Five Days at Memorial

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Five Days at Memorial Page 35

by Sheri Fink


  ON MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, workers raised white tents on the outdoor parking lot across Clara Street from Memorial’s emergency room ramp and prepared a crawfish boil for former employees and staff. Servers dumped steaming piles of crustaceans before guests, who snapped them in half and tugged out their tails. Some doctors had returned to practice at their outpatient offices in the complex, and Tenet had announced plans to reopen the new surgery building where Anna Pou, Karen Wynn, and the intensive care nurses had tried to sleep the night Katrina struck. The main hospital, however, would remain closed. The music was upbeat, the faces downcast, even tearful. Dr. Horace Baltz saw it as an occasion for emotional closure. He came to bid colleagues and his forty-three-year career at the hospital good-bye. The clash of the festive and funereal reminded him of a wake, the darkened hospital lying corpselike before them.

  Baltz didn’t hear anyone speculate on what might have happened to the patients after the storm. Several partygoers did, however, excoriate the absent Dr. Bryant King in a way Baltz considered a racially prejudiced “verbal lynching,” calling him untrustworthy, not a team player, and a troublemaker for having spoken out on CNN. King had moved out of the state after the uproar began against him.

  Baltz departed without thanking his hosts. The next month, Tenet announced intentions to sell Memorial Medical Center and what remained of its other hospitals in the region.

  AS THE SPRING months passed, Rider and Schafer found little of significance to add to the evidence against Pou for the LifeCare deaths on the seventh floor or against nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, who they believed had accompanied Pou. When would the agents be allowed to make arrests? “Not now,” they were told, without explanation.

  In June, Schafer received a letter from a lawyer for the family of John Russell, the LifeCare patient whom Gina Isbell had tried to save by hand-ventilating him as he was carried downstairs after the power failed. She had stood by his body after he died and taken him to the chapel, the first patient placed there and blessed by Father Marse. The lawyer was writing to Schafer because—nearly a year later—Russell’s wife of forty-two years and her daughter had learned none of this. They had received a death certificate from the coroner’s office, but had not been given any conclusive proof as to what date Russell died and how he died. “He appeared to be in relatively good health and lucid shortly before the Hurricane,” the lawyer wrote. “That is when they last saw him. I attempted to contact the Coroner’s Office in New Orleans and my call was not answered.” The death certificate marked “pending investigation,” listing no cause of death, made them worry, made them think that maybe the attorney general was right and patients at Memorial had been injected.

  The urge to learn what had become of a loved one who perished in a large disaster or crisis was so essentially human that it had led to the development of a special field of DNA identification focused on mass casualties. The techniques drew from anthropology, forensics, molecular biology, genetics, and computer science. They had been applied, at great cost, to the jumbled bones from mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina; waterlogged corpses from the beaches of post-tsunami Phuket, Thailand; and the fragments—sifted through for years—from Ground Zero in New York City. A DNA sample from Russell’s left tibia had been taken to help confirm the identity of his body. Unique skin marks were also noted, and a skull and crossbones tattoo on Russell’s left arm seemed to have been wryly placed for the occasion. It said: AS YOU ARE I WAS. AS I AM YOU WILL BE.

  It had taken Russell’s widow three weeks to locate his body, and she was never able to see it because it was too badly decomposed. It was held for investigation and released to a funeral home well over two months after the storm. Russell’s widow felt the need to know more. Although Schafer didn’t know it, she had suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder after the storm, imagining her husband suffering in the heat. She was not aware that he had died before the worst of the ordeal recounted in the news. Schafer called the attorney the very next day and made arrangements to get Russell’s medical records to him.

