Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (58 page)

He had mixed feelings about it. After Katrina’s floodwaters ravaged the DA’s building, the staff had decamped to a cramped office suite with stained carpets and folding tables for desks. Morales saw his new surroundings as improved—the carpet in the DA’s old office had been held together with duct tape. Morales was only five years out of law school and punctuated his sentences with the occasional snort, exasperated sigh, or other sound effect. He was one of a few homicide prosecutors in a city with one of the highest murder rates per capita and a poor record of bringing perpetrators to justice. He was also smart and well regarded by his colleagues. The high-profile Memorial case was starting to absorb all of his time.

While the attorney general’s office had kept the DA’s office in the dark throughout the yearlong investigation, now DA Jordan, in his first term in an elected position, was receiving nasty letters from the public for being associated with it. Jordan hardly needed another unpopular cause. Soon after taking office as the first African American district attorney in Orleans Parish in 2003, he had fired dozens of white employees and replaced them with black ones. Now he was
fighting a federal judgment against him for racial discrimination.

Jordan was caught between powerful forces in the Memorial case. Tenet had money invested in the New Orleans political scene. Pou’s lawyer, Simmons, as well as several of the Tenet lawyers, were, like Jordan, former US attorneys. On the other side, the attorney general had saddled the case with his reputation. Foti and Jordan had markedly different interests.
Foti needed to prove he had done the right thing by arresting the three. Jordan would benefit if the case just went away.

But Jordan didn’t tell Morales to make the case disappear, and the young ADA had his own reasons for lacking enthusiasm. Under Louisiana law, intentionally killing someone as alleged in the arrest affidavit was murder. Morales understood why the deaths at Memorial had merited an investigation. Still, these weren’t typical homicides. The military had been called in to restore order in the city, with Governor Blanco warning that their M-16s were “
locked and loaded,” the troops more than willing to shoot and kill, “and I expect they will.” Morales felt he was being asked to apply civilian law to a war zone.

This feeling was both professional and personal. Morales’s former student clerk, a New Orleans police sergeant who studied law in night school,
was under investigation in the shootings of unarmed civilians on New Orleans’s Danziger Bridge on the tense, chaotic, sixth day after the storm. It first appeared he had been responding to a call to assist police who had been shot there. Morales considered him a very good cop and a very promising budding attorney. Good people, Morales thought, shouldn’t necessarily be charged for the bad things they did in a crisis.

Morales’s ambivalent feelings about the Memorial case contrasted with Rider and Schafer’s undimmed enthusiasm for it. In August they had slapped Pou’s outspoken boss, Dr. Dan Nuss, with a subpoena seeking to find out what he knew.

Morales did not view this as helpful collaboration. As prosecutor of the case, it was he who should be signing subpoenas. They had stepped on his toes and irritated him. Just as the AG’s staff had not cared to involve the DA’s office while investigating the Memorial deaths, the DA would now return the favor.
Morales drafted a letter from DA Jordan to AG Foti asking his office to cease investigating because it “would not be advantageous to the case” until the grand jury investigation was under way.

THE ORDER to stop investigating came as a severe blow to Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer. They had hoped that even after the DA claimed his right to prosecute Pou, Landry, and Budo, he would invite the AG’s team to assist. Moreover, Schafer regarded the investigation as having spider-webbed out in multiple directions, and he wanted to follow the radii out to other doctors, nurses, and staff, to explore the potential for additional charges and arrests. Schafer also wanted to probe a potential corporate thread of responsibility for the deaths, even a conspiracy. He and Rider hoped the DA would grant immunity to some of the health workers who had proffered potentially critical testimony.

By the time of the arrests, Rider and her partners had accumulated on the order of 50,000 pages of documentary evidence. The Orleans Parish DA’s office requested a case summary, and Rider set about preparing it with the help of other agents. The report grew longer and longer as she worked on it.

Rider’s colleagues, who’d had previous dealings with the DA’s office, told her that people there would not be interested in receiving something so detailed, but Rider insisted on being thorough. If the DA’s prosecutors were serious about seeking indictments, why wouldn’t they want as much information as possible? Attorney General Foti caught wind of the internal disagreement and called Rider into his office to broker a compromise. She would write a brief executive summary as well as a more detailed report keyed to the records. The task of organizing the documents began to monopolize her days.

AS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of Katrina approached, Dr. Horace Baltz turned each day to a new installment of a
five-part
Times-Picayune
“tick tock” story about events at Memorial by reporter Jeffrey
Meitrodt. The series was based on more than three dozen interviews with people at the hospital and others, including Anna Pou’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Jeanette, who said she had once thought her daughter “too tenderhearted” to become a doctor. What Anna Pou was being accused of having done, the elder Pou said, was out of character. “Maybe one of my other children could have done something like this, but not this one. Not Mrs. Soft Heart.” The articles also introduced readers to rescuers Mark and Sandra LeBlanc and the story of Mark’s mother, Vera LeBlanc, whom they had come to Memorial to save.

