St. Rita’s Nursing Home

St. Rita’s Nursing Home was a single-story nursing facility near failed levees in St. Bernard Parish. During Hurricane Katrina, more than thirty residents apparently drowned there. The disaster turned the home into a focal point of arguments about evacuation, institutional responsibility, and the difficulty of judging decisions made amid a failing emergency response. Its later legal story also exposed how competing accounts of the tragedy could shift as new evidence and other disasters came to light.

Setting and evacuation context

The home stood in an area exposed to flooding when levees failed. Before the storm, its owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano, had been urged to evacuate the facility. The other three nursing homes in St. Bernard Parish moved their patients ahead of the storm, making the Manganos’ decision stand out even before the deaths at St. Rita’s became a major public issue.

The city’s evacuation policy was itself being revised as officials weighed the vulnerability of people who could not leave independently. A draft of Ray Nagin’s evacuation order had exempted nursing homes. That provision was changed after Col. Terry Ebbert, New Orleans’s homeland security and public safety director, pointed out their vulnerability. The episode placed nursing-home evacuation within a wider problem: an order to leave did not by itself provide the transport, staffing, or coordination required to move residents safely.

The deaths and changing accounts

In the early aftermath, reports described more than thirty residents as having apparently drowned and said the owners were nowhere to be found. That initial account was challenged by later information: the Manganos and their family had, contrary to common assumptions, remained at St. Rita’s and tried to save residents. Their presence did not erase the central question of why the facility had not been evacuated before Katrina, but it complicated a story that had first appeared to reduce the disaster to abandonment.

The consequences at St. Rita’s formed part of a broader pattern of deaths in health-care facilities across the flooded region. Accounts of the disaster at Memorial Medical Center and other hospitals drew attention to patients who depended on institutions for shelter, care, and evacuation. The book also places the nursing-home deaths against the wider toll in New Orleans, where delayed evacuation, insufficient buses and drivers, uncoordinated rescue efforts, and fragile hospital and nursing-home infrastructure compounded the danger for people who were poor, elderly, ill, or otherwise unable to leave on their own.

Investigation and public dispute

Before a planned meeting between Medicaid fraud investigators and the Manganos, Charles Foti, the attorney general, issued warrants charging each owner with thirty-four counts of negligent homicide for failing to evacuate residents before the storm. The couple surrendered to authorities, and Foti publicly condemned them. James A. Cobb Jr., their attorney, answered by criticizing Foti for acting before the full story was known and presenting his clients as people who had tried to save residents. The competing descriptions—negligent owners on one side, rescuers on the other—became part of the case’s public life as well as its legal one.

Cobb also joined a public-relations effort with Rick Simmons, who was assisting Anna Pou, to undermine Foti’s standing. Foti described their efforts as a conspiracy; Cobb later acknowledged the campaign. The dispute connected the St. Rita’s case to the investigation of deaths at Memorial, while also sharpening a question of public accountability: whether the state could blame individual care providers for failures during Katrina while arguing that government and levee failures had caused enormous damage. The owners’ defense planned to call Governor Kathleen Blanco and assign responsibility to the government’s failed levees and evacuation plans for vulnerable residents.

Trial and aftermath

In September, a jury in St. Francisville, Louisiana, acquitted Sal and Mabel Mangano of all thirty-five counts of negligent homicide and twenty-four counts of cruelty to the infirm brought against them. The reported indictment and the later account of the trial list different numbers of negligent-homicide counts; both figures belong to the book’s chronology. The acquittal ended the criminal case against the owners, but it did not resolve the broader questions about preparedness, institutional duties, or how responsibility should be assessed when a disaster overwhelms the systems meant to protect residents.

Six weeks after the verdict, Foti lost his reelection bid, following a campaign by Pou’s supporters to unseat him. Before leaving office, his Medicaid Fraud Control Unit closed its post-Katrina investigations into other health-care facilities, including Lindy Boggs Medical Center and Touro Infirmary. Federal officials also ended their part of the joint hospital and nursing-home investigations, citing the unsuccessful results of the Memorial and St. Rita’s cases. The home’s history thus concludes not with a single, settled account of blame, but with an acquittal and the curtailment of investigations into failures elsewhere.