  Also in June, Schafer and Rider interviewed the nursing director in charge of women’s and infants’ services at Memorial, Marirose Bernard. She described the successful transfer of the neonates the first day the waters rose. After this, she said she had taken charge of organizing two-hour nursing shifts to care for the adult patients staged on the second floor. She had seen patients die in the heat, and had given doses of the sedative Ativan to the one who looked uncomfortable and was crying out, “Mama.” She denied hearing anyone talk about euthanasia, and Rider and Schafer did not press her on this. She said when she had left Memorial on Thursday afternoon with other nurses, about fifteen “pretty sick, pretty sick, awful” patients remained on the second floor under the care of Drs. Pou and Thiele and several nurses. She said she left in a boat, was allowed to take her cat, and hoped to find family members who had departed the previous day and were stuck in the New Orleans Convention Center. Instead, she spent the night on the I-10 cloverleaf, huddled with other staff “because our lives were being threatened.”

  Butch Schafer had a flash of memory. “Were you interviewed by a news…?”

  She said she had been interviewed by a Fox News correspondent. “She says, ‘Why did you stay, if you had the choice of being in your bed? Why did you stay?’ I said, ‘Because I am a nurse.’”

  “You are the one,” Schafer said.

  “I said I am a nurse, and that is what nurses do.”

  Bernard was the one Schafer had been quoting ever since he was in Atlanta with his family and saw her interview after his daughter’s death. Bernard had evoked memories of his mama, a dedicated, white-capped nurse in the 1940s. “You are the one. I remember it now. Absolutely.”

  “We did the best we could,” Bernard said. Schafer walked around the table and asked her lawyer for permission to hug her. The lawyer said it was up to his client. The nurse stood up, and they embraced.

  LATE JUNE BROUGHT a major development in the case Rider and Schafer were assembling against Pou. The Louisiana Supreme Court had, in May, denied the investigators access to anything Pou had told Tenet attorney Audrey Andrews prior to Andrews informing her she was exclusively Tenet’s attorney. However anything Pou said subsequently—to Andrews or Tenet’s media relations chief—was fair game. Rider and Schafer quickly moved to interview the two Tenet employees, and Tenet offered to make them available, but Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, filed new motions in court attempting to block them.

  Although he wasn’t required to do so, Schafer agreed to a hearing to determine the answer to a single question: at exactly what point in the conversation had the Tenet lawyer informed Pou that she was not Pou’s attorney? Schafer’s gentlemanly decision proved to be a critical mistake. He had been outfoxed. Simmons used the hearing to argue for broader protections against disclosure of what Pou had said. On June 26, the lower court ruled that anything Pou had discussed prior to being notified, even if Pou revealed it again in the later conversations, was protected. The Tenet lawyer’s eight pages of notes on the conversation would, consequently, be protected too.

  Schafer planned to appeal this decision on behalf of the attorney general’s office, but for now, the decision frustrated Rider and Schafer’s efforts to get key evidence of Pou’s unguarded conversation with the Tenet employees. After months of waiting, it seemed that their case would have to go forward without the information.

  One weekday afternoon in July, several weeks after the court’s decision, Rider received a call from her chief, telling her the arrests of Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo could take place the next week. The timing disappointed her. She was at last heading to Dallas to interview a Tenet official and then planned to fly to Las Vegas to take a Certified Forensic Accountant exam. She’d had to postpone the test once to search the hospital the previous year.

  She had already written up a draft arrest warrant. She offered to take it down to the courthouse on Friday before she left town
. Another special agent could then make the arrests.

  No, she was told. Attorney General Foti wants you to execute the warrant.

  She said she could still take the affidavit to the court on Friday, get it signed before her trip, and then return on the red-eye flight from Las Vegas, arriving in New Orleans by ten thirty a.m. the following Thursday. Someone could pick her up at the airport and they could carry out the warrant. Rider assumed arrangements would be made with Pou’s lawyer for Pou to turn herself in and be booked. This was, most of the time, the way things were done, particularly when the target was a professional not deemed a flight risk.

  “You can’t get the warrant signed early.”

  Rider wondered why. Her boss directed her to get the warrant signed at six p.m. on Monday. She was to execute it the same day, after the ten o’clock news. She would have to cancel her trip. These would be surprise arrests. The director’s job was on the line if the “targets” were lost.

  That weekend, Rider began surveillance on Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo.

  CHAPTER 9

  ANNA POU HAD FINALLY and quietly returned to performing surgery. Months had passed since her name was broadcast, and little seemed to be happening with the investigation at the attorney general’s office, although rumor had it something might soon emerge.

