New Orleans – With a doctor and two nurses accused of killing four patients in the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, there was anger among relatives but little surprise from some who have long considered the deaths of their loved ones to be suspicious.
“I consider the nurses murderers. They were in a bad situation, but they were murderers,” Lou Ann Savoie Jacob said Wednesday. Her 90-year-old mother, Rose Savoie, was among those prosecutors say were killed by Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry at Memorial Medical Center, where patients and staff were stranded for days without running water or communications after the hurricane overwhelmed levees.
According to court documents released Tuesday by the attorney general’s office, Budo was seen injecting Savoie with something Sept. 1, three days after Katrina left four-fifths of the city under water. “That burns,” the 90-year-old woman allegedly said when she was injected.
The daughter of another patient in the case said her mother, Ireatha Watson, had been very sick, with gangrene in both legs and dementia, but that she had been stable before Katrina hit.
Watson, 89, had been scheduled to have her legs amputated the day the hurricane hit.
“I found it strange that she passed away the way she did, and I couldn’t get any information,” said Paulette Harris, Watson’s daughter. Pou, Budo and Landry, arrested late Monday, are accused of killing Savoie, Watson and two other severely ill patients with morphine and the sedative Versed.
Conditions at Memorial deteriorated after the hurricane. The stranded hoarded vending-machine food and workers broke windows to get relief from the triple-digit heat, said Angela McManus, whose 70-year-old mother died in the hospital.
