Owners of nursing home where patients drowned in Katrina flooding acquitted

[Maddy McCall]

Source: AP

ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA. — The owners of a nursing home where 35 patients died after Hurricane Katrina were acquitted Friday of negligent homicide and cruelty charges for not evacuating the facility as the storm approached.

The jury took about four hours to acquit Sal and Mabel Mangano, the husband-and-wife owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, just outside of New Orleans.

They had faced 35 counts of negligent homicide and 24 counts of cruelty to the elderly or infirm after the patients drowned - some in their beds - when the monster hurricane swept through the area.

/snip

The couple were the only people to face criminal charges stemming directly from Hurricane Katrina. More than 30 lawsuits have been filed against them by patients injured at the nursing home and the families of people who died there.


Read more: http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070907/NEWS/70907046

[pitohui]

1. thanks, i didn't know the jury was back

in my humble opinion this is the right decision

once the expert testimony came that if the levees held, there would have been only a foot of water in st. rita's, if i were the judge i believe i would have dismissed the case

you can't put people in prison for not being psychics

i'll try to add the times-picayune link:

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/09/manganos_xxxx_in_st_ritas_nurs.html

[Mnemosyne]

2. Thank the universe. They did the best they could

under horrible circumstances.

Who can cast the first stone?

[MadMaddie]

3. So once again we see that no one is responsible for anything

They may have been good people the owners but what they did was neglect and abandon the charges in their care....

I don't understand it....


So a horrendous storm is coming and the owners didn't think that this time they should evacuate. The argument that they had to wait for a mandatory evacuation goes in the face of FEMA and all the Rethuglican talking points doesn't it...

<snip>
Defense lawyers say levee failures and a government that never called a mandatory evacuation are to blame.
<snip>

[pitohui]

6. they didn't abandon anyone!

they stayed there and were floating people out on mattresses, boats, anything they could, they had their grandchildren there!

yes, they believed the gov't when they said the levees would hold

you do realize that whenever you evacuate people on life support, some of those people die from stress of evacuation?

one of my friends died in the evacuation from katrina and he was only 54 years old

in the evacuation of houston for rita, over 100 people died, including many old people, just from being evacuated

foti is on a kick of trying to make sure we never get any damn doctors or hospitals or nursing homes ever again in southeast louisiana, because real people can't afford to go thru these malicious prosecutions -- too bad he can't be somehow prosecuted for these malicious attacks on people who were on the ground, during the storm, with the sick and the dying

he won't be happy until any time there is a storm in the gulf, every doctor takes a vacation in hawaii to get the maximum distance from any chance of being sued!

sorry to rant, but i'm one who is stuck waiting in l-o-n-g ass lines for doctors and medical care thanks to crap like this

how do we expect to get doctors, caregivers, etc. back in town with these prosecutions on the books?

[MadMaddie]

14. Don't get me wrong....I am glad that they found the Doctors and

Nurses at the hospital not guilty....

And maybe the owners did the best the could....

I am sorry that you and your neighbors are experiencing (still) deplorable conditions and not having adequate health care....

If our state and federal government had the incliniation to improve the conditions...they would have....they never had any intention to help you and others....down in the Gulf...

You have every reason to rant....and DU is a good place to rant....

[Catherine Vincent]

4. That doesn't seem right.

The owners should have some responsibility for those deaths. Even if they had called relatives of all the people that were there.... inform them to pick up their family member would at least shown that they tried to do something.

[jobycom]

8. They did inform the families.

According to other workers in the home, all the families were called and informed that these patients weren't going to be moved because the stress of an evacuation could kill them. The owners stayed in the home with their family, including their own grandkids.

Foti should have never charged them with homicide. They made the wrong decision, but the decision wasn't haphazard or lazy or irresponsible. They considered the options, consulted the families, and made a decision based on their best information.

