St. Rita’s Nursing Home Disaster During Katrina was one of the deadliest nursing-home tragedies of Hurricane Katrina. More than thirty residents apparently drowned at the single-story home near failed levees in St. Bernard Parish. The disaster became both a test of evacuation responsibility and a contested criminal case: the owners were accused of failing to move residents before the storm, while their attorney argued that evacuation itself could expose vulnerable people to lethal danger.

The evacuation dilemma

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered nursing homes to evacuate, but the order was not enforced. Many homes were unprepared and received too little support to relocate residents in the less than a day before the storm’s predicted landfall; about two-thirds of affected nursing homes kept residents in place. The broader evacuation system was strained: residents without cars had few ways out, officials knew transport plans lacked enough drivers, and Acadian ambulances were overwhelmed, with many vehicles stuck in traffic. Some ambulances took patients to the Superdome rather than out of the city.

St. Rita’s stood in a particularly exposed position: it was a single-story facility near the failed levees in St. Bernard Parish. Its owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano, had been urged to evacuate before the storm. The scale of the risk was not unique to St. Rita’s, but it was unevenly distributed: frail residents depended on institutions and transportation that were not reliably ready to move them, while flooding and power failures turned delay into danger.

Deaths and competing accounts

After Katrina, more than thirty residents at St. Rita’s were reported to have apparently drowned. At first, the married owners were described as nowhere to be found. Later reporting complicated that initial picture: the Manganos and their family had stayed at the home and tried to save residents, contrary to what many people had assumed. That account did not settle whether the decision not to evacuate was justified, but it made the tragedy harder to reduce to a simple story of absent owners and abandoned residents.

The dispute also unfolded against evidence that evacuation could be perilous. Before Katrina, three residents of Ferncrest Manor Living Center apparently died from heat exposure while being transported toward Baton Rouge on buses without functioning air-conditioning or adequate water, and some survivors required hospital treatment for dehydration. At Chateau Living Center, where a contracted tour company had failed to provide buses, thirteen residents died in the heat after power failed. These cases underscored the danger of leaving residents in place while also showing that hurried, poorly supported transport could cause harm.

Investigation and public dispute

Before investigators had a planned meeting with the Manganos, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti issued warrants for their arrest on thirty-four counts each of negligent homicide, alleging that they had failed to evacuate residents before Katrina. The couple surrendered. Foti publicly condemned them, presenting the case as part of a wider investigation into deaths at hospitals and nursing homes. The charges were allegations, not a finding of guilt.

The owners’ attorney, James A. Cobb Jr., attacked Foti for acting before he knew the whole story and called his clients heroes. He pointed to the risks of evacuation, which had gained renewed attention after Hurricane Rita: a charter bus carrying elderly residents from Brighton Gardens of Bellaire caught fire, and twenty-three of the thirty-eight people aboard died. The storm spared Houston, making the bus deaths an especially stark reminder that evacuation could bring its own catastrophe. Cobb’s argument did not erase the questions raised by St. Rita’s deaths; it put those questions inside a broader conflict over how responsibility should be judged when both staying and leaving can endanger residents.

A wider pattern of institutional failure

The book places St. Rita’s within a larger inquiry into why so many people died in medical facilities during Katrina. It identifies delayed evacuation, insufficient buses and drivers, fragmented rescue operations, poor communications, and inadequate backup power and water systems among the factors that compounded the disaster. At Chateau Living Center, the failed bus arrangement showed how a plan to evacuate could collapse before residents ever reached safety; at St. Rita’s, the deaths made the consequences of remaining in a vulnerable building impossible to ignore.

The contrast with Charity Hospital further complicates any single explanation. Charity flooded and lost power, plumbing, communications, computers, and elevators; it had no helipad and far fewer staff relative to the number of patients than Memorial Medical Center. Yet fewer than ten patients died there, and staff said they continued providing care until the end. The comparison does not establish that the facilities faced identical conditions, but it emphasizes that disaster outcomes depended not only on the storm, but also on preparation, staffing, leadership, and the choices available to patients and caregivers. St. Rita’s became a symbol of the urgent, unresolved question at the center of the wider tragedy: how institutions can protect people who cannot evacuate on their own when the means of rescue are themselves uncertain.