One of the articles said incident commander Susan Mulderick had declined a request for an interview through her attorney. Without Mulderick’s voice, reporter Meitrodt had little way to offer her perspective. He wrote that she had provided her colleagues with “appallingly incorrect information” at Thursday morning’s meeting by “telling them that they could expect no rescue that day,” something his sources contended, but which others would later suggest was not true. He also repeated what the LifeCare nurses had said about Mulderick, from the affidavit.

Baltz realized Mulderick would be upset and called her to offer his support. He had worked with her for decades, thought highly of her, and was close to her family, having long ago helped save one of her younger sisters from dying of a brain aneurysm. That sister’s gift of an Audubon print depicting waterfowl was one of his few possessions to survive Katrina’s destruction.

The tough nurse had bawled like a child after reading the article. She was a proud administrator, fiercely loyal to the hospital, and the accusations in the attorney general’s affidavit devastated her. Baltz consoled her as best he could.

Baltz met again with fellow Memorial Medical Center staff doctors planning for the possibility of the hospital’s reopening under new ownership. While the subject of what had happened after the storm remained off limits, one colleague detailed his efforts to ensure the attorney general’s defeat in the next election. Some of the doctors positioning themselves
for leadership on the hospital staff were ones Baltz had overheard talking conspiratorially, he’d thought, about the need to “convince the nurses” on Thursday morning, September 1. Baltz opposed the idea of a cover-up. He felt that his value systems and ethics were no longer in step with those of his colleagues. There was a new aroma in the air, and he disliked it. On the back of a news story printout about Tenet’s fraud settlements, Baltz scribbled a note for medical staff president Reuben Chrestman. It was Baltz’s note of resignation from the medical staff of the hospital where he had worked more than forty years.

Baltz heard a rumor that there was an invitation-only memorial service and catered reception on the Katrina anniversary in one of Memorial’s garages. After briefly smarting over having been left out, he resolved to organize a simpler, more respectful way of memorializing the victims a few days later.

On September 1, the anniversary of the deaths, he laid two small wreaths at the corner of Napoleon and Clara Streets. He held hands with his sister/receptionist to pray for the dead. A few security guards came to join them.

The hospital was weeks from its partial reopening and Baltz caught sight of its new CEO, Curtis Dosch, the tall, reedy former CFO who had reminded Dr. John Thiele of Jed Clampett when they had rested together in the cancer center during the disaster. Baltz thought Dosch looked ill at ease as he raced past their small congregation.

IN THE DAYS leading up to the anniversary,
lawyers filed petitions in the names of the Memorial and LifeCare dead. Medical malpractice claims and personal-injury actions typically had to be made within a year of an incident. Just weeks after the disaster, eager attorneys had begun
soliciting potential clients. Advertisements ran in newspapers, on television, and on billboards as far away as Houston and Atlanta. One
lawyer had even ridden around New Orleans on her scooter planting campaign-style lawn signs on street medians and near hospitals. “I know black people—I was raised by black women,” the attorney, Tammie Holley, a white woman, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. The families, she wrote, “would drive by the hospital to see ‘where mama died’ in search of answers.” She also obtained a mailing list of displaced voters from the NAACP. “The rest is history.” She wrote that a fellow attorney came into her office and said, “I can smell the money.”

The law allowed family members to seek compensation not only for the damages caused to them by their loved one’s wrongful death, including loss of love and affection, but also for the pain and suffering the patient experienced before dying.
The first suit related to Memorial had been filed just over a month after the storm. In January 2006, the plaintiffs’ lawyers amended the claim, seeking status as a class action on behalf of all patients who died or were injured by the allegedly poor design of Memorial’s backup electrical system, and the inadequacy of its evacuation plan and patient care during the disaster. A judge would determine whether to certify the class over any objections from the defendants. LifeCare, made a defendant alongside Memorial and Tenet, sought to have the case heard in federal instead of state court. Some attorneys viewed federal courts as more favorable to out-of-state corporations. In support of this move, the company’s lawyers argued that as New Orleans flooded, a federal official, Knox Andress, had advised LifeCare administrators that FEMA would rescue their patients. During the litigation Andress clarified that he was in fact a nurse in Shreveport who did regional disaster-preparedness work under a federal grant, but that FEMA had never employed him. The court ruled he did not qualify as a federal officer. The case was remanded to Louisiana district court.

Many families filed their own claims outside of the proposed class action. Merle Lagasse’s daughter Karen
described in her suit how an unknown health-care worker, “Jane Doe,” had removed her mother’s oxygen mask before she was passed through the machine-room wall.