Put yourself in the place of the jury for a moment--a jury who had lived through the same thing. Nine times out of ten a hurricane scare is just a scare. Anyone on the Coast has been through that. These things miss their projected target more often than they hit it. So let's say the Manganos did evacaute, and a patient or several patients died as a result of the evacuation--that's not improbable in this case, as we saw with Rita. Then let's say the levees held and the nursing home escaped with no damage whatsoever. Would the state be able to charge them with homicide for making the wrong choice then?

In other words, if either decision could have led to fatalities, then either decision could have led to murder charges. Which means that the real crime was being a nursing home manager when a hurricane came. The jury apparently rejected that premise. Instead of looking at the outcome of the decision, the jury looked at the decision-making process, and apparently decided the Manganos were not negligent. At least that's how I read it--I'm sure we'll hear more about why the jury ruled that way in the days to come.

[Wcross]

5. They do not have any criminal liability.

They will still have to answer civil suits.

[pitohui]

7. they've lost everything so civil suit away

there is an element that won't be happy until we can't get a caregiver or doctor or nurse in southeast louisiana and the likes of charles foti caters to that element

[Sanity Claws]

9. Chertoff, Brownie, Bush et al should have been on trial

They were the real criminals.

[jobycom]

12. No kidding. If Charles Foti wants so badly to convict people for making tragic decisions

why not go after the people whose decisions and lack of action killed hundreds of people, rather than going after doctors, nurses, and nursing home owners in no-win situations where any decision they made would have caused someone to die. The criminals of Hurricane Katrina are still walking free, rather than on trial for hundreds of counts of negligent homicide--and I'm being kind, because I firmly believe Bush knowling let people die to hurt Blanco's credibility, which means the homicide was deliberate, not negligent.

Charles Foti, Jr, doesn't want to go after them, though. Some Democrat, eh?

[Thothmes]

16. trial

I fully agree with you statement. I also think the Civil officials in NO and Baton Rouge bear a substantial responsibility for these tragic events.

[cobalt1999]

10. Not their fault.

If they kept people in an old decrepit building and it collapsed, then they would have some blame. The failure was not in their building but in the levies. If anything the city, state, and national government officials responsible for the levies were to blame.

[jobycom]

13. Watch that "city and state" stuff.

The levee design is the sole responsibility of the federal government. The Army Corp of Engineers designs and builds the levees, then turns them over to the cities for "upkeep"--meaning mowing the grass and picking up litter. Only the Corp can modify the designs.

Anyway, the levees in St. Bernard Parish, where this nursing home was, didn't fail catastrophically. They just weren't built tall enough, so the waters rushed over the top of the levees, and this did create breaches where the water topped them. Here's a cool picture, to give you an idea of what it looked like. This was the water coming over the levee along the MR-GO canal, which was a large part of the flooding of St. Bernard Parish.

[jobycom]

11. Is Foti expected to win or lose in October?

He's 0 for 2 in his high profile cases, and I can't imagine many people who lived through Katrina are going to side with his hard-line stance. People were in an impossible situation because of an unprecedented event, and he's bringing charges against people who were doing their best to make the right choices. Meanwhile, the crime rate in Louisiana is through the stratosphere.

I can't imagine people feeling like he's doing his job.

[hedgehog]

15. Just where were they expected to evacuate these people to, the Superdome maybe?

Left out of the story is that the Manganos opened St. Rita's after seeing the poor quality care a family member got at another nursing home. They may or may not have been the most qualified people, but their intent was to provide a clean, healthy, loving place for the elderly infirm. Clearly they had no idea that Katrina was going to cause such extensive flooding. they were prepared for high winds and the loss of electrical power and fully expected to keep their charges comfortable and safe.

On edit: some elderly persons get very confused if they are taken from their normal surroundings. An overnight stay in a hospital for a minor problem can cause major distress. Imagine the effect of being moved in a poorly organized evacuation to a make-shift shelter to be cared for by strangers.