dr anna pou 60 minutes

sixty Minutes

Was It Murder?

September 21, 2006 / 2:59 PM / CBS

This segment was originally circulate on Sep. 24, 2006. Information technology was updated on Aug. 15, 2007.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two years ago, more a chiliad bodies were recovered in the urban center of New Orleans. Among the dead were 34 patients from Memorial Medical Middle, a hospital that was stranded, isolated, in ten feet of h2o and without power for four sweltering days.

A year ago, Louisiana's attorney general stunned the city when he claimed that four of Memorial'due south dead did not dice from illnesses or even from the horrific conditions but that they were murdered. Fifty-fifty more stunning, a highly respected doctor and ii nurses were arrested.

A few weeks ago all three were cleared past a New Orleans grand jury. But still the case continues to resonate and raise questions about ideals, and compassion in what has been described every bit battleground weather. Every bit correspondent Morley Safer reported concluding September, at the center of it was Dr. Anna Pou.

"It is unbelievably shocking for me that I'm actually sitting here having this conversation with yous on national TV. And I want everybody to know that I am not a murderer, that nosotros are non murderers," says Dr. Pou.

Dr. Pou, along with nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo, were arrested after an investigation by the state attorney general, who accused them of murder by injecting four patients in their care with two different drugs.

"When you use both of them together, information technology becomes a lethal cocktail and guarantees they're going to die," the chaser general, Charles Foti, announced.

The story made headlines around the earth. Information technology'due south New Orleans after all and theories abound: were patients murdered? Was it mercy killing? Did the medico and nurses kill patients who were dying anyway and were too ill to be evacuated? Or were they simply given medication to make them comfy in the nigh horrific of conditions.

The attorney full general had no doubt. "This is not euthanasia. This is plain and simple homicide," Foti said.

"Yous went from existence a highly respected physician to, in the optics of the law, a criminal. What did that exercise to you?" Safer asks Dr. Pou.

"It completely ripped my heart out. Because my entire life, I accept tried to practice good. And my entire adult life, I have given everything that I take within me to take intendance of my patients," she replies.

Dr. Pou has been practicing medicine for more than 15 years — as a head and neck surgeon who specializes in treating cancer patients. Every bit Katrina approached, Dr. Pou headed to Memorial Medical Center, where she was on telephone call. In all, nigh 2,000 people were in the hospital that Sun dark, many of them merely seeking refuge. Afterwards the storm passed the adjacent morning time, in that location was a sense of relief.

Dr. Pou was offered the chance to leave but she chose to stay with her patients. By early Tuesday morning, the city'southward levees were collapsing.

"It was really shocking. The water was squirting out of the vents in the street, the gutters. And water started coming. And probably rose about a human foot an hour," she recalls.

Past late Tuesday, the hospital was flooded with 10 feet of water and completely without power. Ventilators stopped, there were no telephones, limited nutrient, and maybe worst of all the 110 degree rut.

"I don't know if there's any way for me to describe to you how intense the heat was," Dr. Pou tells Safer. "It was relentless. Information technology was suffocating. It made it extremely hard to breathe. And with the heat came the terrible smell from all of the human waste and the fact that we didn't have water."

Occasional helicopters or small-scale boats would evacuate some patients, only nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo say that was rare.

"Information technology was similar, where are the boats? Where are the helicopters? Why isn't everyone coming?" Landry recalls.

Neither Landry nor Budo says they were thinking of getting on one of those boats. "Not until everybody else was out as far as patients or visitors or families. I mean, we were at that place for the elapsing," Landry explains.

Patients lay soaking in squalor. Nurses broke windows for air and fanned patients. The seventh floor was almost critical. A split up company chosen Lifecare ran an acute care facility for the severely ill. Their doctor didn't show, and so Dr. Pou and a handful of other doctors and nurses did what they could.

At that place were sporadic evacuations, simply it took a tremendous effort. Patients had to be carried down equally many as 7 flights of stairs, then back up again to a helipad on a garage. It was a battlefield and several died in the process. By nightfall Wednesday, Memorial was a hellhole.

"The infirmary you take to retrieve was pitch black. We couldn't run across our easily in front of our face. We had to examine patients using flash lights," Dr. Pou remembers. "The patients realized at that place wasn't a whole lot that we could exercise for them, except to provide the most basic care and they were worried, you know. Y'all know, 'I don't experience well. When am I gonna go out of here?'"

Doctors say the hospital had go a death trap – dehydration was a killer.

Dr. Pou says people were dying. Asked if the patients passed from their diseases or from their atmospheric condition, she says, "You lot have to sympathise that in that location were very sick people in the hospital. You had this intense heat. Nosotros had the lack of all the tools that we normally used. Then people were dying from the horrible weather because they were not strong enough to tolerate them."

"Did yous effigy at whatsoever bespeak that yous were really done for?" Safer asks Dr. Pou.

"Because you don't know me, you don't know how tough I am," she replies. "I don't think anyone gave up hope. I tin tell you lot that I didn't give up hope, because as a cancer specialist, what I do is I give hope to my patients. You know, I am hope."

By Thursday morning, another ten patients were expressionless. So something worse happened: give-and-take spread that no organized rescue would be coming.