  James O’Bryant, her patient before Katrina, had developed facial pain again. A scan showed the cancer had grown back behind his left eye and needed to be removed. He said he wasn’t sure he wanted to undergo another extensive operation. The chairman of Pou’s department, Dr. Dan Nuss, believed he could remove the whole tumor, and O’Bryant decided to let him try. Pou would work alongside Nuss to reconstruct O’Bryant’s face.

  The operation took place on Thursday, July 6. The surgeons painstakingly removed bits of tissue, sending them for a rough initial check under a microscope for cancer cells before cutting deeper. Over many hours, they pursued the tumor’s tentacles only to discover that it had invaded a bone around a previously removed blood vessel. The scan had not shown this. To get all the cancer, they would need to open O’Bryant’s skull, something they felt he could not withstand. Twenty hours into the operation, they closed his face as best as they could and left part of the tumor inside him.

  A nurse walked into O’Bryant’s room after the operation. “Oh my God,” she said. “What do they expect me to do with this?”

  “Please just act like you know what the hell you’re doing,” O’Bryant’s wife, Brenda, said. “He’s frightened to death.”

  Patients with shocking facial deformities were new to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, a Franciscan-run hospital in Baton Rouge. Pou and her Louisiana State University head and neck surgery colleagues were operating there now because the New Orleans hospitals where their department had been based had not reopened.

  After Pou learned from Brenda O’Bryant about how the nurses were treating James, she called a meeting with the staff members. They crowded into a room with a computer, and Pou showed them step-by-step what procedures had been done and how James had reached his current condition. She explained why following every last detail of her care instructions was so important to helping the fragile tissues of his reconstructed face heal.

  Pou worried about O’Bryant’s recovery. She posted signs in the intensive care unit warning anyone caring for him not to put pressure on the left side of his face, head, neck, shoulder, or arm.

  FRIDAY, JULY 14, 2006

  DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN NUSS had friends in high places. Through him, Pou and her attorney, Rick Simmons, learned that Foti was likely to release the findings of his investigation, and they would not be good for Pou. Someone from the attorney general’s office called the department asking for Pou’s address, a worrisome development.

  On Friday afternoon, Simmons phoned the attorney general’s office. “Are you going to arrest my client?” he asked. “No, not right now,” prosecutor Butch Schafer said, somewhat honestly. “We can self-surrender,” Simmons reminded him. They had discussed this before. Simmons would deliver Pou to be booked in order to avoid the indignity of a surprise arrest. Attorneys for Lori Budo and Cheri Landry had also expressed a preference for self-surrender. Simmons assumed they all had a deal.

  Simmons asked Schafer to give him a call so he could bring Pou in and avoid a “perp walk.” He didn’t want news crews tipped off, snapping photographs of his client being led to jail in handcuffs. Schafer assured him that wasn’t going to happen.

  Simmons placed a few other phone calls and told Pou to keep her surgery schedule. Pou had plans to spend a long weekend off in New Orleans with her mother. She gave that up, instead picking up her mom and driving the seventy-five miles back to the capital where Pou now stayed part-time at a home she did not own. Throughout the weekend, she checked on O’Bryant in the ICU, spoke with his nurses, and sat with Brenda, consoling her.

  SUNDAY, JULY 16, 2006

  THE ARREST TEAMS had printed out Yahoo! maps on Friday and checked their targets’ work schedules. On Sunday afternoon they met to learn the surveillance plan. Pairs of agents began watching Anna Pou, Lori Budo, and Cheri Landry in four-hour shifts, following them between their homes and worksites. They were instructed to “maintain visual” and know the women’s whereabouts at all times in preparation for the planned arrests of all three women on Monday.

  Anna Pou’s cell phone rang on Sunday evening. It was Brenda O’Bryant calling about James. Hours earlier at the hospital, a doctor in training had tugged at what he thought was a stitch that needed to be removed. He had in fact torn away part of a scab, but James had seemed all right. He was discharged as planned and the couple drove two hours home to Bogalusa, a paper mill town on the Pearl River at the Louisiana-Mississippi border. In 1995, a chemical accident in Bogalusa poisoned thousands and led to a class action lawsuit that was settled months before Hurricane Katrina. Brenda figured that the orange cloud that had hovered over the city for several days had caused James’s cancer.

