Five Days at Memorial

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Five Days at Memorial Page 41

by Sheri Fink


  Following the airing of the 60 Minutes interview with Dr. Anna Pou, the Louisiana State Medical Society (LSMS) is confident that Dr. Pou performed courageously under the most challenging and horrific conditions and made decisions in the best interest of her patients. Her recent statements regarding the events clearly show her dedication to providing care and hope to her patients when all hope seemed abandoned.

  It concluded by commending her “valiant efforts” during and after Katrina.

  WAS IT HER trembling lips? Her appealing eyes? The fact that the entire medical community to which coroner Frank Minyard belonged appeared to support her? Something about the 60 Minutes broadcast gave Minyard the urge to meet this lady, to chat over a cup of coffee and try to get a handle on her. He had done this before with people accused of crimes he was investigating.

  At some point in a case he felt he had to go beyond science, go instead by his gut, which sometimes aligned conveniently with political interests and the interests of his buddies. Once, in 1990, he had suggested that a criminal who had died after being badly beaten while in the custody of Minyard’s policeman friend, could have sustained his injuries because he “slipped on the floor.” After Katrina, CNN and the Times-Picayune had sued him for refusing to release autopsy records related to the controversial Danziger Bridge police shootings.

  Minyard was now seventy-six years old, had served as elected coroner for thirty-one years, and had recently garnered another term (after going to court to get his sole challenger disqualified), but community opinion and his image still mattered greatly to him. An obstetrician-gynecologist by training, Minyard was inspired by a Catholic nun to devote his life to what he called “the business of serving suffering humanity.” He gave up his private doctor salary and gained a measure of public adulation. For decades, he peered into bodies in the basement office of the colonnaded criminal courthouse, emerging in cowboy boots to play jazz trumpet at city charity events. He kept posters of his younger self in a white suit playing trumpet on a levee and would sign them for visiting reporters.

  Minyard was proud of his office and its history and liked to tell people that “coroner” meant “keeper of the crown,” the person who collected money for the king when someone died. “It’s in the Magna Carta,” he’d say. He considered his job to be different from that of medical examiners or pathologists who use “pure science with blinkers” to draw conclusions about the causes and manner of suspicious deaths. He, being elected, was a man of the people. He felt it was his duty to take into consideration the potential effect of his rulings on the community.

  Minyard received calls after the 60 Minutes piece asking why he was even investigating and why the attorney general was doing what he was doing to “that good woman.” Minyard had watched his close friend Dr. John Kokemor, a former member of his staff, appear on 60 Minutes and in other media to defend Pou and the honor of the hospital.

  Minyard invited Pou’s lawyer to bring her to his office for a visit.

  Pou sat across from Minyard. On his desk was a Bible, on his wall a crucifix. All around them were framed pictures of life in their native city. Soon it was Old Home Week as they discovered mutual friends and chatted about several members of Pou’s large Catholic family with whom Minyard was close. They reminisced about Pou’s deceased father, the family doctor, who had been especially kind to Minyard and had referred patients to him when Minyard opened his ob-gyn practice.

  They talked for about an hour and Pou enchanted him. He considered her a “very ladylike lady, a real, real Southern charming lady.” She told him that she had been trying to alleviate pain and suffering. Pou’s lawyer was there, and Minyard was careful not to put her on the spot with direct questions about what she had done. The conditions she described at Memorial took Minyard back to the days he spent trapped in the criminal courthouse after Katrina. The city had flooded as he was driving back to work. He got out of his car and made it there by wading, swimming, and hitching a ride on a boat. He was stuck for four days. How precious food and water had seemed. How impossible it was to sleep at night with gunshots echoing all around him.

  Minyard’s feelings were less sympathetic than he let Pou know. He believed he would have at least tried to save Emmett Everett. There must have been a way to get the 380-pound man downstairs. It also bothered Minyard that few of the elderly patients who died had been receiving or seemed to have required pain medication before they were injected.

