New Orleans
A grand jury this week declined to indict a New Orleans doctor accused of killing elderly patients in the chaos following Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Anna Pou, a surgeon at Memorial Medical Center, was charged along with two nurses with intentionally administering a “lethal cocktail” of drugs to four patients. Charges against the nurses were dropped in June, and Pou was cleared when a grand jury refused prosecutors’ request to indict her on murder charges. At least 34 patients died during the four days that they waited to be rescued from the flooded hospital, which was without power. Pou always maintained that she worked feverishly to save patients under horrid conditions, and that if painkillers she’d administered hastened their deaths—as prosecutors alleged—it was completely unintentional.
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