  At around seven thirty p.m., Brenda noticed blood pooling beneath James’s face and called Pou, who instructed her to put something cold on his wound and head to the nearest emergency room. Pou asked to speak with the ER doctor on Brenda’s cell phone. At first he refused to take the call. Brenda insisted and handed him her phone. Pou asked him to check several things. He seemed annoyed and gave the phone back to Brenda.

  Pou kept Brenda on the line, even when a security guard escorted her out of the ER for violating the hospital’s no-cell-phone policy. Pou convinced her not to hang up. “I need to know what’s going on,” she said.

  The bleeding seemed to have stopped. If it started again, it could be catastrophic. Pou told Brenda to make sure James was observed for at least an hour in the ER, then taken back to Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge by car or ambulance. “I can’t do anything without seeing him,” Pou said. “You’ve got to bring him back here.”

  James was experiencing more pain. He began praying aloud. Then his wound started gushing.

  The ER doctor put a stitch in his face to stop the bleeding. It seemed to work, but Pou wasn’t yet comfortable letting Brenda drive James to Baton Rouge. Blood might be gathering in a confined space beneath the surface, a hematoma, its pressure growing.

  James said his pain was getting worse. The doctor didn’t seem to believe him. He acted as if James were an addict seeking narcotics.

  Then James’s face erupted. The staff rushed him into an ambulance. He was bleeding so profusely that on the way to Baton Rouge, they transfused him with two units of blood.

  Pou prepared the operating room. She called her chairman, Dan Nuss, telling him he had to come in on a Sunday night. The surgical nurses arrived, and the staff scrubbed their hands and arms and donned sterile gowns and gloves. They operated on O’Bryant through the night.

  THE SAME NIGHT, Attorney General Foti met by speakerphone with agents and prosecutors to go over the arrest plan for Monday. One prosecutor suggested upping the
charges from second- to first-degree murder. Murdering with the specific intent to kill someone older than sixty-five, or more than one person of any age, fit the state’s definition of the more serious crime.

  “No!” Foti’s public information director Kris Wartelle nearly shouted. The idea of prosecuting Katrina health professionals for first-degree murder was crazy. Merely investigating them for second-degree murder had provoked angry letters from the public. A second-degree murder conviction would carry a lifetime sentence of hard labor without parole in Louisiana. The only thing to gain from first-degree charges was the option to pursue the death penalty.

  One attorney on the call suggested dialing down the charges to manslaughter; murders committed in “sudden passion” with loss of self-control after a provocation, or in cases where there was no intent to kill, carried a maximum sentence of forty years’ imprisonment. The voices advocating for second-degree murder prevailed.

  Wartelle sensed that sending agents out to arrest the women was a terrible idea from a PR standpoint. She gave Attorney General Foti advice on how to avoid media attention during the arrests, so the television cameras did not catch the women in a perp walk and broadcast the footage on the popular “Live at Five” evening or ten o’clock nightly television news. She asked him to slow down, to go over with her the questions he might face at a press conference after the arrests. He did not.

  Prosecutor Butch Schafer and Special Agent Virginia Rider also disliked the idea of surprise arrests. Rider bore responsibility for organizing them, and Schafer knew she was not enthusiastic about slapping handcuffs onto suspects’ wrists. Schafer made his opinion known in the strongest possible terms within the attorney general’s office. Letting people turn themselves in was done every day; it hadn’t occurred to Schafer these arrests would go any other way. He knew the women’s attorneys expected they would be allowed to deliver their clients to be booked. He had given them his word he would contact them if their clients were going to be arrested, and a Southern gentleman didn’t violate a gentleman’s promise. But it was the attorney general who had the power to make this decision. Perhaps he wanted to use the case to establish his strength as a prosecutor after spending three decades as a sheriff.

 

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