Dr. John Kokemor was stunned. "That was really what was told to u.s., that assistance was not on the fashion," he recalls. "That we would be on our own. At that point, we were dumbfounded and in a bit of shock."

Dr. Kokemor says they were being abased in result. Asked what choices they had to brand in lite of this grave situation, he says, "Our choice would've been to leave the infirmary and go out behind our patients. That was unacceptable to me and unacceptable to virtually all of our doctors."

Many felt that the patients could non carry another mean solar day in Memorial. Preparations were made for a makeshift evacuation. Several doctors waded out into the floodwaters to endeavor to commandeer boats.

According to Attorney General Charles Foti, that's when Dr. Anna Pou and her nurses injected iv patients with lethal doses.

The chaser general says in an affidavit that several witnesses merits that Dr. Pou, forth with nurses Budo and Landry headed up to the Lifecare facility on the seventh floor, where there were ix patients that doctors say were too ill to be moved.

Foti claims Dr. Pou told the staff "they didn't take a lot of time" and that they "needed to evacuate." She and then allegedly said "a decision had been made to administrate lethal doses" to patients who probably were not going to survive. Witnesses claim that Dr. Pou said she took "total responsibleness." And so, co-ordinate to Foti's affirmation, the doctor and nurses were seen entering patients' rooms with syringes and vials of drugs.

"People testified what they saw – what they heard," Foti says. "We and then spent almost ten and a half months investigating. And afterward all of this – tin can simply come to conclusion that this criminal offence had been committed."

Foti says he has post-mortem evidence that shows that the Lifecare patients, two men and two women anile 61 to 90, had high levels of the painkiller morphine and the sedative "Versed."

But that evidence has nonetheless to be released. Some doctors say those medications would be perfectly acceptable in making patients comfortable, given the circumstances.

"They were lethal doses of both of those drugs in those patients. Lethal doses," Foti says.

Foti acknowledges the four patients were very sick.

"I mean they had 'do not resuscitate,'" Safer remarks.

"Some did, some don't. Do not resuscitate does not mean practice non rescue," the chaser general argues.

Foti later alleged every bit many as ix patients were murdered.

"Only would you not think that in case of murder, the perpetrators would try to conceal their deportment?" Safer asks.

"Maybe they but didn't call back that everyone would ever discover out," Foti says.

Dr. Pou and the nurses agreed to talk to hr but their lawyers would not let them discuss whatever specifics of their actions that day. The lawyers say that's because in that location are nevertheless a number of ceremonious suits brought by families of the deceased that have yet to be heard. But Dr. Pou will answer the primal question.

Asked if she murdered those patients, as the attorney full general alleges, she says, "No, I did not murder those patients. Mr. Safer, I've spent my entire life taking intendance of patients. I have no history of doing anything other than good for my patients. I do the all-time of my ability. Why would I suddenly start murdering people? This doesn't brand sense."

She besides says she is just not capable of any sort of mercy killing.

"I do not believe in euthanasia. I don't think that it's anyone's decision to make when a patient dies," Dr. Pou explains. "Nevertheless, what I practise believe in is comfort care. And that means that nosotros ensure that they exercise non suffer pain."

"Doctors make decisions every twenty-four hour period in terms of the then called double effect where the medicine I am going to requite to this person I know is information technology's going to ease their pain. But, I too know there is some other possible effect and the effect is to shorten their lives. Are we talking about something similar that?" Safer asks.

"Are we talking nearly in this case?" Dr. Pou asks.

"Yes," Safer replies.

"Any time that yous provide pain medicine to anybody at that place is a hazard," Dr. Pou explains. "Just, equally I said, my part is to help them through their hurting."

Murder or not, the declared crimes took identify when help was actually on the way. Merely no one in the infirmary knew that. The owners of Memorial had chartered 5 helicopters; within hours hundreds of people were evacuated, 34 people lay expressionless.

"I don't think I could accept done annihilation more. I worked about around the clock running upwardly and downwardly the stairs," Dr. Pou says. "I did the best I could nether these dreadful conditions that I did non create, simply were created by the fact that we were abandoned."

Safer asked Foti if he took the atmospheric condition into consideration when he fabricated his decision.

He says he did and says he has no 2nd thoughts.

Though no longer facing life in prison, the three women still face ceremonious lawsuits brought by the families of those who died. Whatever may have happened at Memorial over those iv days 2 years agone, it is one more instance of the utter failure of metropolis, land and federal authorities which placed Dr. Anna Pou and the nurses in a hopeless state of affairs – the worst function of which, for Dr. Pou, was the prospect of never practicing medicine once again.

"That is the affair that is truly the almost painful for me," Dr. Pou. "I'yard very committed and I love what I practise. I hateful, I really love it. It is the best thing almost my life. And the fact that I may not to be able to continue to practise the matter that I love the most when I know I tin can do a lot of expert is just phenomenally, phenomenally painful to me."

At present that Dr. Pou has been cleared of all criminal charges she says she will return to practicing medicine. Attorney General Charles Foti says he still believes Dr. Pou is guilty of murder.

Produced By Deirdre Naphin and Katherine Textor