  The first week of October, the expert consultants submitted their reports on the Memorial and LifeCare deaths. In their letters, forensic pathologists Wecht and Baden formalized the strong opinions they had expressed in Minyard’s office in August. The LifeCare deaths were the result of drug injections. Minyard, seeking additional information to help him make his decision, had also sent the patients’ medical, autopsy, and toxicology records to three other experts for an independent review.

  “Homicide,” Dr. Frank Brescia, an oncologist and specialist in palliative care, concluded in each of the nine cases. “Homicide,” wrote Dr. James Young, the former chief coroner of Ontario, Canada, who was then president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “All these patients survived the adverse events of the previous days, and for every patient on a floor to have died in one three-and-a-half-hour period with drug toxicity is beyond coincidence.”

  A local internist concluded that while medical records and autopsies for several of the patients revealed medical issues that could reasonably have led to their deaths, most of the patients’ records did not. In his report to Minyard, he wrote that it was “evident” that Emmett Everett was “in stable medical status with no clear evidence that death was imminent or impending.” (Pou’s lawyer said that Everett almost certainly died of an enlarged heart, not an overdose of medication.)

  The day after the last of the forensic reports was received in late October, Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, documented spending close to two and a half hours and $360 in expenses at Minyard’s office. Perhaps the sympathetic coroner had allowed him to make photocopies of the lab results that Simmons had been trying to get from the assistant district attorney. Two weeks later, Pou’s brother Michael, a trustee of her defense fund, which had been moved after LSU had warned it could not legally be operated from the public university, wrote a $3,300 check from her fund to William J. George, PhD, a toxicologist brought on to analyze the evidence.

  Simmons’s dogged efforts to protect Pou met with more success in early November. The Louisiana Supreme Court denied the attorney general’s appeal of the lower court’s decision protecting Pou’s initial post-storm discussions with Tenet’s attorney and media relations chief. That case was finished. Whatever Pou had told the Tenet employees at a point less clouded by the passage of time and the pressures of prosecution—perhaps an honest accounting of her decisions and actions—would, it seemed, remain forever hidden.

  ANOTHER VISITOR to coroner Minyard’s office was Dr. Horace Baltz. He came in mid-November after Minyard called him one day and asked if they could meet. Minyard had seen a copy of a letter Baltz had sent to the attorney general’s investigators encouraging them to continue looking into potential mercy killings at the hospital.

  The men shared that they were having sleepless nights. Baltz, too, had known Pou’s father. As a high school delivery boy, Baltz had fetched prescriptions for him. Minyard felt obligated to him, Baltz gathered, but was swayed by the fact that five independent forensic experts had agreed that the deaths Pou was accused of were homicides. The case would be going to a grand jury and then, presumably, to trial, which, judging by the calls Minyard was getting every day from around the world about the case, would attract the media in droves. “It would be the biggest thing since the Super Bowl in New Orleans.” To Baltz, the coroner appeared to be juggling a hot potato. Emotionally, Minyard felt bound to Pou’s father. Politically, Minyard was loath to court controversy. Intellectually, like Baltz, he seemed to think the deaths were homicides. It was odd that the coroner sh
ared so many details about the case with a stranger. The next day Baltz sent Minyard an article about Memorial and a letter of thanks:

  For months—like a voice in the wilderness—I have felt out of synch with my professional peers, as relates to the Memorial situation. Like the lyrics of the popular Christmas song […] I asked, “do you hear what I hear; do you see what I see?” I began to question my moral values and ethics. However, yesterday’s visit was most therapeutic, has restored confidence in my judgement, and strengthened my resolve. Thank you. Last night was my first full night’s REM sleep.

