Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (61 page)

RICK SIMMONS’S EFFORTS to construct a defense for Anna Pou were unflagging but handicapped by a deficit of evidence from the prosecution.
In mid-September he wrote Assistant District Attorney Michael Morales, asking for the umpteenth time for copies of the forensic test results performed on the bodies. Simmons referred to it as an exchange: in return for being given the laboratory and autopsy results, he would offer his own experts’ input on the case.

ADA Morales declined the offer, reminding Simmons that Pou had not yet been indicted. When and if she was, her attorney could move under Louisiana law to gain access to certain evidence that the DA had amassed. But they were not yet at this point in the process. Morales was happy to look at Simmons’s hand if he wanted to show it, but he wasn’t prepared to show his.

Simmons repeatedly reminded Morales that the DA’s office had “absolute discretion” in the case, could reject it out of hand, could simply send it back to the attorney general as a refusal. As Morales underwent a crash course in medical care under crisis, Simmons seemed always at the ready to supplement his information, sharing the defense’s concepts of the case.

Morales was learning so many new terms, he began to keep a glossary: Agonal Breathing; Double Effect; Euthanasia; Palliative Care; Triage. Special prosecutors, division chiefs, and the attorney general had the glossary at hand for reference whenever they met to discuss the evidence and what remained to be done. In a normal case, one charging conference would be held. The Memorial case was on its way to five.

As hard as Morales found it to apply civilian criminal law to a “war zone,” he was impressed at how well the medical ethical concept of the double effect tracked with the legal concept of specific criminal intent, which was required to prove murder in Louisiana. Were the injections intended to harm and kill, or to palliate? He began to view the case from this perspective.

Simmons continued to fight to ensure that what Pou said to the Tenet attorney and media relations chief after Katrina would not be revealed. At the end of September, a Louisiana appeals court sided with him. The information remained protected as Butch Schafer petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to hear the case again.

Simmons also guided Pou, who now harbored great enmity for the media, through an interview with the influential CBS television magazine show
60 Minutes
. The camera crew and producer arrived to film Pou twice. Nervous, she changed her mind and refused to see them the first time.

Simmons arranged for an audio recording of her entire interview with Morley Safer so that nothing could later be taken out of context in court should
60 Minutes
be served with a subpoena. As the broadcast date approached, he was confident the segment would show her in a good light, and he helped orchestrate a chorus of support from professional medical organizations to appear in the days after it aired. Befitting his role as mastermind of Pou’s defense, Simmons even took issue with a plan by the
American Medical Association—an influential membership organization of doctors—to release a statement the day after Sunday night’s show, arguing that a much-anticipated
Monday Night Football
broadcast marking the return of the New Orleans Saints to the restored Superdome would draw local news attention away from it.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Foti’s public information director, Kris Wartelle, had also helped organize an interview with her boss, confident that the broadcast would be a hard-hitting investigative work that would fairly present his side of the story. She had been impressed by
60 Minutes
reporter Ed Bradley’s work with her office on a story examining why police in the majority white suburb of Gretna prevented a largely black crowd of New Orleans residents from crossing a bridge to relative safety there after Katrina. It took Wartelle by surprise to learn that Morley Safer, not Bradley, would be reporting the Memorial story after what she believed to have been an internal fight. Safer’s young producer assured Wartelle the story would still portray Foti as a hero.

Safer arrived to conduct the interview. “Morley’s in a bad mood,” the producer warned Wartelle.

When Safer began questioning the attorney general under the klieg lights, it became apparent the story would be critical toward him. Foti was angry at Wartelle, who argued with Safer for about an hour after the interview and sent a scathing e-mail to a top CBS network official. She felt she had been lied to about the reporter’s intentions.

The segment aired Sunday night, September 24, 2006. Pou’s appearance was a sensation.

The camera closed in on her attractive face. Her lips trembled slightly, their corners turned down in a pained grimace as she stared intently at Safer. “I want everybody to know that I am not a murderer,” she told him, speaking slowly and nodding her head to emphasize her words, as if the American public were a child whom she needed to make understand something vital.

Safer’s face showed pity and sympathy. He asked what it was like going from being a respected surgeon to an accused criminal. “It completely ripped my heart out,” she said, on the verge of tears. “My entire life I have tried to do good.” She argued that she had done the best she could under dreadful conditions that resulted from being abandoned. She didn’t believe in euthanasia, she said, but in comfort care—ensuring that patients don’t suffer pain. Asked by Safer if she ever lost hope, Pou was indignant. As a cancer specialist, she said, “I am hope.”

The attorney general, meanwhile, appeared stiff and distant behind thick glasses, his face shiny and lit from the side, highlighting his wrinkles. Safer asked him, “Would you not think that in case of murder, the perpetrators would try to conceal their actions?”

“Maybe they just didn’t think that anybody would ever find out,” Foti replied, crooked teeth showing between chapped lips.

Doctors from around the country were incensed. “Your Attorney General, Mr. Foti, is a complete buffoon for prosecuting these professionals,”
a doctor from Virginia, John M. Kellum, wrote to the webmaster of the attorney general’s website during the broadcast.

Spokeswoman Wartelle filed a complaint with Kellum’s medical school dean, describing his e-mail as “rude and unprofessional,” and she sent a message back to Kellum. “If you don’t want allegations of wrong doing investigated, then maybe you should contact the hundreds of eyewitnesses we interviewed […] We cannot comment on the evidence which puts us at a disadvantage when viewers lash out without one inkling of the evidence in this case.”

As Simmons had helped orchestrate (albeit on the Monday) the American Medical Association released a statement describing Pou as a member in good standing and the case against her as complex and sharply contested. One of the organization’s top executives was a head and neck surgeon like Pou and worked on her behalf behind the scenes. “The AMA is very proud of the many heroic physicians and other health care professionals who sacrificed and distinguished themselves in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, a doctor on the board of the
Louisiana State Medical Society who had known Pou since childhood lobbied for her within that organization. Members pressured the group to donate to Pou’s support fund, and when legal strictures precluded that, employees posted information about Pou’s defense fund on the organization’s website, which carried a statement suggesting that the strength of Pou’s television performance be used to gauge her innocence.

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.