Battle over 35 (drowning) deaths at St. Rita's (NOLA nursing home) set to begin.

[Maddy McCall]

Source: NOLA.com

Jury selection starts Monday in high-profile trial of a couple accused of abandoning their nursing home to Katrina's fury

snip/

Nearly two years later, St. Francisville is about to be inundated by another Katrina-spawned wave of visitors as a West Feliciana Parish jury will be asked to render a judgment in what was perhaps the catastrophic storm's deadliest episode: the drowning of 35 residents at St. Rita's nursing home in St. BernardParish.

The home's owners, Mabel Mangano, 64, and her husband, Sal Mangano, 67, face 35 counts of negligent homicide for not evacuating the nursing home as Katrina bore down on southeastern Louisiana in late August 2005.

snip/

The hurricane's monstrous storm surge pounded over and through St. Bernard's levees, unleashing raging floodwaters that knocked able-bodied men off their feet. At the nursing home near Poydras, residents confined to their beds or wheelchairs were quickly overwhelmed by the rapidly rising water, which turned the single-story building into a tomb within 20 minutes.

Authorities have said the Manganos ignored a mandatory evacuation order and refused an offer of two buses to take their residents to safety the day before Katrina made landfall.

snip/

The death toll at St. Rita's likely would have been higher if not for one fortuitous fact: Because the residents' mattresses were wrapped in plastic liners, they floated.



Read more: http://blog.nola.com/updates/2007/08/battle_over_35_deaths_at_st_ri.html

[Hekate]

1. The Manganos must be held to account.Meanwhile,the nurses& doctor who stayed with patients elsewhere

...were severely judged despite what I believe were acts of heroism in not abandoning their charges.

New Orleans, New Orleans: the nightmare continues. Perhaps we will see justice done in our lifetimes.

Hekate

[Skittles]

3. particularly galling because no government officials have been held accountable

it's all just too much

[saigon68]

7. The fishing was really good

[EFerrari]

2. We read so many terrible stories in these last seven years.

All I can do is rec because this leaves me speechless.

[uppityperson]

4. k&r. Bit more from article, casts a different view for me.

I don't know enough about it to judge properly, will be reading with interest. This article gives more info that I didn't know, that they stayed rather than left. It is incredible, very sad. Bit more from article:
{div class="excerpt"]Defense attorneys have emphasized that - contrary to some erroneous reports shortly after the hurricane - the Manganos themselves did not evacuate and rode out the storm at the nursing home along with their two children, several grandchildren and about a half-dozen staff members. "Unless you view the whole Mangano family as a pod of suicidal whales swimming up on a beach, how can you call their actions reckless?" Cobb said before the gag order was issued."They had no earthly idea this could happen. No one did."

He said the Manganos stocked up with a two-week supply of fuel, water, food and medicine, as well as making other preparations, such as buying a washing machine because the home's large commercial washers couldn't be run on a generator. About 10 residents were evacuated by relatives as the storm approached, leaving 59residents at the nursing home.

After the hurricane passed,Sal and Mabel Mangano began preparing the home's traditional Monday lunch of red beans and rice as their adult grandson,Tanner Mangano, stepped outside under clear skies to assess the damage.

He has said he heard a noise that sounded like a freight train.Then he saw a wall of water 6feet high rushing across the highway with dogs and pigs scrambling to get out of th eway. A couple of the men swam to nearby houses to get boats. When they returned minutes later, people were already clinging to the nursing home's gutters as the water quickly rose to within inches of the ceiling....

[Demit]

5. Agree with you. The full article gives more facts to think about than the original snippet.

You're right. it's ALWAYS worth reading the full article at the link before rushing to judgment (and rushing to comment).

[hedgehog]

6. It sounds as if the hurricane didn't flood the nursing home, the

failure of the levees did. I've thought these people were scapegoats from the first time I read about this case. I think it's fair to say few people in the area thought of flooding as the most important hazard. For comparison, the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport, Mississippi wasn't evacuated until after the hurricane either, and that building flooded as a direct result of the hurricane. As a matter of fact, I can recall seeing a news anchor reporting from the lawn of the Armed Forces Home before the hurricane. Everyone assumed that that was a safe location.