Post-Katrina mercy killing allegations probed

Did mercy killings take place at a New Orleans hospital during the peak of the post-Katrina crisis?

The Louisiana Attorney General's office wants to know, and has ordered autopsies for 45 bodies found in Memorial Medical Center's morgue, according to CNN.

Three days after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, staff members at the city's Memorial Medical Center had repeated discussions about euthanizing patients they thought might not survive the ordeal, according to a doctor and nurse manager who were in the hospital at the time. The Louisiana attorney general's office is investigating allegations that mercy killings occurred and has requested that autopsies be performed on all 45 bodies taken from the hospital after the storm.

Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard said investigators have told him they think euthanasia may have been committed.

"They thought someone was going around injecting people with some sort of lethal medication," Minyard said.

Dr. Bryant King said he did not witness acts of euthanasia but adds:

"... most people know something happened that shouldn't have happened."

The levees protecting New Orleans breeched in the wee hours of a Monday morning. By Wednesday the situation at Memorial Medical was considered dire:

"We weren't really functioning as a hospital but as a shelter," King said. "We had no electricity. There was no water. It was hot. People are dying. We thought it was as bad as it could get. Why weren't we being evacuated? That was our biggest thing. We should be gone right now."

Food was running low, sanitation wasn't working, and temperatures inside soared to 110 degrees. Floodwaters had isolated the hospital, where about 312 patients -- many of them critically ill -- were being treated when Katrina hit.

CNN says 11 deaths had been recorded at the hospital at that point. Not 45.

No one knew when rescuers would arrive. Without power to operate medical devices, staff could only provide basic care. Evacuations were sporadic -- an occasional boat or helicopter picking up patients.

"It was battle conditions," said Fran Butler, a nurse manager. "It was as bad as being out in the field."

The staff was desperate, Butler said.

"My nurses wanted to know what was the plan? Did they say to put people out of their misery? Yes. ... They wanted to know how to get them out of their misery," she said.

Apparently the topic was getting a lot of attention:

Butler also told CNN that a doctor approached her at one point and discussed the subject of putting patients to sleep, and "made the comment to me on how she was totally against it and wouldn't do it."

Butler said she did not see anyone perform a mercy killing, and she said because of her personal beliefs, she would never have participated.
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But King said he is convinced the discussion of euthanasia was more than talk. He said another doctor came to him at 9 a.m. Thursday and recounted a conversation with a hospital administrator and a third doctor who suggested patients be put out of their misery.

King said that the second physician -- who opposed mercy killing -- told him that "this other [third] doctor said she'd be willing to do it."

About three hours later, King said, the second-floor triage area where he was working was cleared of everyone except patients, a second hospital administrator and two doctors, including the physician who had first raised the question of mercy killing.

King said the administrator asked those who remained if they wanted to join in prayer -- something he said had not occurred at the hospital since Katrina ripped through the city.

One of the physicians then produced a handful of syringes, King said.

"I don't know what's in the syringes. ... The only thing I heard the physician say was, 'I'm going to give you something to make you feel better,' " King said.

"I don't know what the physician was going to give them, but we hadn't been given medications like that, to make people feel better, or any sort of palliative care," he said. "We hadn't been doing that up to this point."

King said he decided he would have no part of what he believed was about to happen. He grabbed his bag to leave. He said one of the doctors hugged him.

King said he doesn't know what happened next. He boarded a boat and left the hospital.

Earlier this month, investigators from the attorney general's office visited King and asked him to recount his story.

The corporation that owns the hospital said the additional patients who died were critically ill and in a portion of the hospital rented from a company called LifeCare.

But King said he finds it hard to understand how that many patients could have died at the hospital, even under such grim conditions.

"There was only one patient that died overnight," he said. "The previous day, there were only two. From Thursday to Friday, for there to be 10 times that many, just doesn't make sense to me."

CNN said it has talked to three people mentioned by King. One, the hospital administrator, said he remembers nothing about a prayer meeting, and later accused King of lying.

One doctor, the one identified as having brought up the euthanasia debate, refused to talk. As for another:

The doctor King alleged held the syringes spoke by phone with CNN on several occasions, emphasizing how everyone inside the hospital felt abandoned.

"[We] did everything humanly possible to save these patients," the doctor told CNN. "The government totally abandoned us to die. In the houses, in the streets, in the hospitals. ... Maybe a lot of us made mistakes, but we made the best decisions we could at the time."

When told about King's allegations, this doctor declined to comment either way.

CNN also published the typical self-serving boilerplate you expect from from the PR flack for the medical corporation, about doctors and staff "heroically saving lives" in difficult circumstances -- which may be true but is neither here nor there when it comes to the investigation.

We'd like to take you back to Monday, September 12, a day after authorities discovered the 45 bodies in the basement. The London Daily Mail has just published a report describing mass mercy killings at an unnamed New Orleans hospital, and extensively quotes a female doctor, who sounds as if she's trying to justify actions taken at a time of high anxiety and uncertainty. The newspaper's lead:

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

The sweeping nature of the story was suspicious. Our take:

The story makes it appear as if there was wholesale euthanasia taking place throughout New Orleans.

Perhaps -- maybe -- this is true. But we are skeptical. Why?

The two writers quote only the woman doctor. They quote no other "on site" sources. They speak of an unidentified orderly once. He is never mentioned again.

But the woman doctor's words spoke volumes:

"I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."

The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.
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"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second. ..."

This doctor fled the hospital, allegedly in fear for her life from looters who, as we have learned, weren't nearly as numerous as the rumors (unless you count the New Orleans Police Department). Is it possible that the fact that the hospital was evacuated within another 36-48 hours, the entire rationale for the morphine-induced "compassion" evaporated?

Consider the statement of Dr. King:

"There was only one patient that died overnight," he said. "The previous day, there were only two. From Thursday to Friday, for there to be 10 times that many, just doesn't make sense to me." ...

"... most people know something happened that shouldn't have happened."

And Nurse Butler:

"My nurses wanted to know what was the plan? Did they say to put people out of their misery? Yes. ... They wanted to know how to get them out of their misery," she said.

This may be one of the saddest, spiritually disheartening stories to emerge from the disaster of New Orleans. It appears at least very possible that, under adverse conditions, the average American can no longer trust medical professionals to follow the Hypocratic Oath. There are just too many who are in the sway of the teachings of Dr. Death Kevorkian and other gurus of the Culture of Death.

If patients were euthanized, we pray that Louisiana prosecutors have the stomach to do what needs to be done: bring to justice those who are heroes only in a perverted world.