Touro Infirmary evacuation and Odun Arechaga incident

Touro Infirmary’s evacuation during Hurricane Katrina became contentious not only because of reports that critically ill patients were left behind, but because Odun Arechaga’s case exposed a gap between accounts that claimed everyone had been rescued and evidence that one patient had been overlooked. An anonymous Touro doctor alleged that Arechaga was among fourteen patients considered too critical to move and that medical workers gave them morphine before leaving them. Arechaga survived the disaster, making his case a particularly difficult test of what those reports established—and what they did not.

The evacuation and the allegation

An anonymous physician wrote to the attorney general’s office about a military commander who had supervised Touro’s evacuation. According to the physician, the commander identified fourteen patients as too critical to evacuate. The doctor alleged that medical workers gave those patients morphine and left them behind, and named Arechaga among the fourteen. The account describes an alleged decision made under evacuation pressure; it does not, by itself, establish that Arechaga personally received morphine or specify the circumstances of each patient’s disposition.

Toxicology tests on some bodies recovered at Touro and Specialty Hospital of New Orleans found high levels of morphine and midazolam—the same drug combination used at Memorial Medical Center. Those findings lent weight to broader concern about medication and abandoned patients across hospitals, but the reported results concern some of the bodies, not a named toxicology finding for Arechaga. The distinction matters: the allegation, the test results, and Arechaga’s individual experience are related evidence, not interchangeable proof.

Competing accounts of who was rescued

A Touro hospital archivist later presented a sharply different account. She recounted that when a fire-department superintendent said the staff had one hour to leave, even if patients had to be left behind, the workers intensified their efforts and rescued everyone. Her account, which concluded that no patient was left behind, did not mention Arechaga. The book notes that the archivist had not been at Touro during the hurricane and apparently did not know of him. Her version therefore sits in direct tension with the anonymous doctor’s account, while its omission also helps explain how a reassuring institutional story could circulate without accounting for every patient.

The evidence base for reconstructing Touro’s evacuation included state and federal investigative memoranda, interviews, legal correspondence, medical and autopsy records, toxicology reports, subpoenas, and materials from civil litigation, including depositions and court documents. The doctor who made the anonymous complaint and Touro’s president and chief executive declined interview requests. That record offers multiple forms of documentation, but the conflicting testimony and gaps in what individual sources knew remain important limits on certainty.

Arechaga after the storm

Arechaga did not die during the evacuation crisis. His longtime close friend Nina Levy arranged for him to move to a nursing home near her in Illinois after Hurricane Katrina. He died on January 13, 2011, more than five years later. His subsequent survival rules out treating the allegation as a simple account of his death, but it does not resolve whether he was among those left behind or whether he received medication. Instead, his later life makes the discrepancy between the anonymous report and the archivist’s universal-rescue account harder to flatten into either version alone.

A contrast with Charity Hospital

The book places accounts of Touro, Memorial Medical Center, and Lindy Boggs Medical Center against the response at Charity Hospital, where conditions were at least as threatening. Charity had flooded and lost power, working plumbing, computers, telephones, and elevators; it had no helipad, and transferring its patients took until the afternoon of September 2, a day after Memorial’s evacuation was completed. Charity had approximately twice Memorial’s patient load across its two campuses and fewer staff per patient, yet fewer than ten patients died. Its staff described continuing care in patients’ rooms, holding meetings every four hours, and staging a flashlight talent show. This comparison does not settle what happened at Touro, but it makes clear that extreme danger alone did not dictate a single outcome: evacuation decisions, working conditions, staffing, and the reliability of later accounts all shaped how the crisis was experienced and remembered.