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In Katrina chaos, did they kill patients?

A doctor and two nurses are accused of the "mercy killings'' of four patients in a New Orleans hospital in the storm's aftermath.

By TIMES WIRES
Published July 19, 2006

NEW ORLEANS - A doctor and two nurses who labored at a sweltering, flooded-out hospital in Hurricane Katrina's chaotic aftermath were arrested and accused Tuesday of deliberately killing four trapped and desperately ill patients with injections of morphine and sedatives.

"We're talking about people that pretended that maybe they were God," Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti said. "And they made that decision."

The defendants were booked on charges of being "principals to second-degree murder," which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

The three were the first medical professionals charged in a months-long criminal investigation into whether many of New Orleans' sick and elderly were abandoned or put out of their misery in the days after the storm.

Dr. Anna Pou, an oncologist and an ear, nose and throat specialist, and the two nurses were accused of killing four patients, ages 62 to 91, at Memorial Medical Center with a "lethal cocktail" of morphine and Versed. The patients' names were not released.

"There may be more arrests and victims that cannot be mentioned at this time," Foti said. "This case is not over yet." He planned to turn the case over to the New Orleans district attorney, who will decide whether to ask a grand jury to bring charges.

Memorial Medical had been cut off by flooding after the Aug. 29 hurricane swamped New Orleans. Power was knocked out in the 317-bed hospital and the temperature inside rose to more than 100 degrees as the staff tried to tend to patients who waited four days to be evacuated.

Court papers and interviews with people who were at Memorial after the storm paint a desperate picture filled with fear and potentially agonizing choices.

"It was stifling. We were hoisting patients floor to floor on the backs of strong young men. It was as bad as you can imagine," said Dr. Gregory Vorhoff, who stayed throughout the storm and eventually hitched a ride on a boat to seek help.

Memorial Medical, he said, "had ceased to be a hospital."

In court papers, state investigators said Pou told a nurse executive three days after the hurricane that the patients still awaiting evacuation would probably not survive and that a "decision had been made to administer lethal doses" to them. Overdoses of morphine or Versed can stop the heart and lungs.

Foti, however, said he believed the patients would have lived through the storm's aftermath.

Two months after the hurricane, Foti subpoenaed more than 70 people in an investigation into allegations that personnel at the medical center had euthanized patients. About the same time, the husband-and-wife owners of a nursing home in neighboring St. Bernard Parish were arrested on charges of negligent homicide in the deaths of 34 elderly patients. Prosecutors said they failed to heed warnings to evacuate.

According to court papers, tissue samples taken from the dead at Memorial Medical tested positive for morphine and Versed, and the amount of Versed present was found to be higher than the usual therapeutic dose. Medical records reviewed by investigators also showed that none of the four patients were taking either of the two drugs as part of their routine care.

Foti said the combination of morphine and Versed "guarantees they are going to die."

Pou's lawyer, Rick Simmons, said his client is innocent, and her mother said she was distressed by her daughter's arrest.

"Medicine was the most important thing in her life, and I know she never ever did anything deliberately to hurt anyone," Jeanette Pou said in a telephone interview.

In December, Dr. Pou had told Baton Rouge TV station WBRZ: "There were some patients there who were critically ill who, regardless of the storm, had the orders of do not resuscitate. In other words, if they died, to allow them to die naturally, and to not use heroic methods to resuscitate them.

"We all did everything in our power to give the best treatment that we could to the patients in the hospital to make them comfortable," Pou said then.

In addition to Pou, nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo were arrested. All three were released without bail. A lawyer for Landry, John DiGiulio, said his client was arrested at her house in the New Orleans area on Monday night.

"It was a surprise," DiGiulio said. "We were not warned, even though they have been doing the investigation for a long time." Landry, who has been a nurse for more than 20 years, will plead not guilty, he said.

Pou's lawyer said she was arrested and handcuffed at her house Monday.

Tammie Holley, an attorney for about a dozen families whose relatives died at Memorial, said the presence of the sedative in addition to morphine is important in determining whether the staff members intended to kill. Versed, or midazolam, is used to induce unconsciousness before surgery, according to a medical Web site.

"If it was only morphine, there would be no way to know if they were administering it to control their pain," Holley said.

Harry Anderson, a spokesman for Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., owner of Memorial Medical, said the allegations, if true, are disturbing.

"Euthanasia is repugnant to everything we believe as ethical health care providers, and it violates every precept of ethical behavior and the law. It is never permissible under any circumstances," Anderson said.

Foti did not identify the four patients. They will be named if formal charges come through Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan's office.

For now, the only identification is by initials and dates of birth: H.A., born Feb. 5, 1939; R.S., born Dec. 16, 1914; I.W., born Jan. 6, 1916; and E.E., born Feb. 20, 1944.

They had been in LifeCare Hospital, on Memorial Medical Center's seventh floor, where gravely ill patients were treated. LifeCare leased space from Memorial.

E.E. weighed 380 pounds and was paralyzed, according to the affidavit filed with the arrest warrant. The 61-year-old patient was conscious and alert, a LifeCare Hospital official told Pou, investigators said.

"Dr. Pou decided E.E. could not be evacuated," the affidavit said.

The affidavit depicts Pou as taking charge and deciding who on the seventh floor would survive evacuation, while LifeCare staff refused to participate in any "lethal doses."

Lou Ann Savoie Jacob, who lives in Henderson, Nev., said the attorney general's office had told her that RS was her mother, Rose Savoie.

"I kind of suspected that she was euthanized, because I saw her on the 28th of August in the hospital," the day before the storm, Jacob said. "She was sitting up, talking to us, no IVs, her blood was good."

Asked if she would consider the death of her mother a homicide, Jacob hesitated. "They made a decision and maybe it was wrong, maybe it was right. I don't know, I was not there."

However, Jacob said, "I don't think they should have euthanized all those people. I think maybe some of them could have come through."

Information from the Associated Press, New Orleans Times-Picayune and New York Times was used in this report.

[Last modified July 19, 2006, 01:25:40]