  Baltz, like Minyard, cared deeply about his city and his place in it. He expressed that by clinging to high moral virtue, even if that necessitated an occasional confrontation. As a local nonprofit hospital chain, Ochsner Health System, completed its purchase of Memorial and partially reopened it under the Baptist name, Richard Deichmann sent a letter of appreciation to Memorial’s medical staff. This incensed Baltz, particularly given that he himself had not received an invitation to the anniversary memorial ceremony. His pointed, two-page reply to Deichmann began by calling his compliments “kind, but inappropriate.” Baltz had worked at Baptist for every hurricane except Betsy, when he had volunteered at a high school medical station. To him, service in a disaster was pro forma, not “valorous or uncommon.”

  True valor would have been to oppose euthanasia; to lock all narcotics and sedatives securely; to erase all orders “DNR”; to dissuade naive nurses enlisted to execute orders that ordinarily would have been rejected; to assure that evacuees have secure destinations before being dispatched; to adhere to professional ethics at all times; to guard against aberrant behavior of staff members; to demand the Chief Executive Officer and staff be held responsible and visible; and to pray that Devine guidance grace us with sound judgement, serenity, and composure.

  The scenario at Memorial, he wrote, was a horror, but an instance of the horror others faced throughout the Central Gulf Coast region. “Our situation was not unique, but somehow our reactions and responses regrettably were,” he wrote. “Other hospitals with similar stress had more success than we. Was there some inherent flaw in our leadership? Look to ourselves and our behavior. Don’t indict government abandonment, while ignoring corporate neglect. Don’t cite the dread of lawlessness surrounding the hospital, when internally dreadful disregard for law and ethics may have become endorsed policy.”

  On New Year’s Eve at a local restaurant, Baltz spotted ICU nurse Cathy Green and her sister, whom he also knew, at an adjoining table. He shared how disturbed he was over what her nurse colleagues had been accused of doing, and Green turned kinetic. Oh no, she blasted back, they did the right thing. She was helping rally support for them. He saw she was a true believer.

  AROUND THE TURN of the New Year, New Orleans was rocked by two widely publicized killings. Dinerral Shavers was a well-known jazz musician, teacher, and father in his twenties who spoke out against gun violence and was starting a high school marching band to help disadvantaged teenagers. He was shot when picking up his stepson who had called for help. Helen Hill was a Harvard-educated independent filmmaker who had returned to New Orleans after losing her home to Katrina. She was shot by an intruder just feet away from her toddler son and doctor husband, who was also shot but survived. Hill’s murder was the sixth in the city in twenty-four hours. Both her and Shavers’s killers escaped justice. After some witnesses refused to testify against the suspect in the Shavers case, he was found not guilty and released.

  The two deaths drew public attention to extreme dysfunction in the district attorney’s office and police department and led to calls for reform. In 2006 the city had the highest murder rate in the nation at 72.6 per 100,000. Gary, Indiana, was a distant number two, with only 48.3 per 100,000. Of the 162 willful killings that year, only a third were followed by arrests, which had thus far led to very few convictions. Nearly 3,000 suspected felons were released automatically by state law simply because the district attorney and his overburdened assistants had not charged them within the allotted sixty days, sometimes for lack of evidence from the police. Serving two months in prison for allegedly committing a serious offense in New Orleans was common: “Sixty days and I’m out,” the saying went. There was even the very occasional “misdemeanor murder.”

  District Attorney Jordan had reportedly never tried a criminal case before taking office. His homicide unit was struggling to get a handle on the murder problem as its staff left in droves for better-paying work.

  Signs along the avenues posted by a pastor read:

  THOU

  SHALT

  NOT

  KILL

  It frustrated the chief prosecutor in the Memorial case, Michael Morales, to think about how much effort and attention were going into prosecuting the doctor and nurses from Memorial when so many violent criminals were menacing the public.

  ON A FOGGY day in late December, Anna Pou hit traffic on her way to a hospital in New Orleans. She called Brenda O’Bryant. “I don’t know if I’ll get there before they take him to surgery.”

  James O’Bryant had another major operation planned for his facial cancer. It was nearly six months after Pou’s arrest, and there appeared to be no movement on her case, but Pou had not ventured back to practicing medicine and performing surgery. Her days were occupied instead with teaching and administrative duties in Baton Rouge, part of helping revamp the Louisiana State University training program for head and neck surgery now that the major teaching hospitals in New Orleans were closed.

