What follows is a synthesis of questions that the author of Five Days at Memorial has been asked regarding Dr. Anna Pou and the process of writing the book.
Q: What's the current status of Dr. Anna Pou, the physician who was arrested but not indicted as an alleged principle to second degree murder in some of the patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in 2005?
As of the summer of 2022, she was practicing medicine as a head and neck oncologic surgeon in Louisiana.
Q: Did Dr. Pou ever acknowledge injecting patients who died at the the hospital after Hurricane Katrina?
Yes. After a grand jury in Orleans Parish refused to indict Dr. Pou for second degree murder in 2007, she publicly acknowledged injecting some patients with morphine and a sedative. “The intention was to help the patients that were having pain and sedate the patients who were anxious,” she told Newsweek. “Any medicines given were for comfort. If in doing so it hastened their deaths, then that's what happened. But, this was not, ‘I'm going to go to the seventh floor and murder some people.’”
Q: What about other doctors and nurses at the hospital?
Other medical professionals at Memorial have acknowledged that they also injected patients. Some of them described their own intentions differently. One of them, Dr. John Thiele, told me in an interview: “The goal was death; our goal was to let these people die.”
Q: Was Dr. Pou ever exonerated?
A: No. Exoneration refers to someone who is proven innocent after being convicted. Dr. Pou was not indicted and her case never went to trial. Because of this, charges could be brought again, according to legal experts. There is not a time limit on murder prosecution under Louisiana criminal law.
Q: What was the position of subsequent Orleans Parish district attorneys?
A: Leon A. Cannizzaro, Jr. testified in a related civil court case in 2010 that he believed "human beings were killed as a result of actions by doctors." He added: "Whether or not there was a homicide and whether or not there is a case that can be brought are different matters." Mr. Cannizzaro did not take further action during his tenure as District Attorney, which ended in 2021. As of the summer of 2022, the District Attorney who replaced him, Jason Williams, had not commented publicly on these events.
Q: Did you interview Dr. Pou?
A: Yes. After the grand jury declined to indict Dr. Pou, she and her lawyer agreed to an in-depth interview. She gave a detailed description of her time at the hospital during and after Hurricane Katrina, and about her subsequent efforts to secure legal protections for health professionals during emergencies. But on the advice of her lawyer, she skipped over the events of Thursday, September 1, 2005 and did not address the accusations against her.
Q: What information was used in the book to describe aspects of the events that Dr. Pou declined to discuss?
A: I sought the observations of many others at the hospital and reviewed available records and Dr. Pou’s public statements. Her attorney answered some of my questions. I ultimately conducted hundreds of interviews for Five Days at Memorial, including individuals who were not only critical of, but also sympathetic to, Dr. Pou, such as those at a rally for her in New Orleans.
Q: Is the book accurate? Is it fair to Dr. Pou? Why should I trust it?
A: One of my central goals in retelling the events at Memorial was to achieve the highest possible degree of accuracy and contextualization. Being fair to those arrested and accused of involvement in multiple alleged murders — but never indicted or convicted — was essential. Equally important was portraying the stories of the many patients who died, their families, other medical staff members, and the involvement of corporate and government officials whose decisions may have affected these patients’ fates.
Months after I met Dr. Pou and began researching what happened, the nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica was founded. In 2009, ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine co-published my article “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” which became the basis for Five Days at Memorial. The article was extensively fact checked by Magazine researchers prior to publication. Dr. Pou and her representatives, as well as other individuals quoted or described in the article, were given a chance to know and respond to what was being written about them in advance of publication. The article was recognized with both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award in 2010.
After years of additional research, Five Days at Memorial was published in 2013. The text and extensive endnotes indicate which issues are contested and whose perspectives are being represented at a particular point in the book. An author’s note at the beginning tells the reader how the book was reported, and what conventions I used in telling the story. For example, anything in quotation marks was reproduced exactly as it was recalled in interviews or from transcripts or other primary sources. The book was also fact checked prior to publication by a seasoned researcher. Five Days at Memorial was recognized with eight book prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith award.
