, the grandmother of co-owner Mabel Mangano; that grandmother had herself been named for St. Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of lost and impossible causes. The connection gave the institution’s name a history that the subsequent case would make newly resonant, though the book’s account does not suggest that the name determined events at the facility.

The disaster also unfolded against a policy decision about nursing homes’ vulnerability. A draft of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s evacuation order had exempted nursing homes, but that exemption was removed after Col. Terry Ebbert, the city’s homeland security and public safety director, pointed out their vulnerability. The final order therefore included nursing homes. St. Rita’s later became one of the most prominent sites through which the consequences and responsibilities surrounding evacuation were contested.

Residents’ Deaths and the Prosecution

Residents drowned at St. Rita’s during the disaster. The book identifies the deaths as the basis for charges brought against the home’s owners, but the evidence presented here does not detail the residents’ individual circumstances or the facility’s attempted evacuation. The prosecution charged Sal and Mabel Mangano with thirty-five counts of negligent homicide and twenty-four counts of cruelty to the infirm.

The case became part of a wider conflict over the meaning of government failure. James Cobb, the attorney for the owners, and his colleagues planned to call Governor Kathleen Blanco and argue that government failures—including failed levees and failed evacuation plans for vulnerable residents—were central to what had happened. Their argument placed the prosecution against a broader public dispute over responsibility for the levees and the disaster’s enormous damage. It also echoed a tension at the heart of the case: whether the owners could be held culpable for deaths while government institutions were themselves being challenged over failures that put vulnerable residents at risk.

Public Campaign and Verdict

The defense effort extended beyond the courtroom. Cobb collaborated with the legal team representing Anna Pou in a public-relations campaign aimed at undermining Attorney General Charles Foti, who had brought charges against both sets of clients. Foti described the effort as a conspiracy; Cobb later acknowledged the collaboration. The teams supplied the media with negative stories about Foti, while the nursing-home owners’ trial was still ahead. Their coordination linked the public defense of the St. Rita’s owners to the separate Memorial case without making the underlying allegations identical.

In September, a jury in St. Francisville, Louisiana, acquitted Sal and Mabel Mangano of all thirty-five negligent-homicide counts and all twenty-four counts of cruelty to the infirm. Six weeks later, after a campaign by Anna Pou’s supporters to unseat Foti, he lost his reelection bid, finishing last in a three-candidate primary. Federal officials subsequently ended their part of the joint hospital and nursing-home investigations, citing the unsuccessful results of the Memorial and St. Rita’s cases. The acquittal thus marked both the end of the prosecution of the home’s owners and a turning point in the wider investigations into health-care facilities after Katrina.

Significance

St. Rita’s occupies the book’s account as a place where the deaths of vulnerable residents became a legal test of individual and institutional responsibility. The planned defense did not confine blame to the home: it also pointed to levee failures and government evacuation planning, challenging the idea that responsibility could be isolated to the people charged. The eventual acquittal, Foti’s electoral defeat, and the closure of broader investigations show how the case’s consequences reached beyond the nursing home itself, shaping what could be established—and prosecuted—about the disaster’s failures.