  Pou reached the hospital and raced to where she thought the O’Bryants would be waiting. She rounded a corner to see James on a transport gurney being wheeled down the hallway toward the operating room. “She’s here!” he shouted, and sat up to greet her. She hugged him.

  “I’m going to be right here when you come out,” she said. She sat in the waiting room with Brenda and the family. Hours later, they rejoiced when James made it through all right.

  This couple whose problems were so much greater than her own treated Pou with awe, gratitude, and reverence. They didn’t seem to mind that Pou had never told them what happened at Memorial. “My lawyer won’t let me get into conversations about this, but I can tell you this,” Pou had said to them: “I loved all my patients. I would never do anything to hurt any one of them.”

  The O’Bryants believed her and not the allegations. The attorney general had punished them, too, by taking away the doctor they trusted in their hour of need. Brenda O’Bryant—a bright, well-spoken woman convinced that she was neither—told coworkers at the lace factory where she worked that she would not believe that Pou had killed her patients even if Pou herself confessed she had done it; she knew Pou as a Christian who looked to God for guidance, and someone like that did not take other people’s lives.

  If being arrested like a criminal had completely ripped Pou’s heart out, the O’Bryants and her other friends, coworkers, and family members were helping to restore it.

  Pou needed support in this winter of uncertainty. Not knowing what would happen was, she would later tell reporter Julie Scelfo, “the most effective form of torture.” The first days of 2007 brought a new drama. A “spoiler blog” predicted that an upcoming episode of the popular television series Boston Legal would feature a doctor accused of killing patients after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Pou was about to be tried by a jury of television writers.

  Rick Simmons badgered the producers before the broadcast. Believing he could not influence the script, he argued instead that the very idea of the program was insensitive, not only to Dr. Pou but also to the family members of the dead. The timing was inappropriate, airing only a little over a year after the alleged events, with a grand jury investigation about to get under way.

  The producer refused to disclose the verdict, saying only that the show’s attorneys rarely lost a case. Simmons asked for a disclaimer to be broadcast in the local area to help blunt any negative effect on potential jurors.


  A last-minute campaign to stop the network from airing the episode was launched by Pou supporters including Dr. Michael Ellis, an influential fellow otolaryngologist and the former president of the state medical society. Ellis attempted to rally colleagues in an interview for a Louisiana medical newsletter. He noted that public pressure had recently resulted in the cancellation of a book and a two-part television special, O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened. Simpson had been arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend and acquitted in a criminal trial, but was viewed by many members of the public as responsible for the deaths.

  “It’s abhorrent to all of us in the medical family that some of our most respected colleagues, well known personally to so many of us, could be so horribly and unjustly attacked in such a vicious and inappropriate manner,” Ellis said to the Louisiana Medical News reporter. He had taught Pou and known her since she was a child, although the article did not mention this. “Shame on our entire legal community for allowing such a travesty to occur.”

  The day before the Boston Legal episode was set to air, Simmons spent hours making calls and writing e-mails. On show day, he went to the local ABC station for an interview. It wasn’t until he saw the program that he learned its conclusion.

  The doctor on the show—Donna, not Anna, a middle-aged white woman with the same haircut as Pou—“had five patients faced with very painful deaths if she didn’t do something,” one of her television lawyers said. “I need somebody to first establish my client as an underdog—not easy, because she’s a doctor—and then, keep her out of prison.” Just what Simmons was trying to do.

  Looters had stolen drugs. Corpses were rotting. “The hospital was like a death camp.” In his closing argument, TV attorney Alan Shore claimed that New Orleans was not part of America after Katrina. Different norms applied. “During that horrendous week, the United States of America was nowhere to be found.” Only the doctor, by helping the patients go peacefully, retained her “innate sense of humanity.”

 

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