Q: How did you originally come to speak with Dr. Pou, and what was it about your background that led you to this story?
A: I first wrote to Dr. Pou to inquire about interviewing her for a potential magazine profile in early 2007 during a visit to New Orleans, where I was lecturing at Tulane. At the time, I had an academic affiliation at Harvard, was freelancing for newspapers, magazines and radio, and had recently written War Hospital, a book about doctors, nurses and patients under siege during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
After training as a medical doctor, I had served as a relief worker in conflict and disaster areas, including after Hurricane Katrina. In all the emergency contexts I had worked in or written about, I was unaware of any effort to intentionally hasten patient deaths. It seemed important to understand what had really happened at Memorial and why well-regarded health professionals who said they were innocent had been arrested.
While the grand jury was still considering charges against Dr. Pou, her attorney told me about a fundraising event and disaster medicine seminar being held for her in Texas, which I was permitted to attend as part of reporting for the article. There, I met Dr. Pou and sat down for interviews with some of her former colleagues. The research expanded from there.
Q: Dr. Pou was known as a caring doctor. Did you meet any of her cancer patients?
A: Yes, Dr. Pou’s close colleague who was treating her patients after her arrest put me in touch with the family members of a longtime cancer patient who had volunteered to speak with journalists. They invited me to their home for an interview. I traveled there at the appointed time to meet them, and we stayed in touch after that by phone. Their consent and participation helped inform the portrayal of Dr. Pou.
Q: Did you speak with the families of the patients who died at Memorial? What were their perspectives?
A: Yes, I also spoke with family members of nearly all of the patients documented as having died on Thursday, September 1, 2005 after being injected with morphine and/or Versed. One of the patients was Emmett Everett, a 61-year-old, Honduran-born grandpa who had a disability— paraplegia— and was morbidly obese. According to staff members and records, he was awake, alert, had fed himself breakfast and pleaded with his nurse not to be left behind.
Some supporters of Dr. Pou have expressed the view that family members of the dead should be grateful to her and other medical staff for having given their relatives comfort medications. However, the family members with whom I spoke did not share the view that these were merciful actions. “Who gave them the right to play God?” Mr. Everett’s widow asked.
Dr. Pou settled legal claims brought against her by survivors of patients who died. As a part of the terms of her settlements, Dr. Pou required family members to give up their right to speak publicly about what they believe happened to their loved ones, sometimes referred to colloquially as a “hush hush clause,” according to several individuals with knowledge of the agreements.
Some family members were present at the hospital during the disaster and described being told to leave while their loved ones were still alive and awaiting rescue. They said they were not asked for consent or informed that a decision had been made to give the medications and would not have agreed to it. As of the summer of 2022, some family members expressed lingering distress, anger and a sense of injustice about their relatives’ deaths at Memorial.
Q: How has Dr. Pou responded to your book and to other people who have attempted to bring the events at Memorial to light?
A: Dr. Pou’s representatives have threatened multiple journalists and others with legal action. They have attacked the reputations of medical professionals who spoke out about the events at Memorial, law enforcement officials who sought justice for them and those who told the story. At times they have circulated information that is not factual and is potentially libelous. However they have not identified evidence of errors in my article or book.
I worked hard to be sensitive and fair in telling the story of the deaths at Memorial in the hopes it could help prevent future suffering. Nobody can claim a monopoly on the truth, but my goal was to tell the most accurate history possible of these consequential events and the people involved in them.
Q: What has been the impact of telling this story?
A: Five Days at Memorial has been widely read by leaders in the fields of medicine, nursing and disaster preparedness. In some cases, potentially lifesaving investments have been made that could help avoid putting medical professionals and patients in similar circumstances in the future. Others are centering people with disabilities in emergency preparedness, including equipment and training to support the rescue of obese people who cannot walk.
What should we learn from what happened, and how can we apply it to our own lives? While we might not know what we would have done in the place of medical professionals at Memorial, we can decide what we would want to do in future emergencies. We can invest in better preparing ourselves and the places where we live and work, especially to protect the lives of the most vulnerable. When a crisis hits home, we all become de facto first responders.