Therese Mendez

Therese Mendez was the nurse executive at LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans during the crisis at Memorial Medical Center. As patients and staff faced evacuation, she urged a family member to leave, tried to shield her own staff from a decision she believed had been made above them, and later described that decision to investigators. Her account became important evidence in an inquiry into patient deaths, while also revealing how a widespread but mistaken belief in military control influenced what staff thought they could do.

Role and Responsibilities

Mendez held a senior nursing role at LifeCare, whose patients occupied a unit within Memorial. Her work during the emergency ranged from persuading relatives to leave to communicating with other LifeCare staff about patients and the evacuation. She had been working overnight on the first floor before returning to the seventh-floor unit on Thursday morning, September 1. In the aftermath, investigators treated her as one of the initial witnesses whose account could help establish what had happened there.

Her position brought her into contact with patients’ families at moments when evacuation meant separation. Kathryn Nelson, who had spent more than a month and a half with her hospitalized mother, resisted leaving. Nelson had even asked earlier in the week whether she could be admitted as a patient so that she and her mother could travel together. Mendez tried to persuade her that she needed to go while a chance to leave remained. Exhausted after working overnight on the first floor, Mendez spoke sharply, telling Nelson that her mother was dying. Nelson answered that she was dying too, although she had no cancer; she later recognized the claim as an attempt to keep from being separated from her mother. Mendez’s insistence was remembered as unusually forceful by Nelson and was later confirmed in Mendez’s own recollection that she had spoken firmly to motivate her to leave.

Mendez’s intervention did not make the separation easier. After the evacuation, she returned with additional people, including someone who may have been a security guard or police officer, and Nelson was allowed a few minutes to say goodbye. Nelson, a registered nurse, spoke to her mother, prayed over her, and then left LifeCare with Mendez. The episode shows Mendez using her authority to get a family member out of the hospital even when doing so meant pressing against a bond Nelson was desperate to preserve.

The Seventh-Floor Decision

After working overnight, Mendez returned to the seventh floor at about eight or nine in the morning. She saw that several patients were gravely ill and breathing irregularly. Two LifeCare patients had died on Wednesday, but the others had survived the night despite expectations that they might not. Mendez was struck by how long her staff had kept the sickest patients alive while those patients were assigned low priority for rescue.

Colleagues called for her, and she met Anna Pou in a back office. Pou told her that the patients left on the floor probably would not survive; Mendez agreed, based on what she had just seen. She later recalled that Pou then said a decision had been made to administer lethal doses. Mendez asked which drugs were involved. She remembered morphine and Ativan among the names Pou gave, but could not confidently recall the rest. Her account therefore conveyed both the seriousness of what she had been told and the limits of her later memory about the specific medications.

Mendez asked whether the plan applied only to LifeCare’s patients. Pou said it did not: staff from another part of the hospital were coming to help, and LifeCare employees should collect their belongings and leave. Mendez went to gather her colleagues. She was in tears, and she wanted the floor nurses and aides—who had worked to keep their patients alive until rescue—to be away from what she believed would happen. Her actions combined a wish to protect staff from witnessing the next stage with a decision to remove them from the patient area, leaving them unable to continue their work there.

Mendez understood Pou to be acting under instructions from a higher authority. She believed that martial law had been declared and that the military was making decisions, an assertion repeated among hospital staff despite being incorrect. Helicopters were removing people in large numbers, and Mendez interpreted the situation through the idea of an emergency retreat in which everything, including those least likely to be rescued, might be left behind. This belief helps explain why she did not describe herself as challenging Pou’s announcement: in her account, the decision appeared to come from an authority beyond the hospital staff with whom she worked. It does not establish that military orders existed or that Mendez knew who had made the decision.

Evacuation and Separation

As the evacuation proceeded, Mendez and other LifeCare leaders tried to reach patients who had been moved to the second floor. Their route was blocked by a Memorial employee, who said that staff had been directed away from the area where DNR patients were located. One colleague whispered to Mendez that they might break away and search for the patients. Mendez discouraged the attempt, fearing they would be shot or arrested. Only the LifeCare pharmacist was allowed through to the garage with medication; the others were given an email address for later inquiries about which patients had died. Someone wrote the address on Mendez’s scrub shirt.

The blocked route made the practical consequences of the evacuation plain: the LifeCare team could not simply return to patients or check their condition. Mendez’s response was shaped by the threat she perceived, not by certainty about what had happened to each person. Near noon, when LifeCare leaders left the seventh floor to join the evacuation lines, Mendez told another nursing director that the patients were gone. That statement conveyed what she had been told and feared, rather than a verified accounting of their outcomes.

Testimony and Investigation

Mendez gave investigators her account by cell phone from a house she had temporarily reentered through a window. She had left a hotel and driven eight hours toward New Orleans, only to learn that residents were not yet allowed back into her neighborhood. With Hurricane Rita forming in the Gulf and news coverage making her fear another evacuation, she was describing the hospital crisis amid renewed uncertainty about whether she would again have to leave home.

Investigators asked her to begin with her last day at Memorial. She described the morning’s helicopter activity, the condition of the patients, her conversation with Pou, the announcement about lethal doses, and the instruction for LifeCare staff to leave. Her account was consistent in its central features with that of Diane Robichaux, while differing in smaller details. Investigators considered those differences compatible with independent recollections rather than evidence that the accounts had been fabricated to match. Mendez’s testimony also placed the alleged decision at a consequential point in the sequence: she said it was communicated when evacuation was under way, not merely while staff were still waiting for rescue.

Mendez’s account became part of Virginia Rider’s arrest-warrant affidavit. The affidavit drew on interviews with Mendez and three other initial LifeCare witnesses and described what they had heard about patients not being expected to make it out, the announcement of lethal doses, and the instruction for LifeCare staff to leave. Mendez’s recollection that Pou had named drugs was limited: she remembered morphine and Ativan but was unsure of the others. Her testimony supported the investigators’ reconstruction of what staff had been told; it did not, by itself, answer who had authorized the alleged plan or determine the cause of any individual patient’s death.

Significance

Mendez’s role in the account is defined by a tension between patient advocacy and perceived powerlessness. She had seen LifeCare staff keep critically ill patients alive through the night and was astonished that they had lasted as long as they did. Yet when she understood that a lethal-medication decision had been made, she believed it came from higher authority and removed her colleagues from the scene rather than confronting the decision directly. She also pushed Kathryn Nelson to leave even as Nelson fought to remain with her mother, treating departure as a narrow opportunity that could close.

The book places Mendez’s recollections beside the institutional uncertainty that followed: investigators still wanted to know who had made the decision, while staff accounts reflected a rumor of martial law that had spread through the hospital. Mendez’s testimony is therefore significant both as an account of the alleged announcement and as evidence of the conditions under which staff interpreted it. Her memory preserves a distinction central to the inquiry: what she said Pou told her, what she believed about the authority behind it, and what remained unknown.