Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (62 page)

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 shared 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.