The New York Times

The New York Times helped bring the Memorial Medical Center story into public view through reporting, magazine collaboration, and sustained editorial work. Its role joined two kinds of inquiry: reporting on disputed evidence and decisions after the disaster, and the careful reconstruction of events that turned a magazine investigation into a book-length account.

Reporting on the contested deaths

A New York Times reporter interviewed Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard about his determinations in the Memorial cases. Minyard said he had not yet found evidence that the deaths were homicides, while also indicating that he was awaiting further evidence and expert reports and could still make a homicide determination before the grand jury. In public debate, that qualified position was repeatedly reduced to the simpler claim that the coroner had found no evidence of homicide. The interview thus took place amid competing interpretations of an investigation that was still unfolding.

The book describes the evidentiary uncertainty behind those statements: bodies had decomposed in the heat, making some forms of testing impossible, while investigators pursued toxicology and expert analysis. The newspaper’s reporting on Minyard placed his public comments within a case where conclusions remained unsettled and where the distinction between an interim assessment and a final determination mattered.

Magazine collaboration and editorial work

The book grew from “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” an article jointly produced by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine and published in 2009. The magazine’s Ilena Silverman was one of three editors identified as central to the article’s development and the book’s narrative structure. Susan White provided early guidance that carried from the article into the book, while Steve Engelberg edited the article with sustained energy as ProPublica’s managing editor. The collaboration therefore shaped not only the initial investigative publication but also the form of the later account.

The project’s fact-checking and editing extended across both organizations. Charles Wilson, David Ferguson, and Aaron Retica checked every fact; among the Times contributors credited were Clinton Cargill, Joanna Milter, Patty Rush, Patricia Eisemann, and Matt Purdy. These credits place the magazine work within a larger process of verification and revision rather than presenting it as the work of a single reporter or editor.

From article to book

The author later expanded the reporting into a book that recounts events at Memorial during and after Hurricane Katrina and follows the subsequent arrests and accusations against medical professionals. The author began researching in February 2007, conducted more than five hundred interviews with hundreds of people connected to the crisis, and wrote the 2009 account for publication by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. The article was thus a point of departure for a broader reconstruction, not the endpoint of the inquiry.

That reconstruction drew on records created during the disaster and its immediate aftermath, including photographs, video, emails, notes, diaries, online postings, and other reporters’ or investigators’ interview transcripts. The author also consulted weather reports, floor plans, electrical diagrams, and expert reports from civil litigation, and visited the hospital and other locations. Dialogue was drawn from interview recollections, transcripts, and other primary sources; when a significant conversation was recounted by one participant, the author generally tried to contact the others, while noting that some declined or remembered events differently. These methods frame the book as an effort to test recollection against contemporaneous documentation and to preserve significant disagreements rather than conceal them.