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Owners of Nursing Home in New Orleans
Charged in Deaths of 34
By Shaila Dewan and Al Baker, The New York Times
September 14, 2005
The owners of a nursing home where 34 people died in the floodwaters that inundated the New Orleans area were charged Tuesday with multiple counts of negligent homicide, shortly after a new dispute broke out between the State of Louisiana and the federal government over the retrieval of hundreds of other bodies.
Mable B. Mangano and her husband, Salvatore A. Mangano Sr., owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home in Violet, just east of New Orleans, turned themselves in after the charges were filed, Attorney General Charles C. Foti Jr. said. He said the couple had not acted on several warnings to move the residents as Hurricane Katrina approached.
"They were warned repeatedly, both by the media and by the St. Bernard Parish emergency preparation people, that the storm was coming," Mr. Foti said at a news conference here. "In effect, I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."
The charges represent the first major prosecution to emerge in the hurricane's aftermath.
The legal action came as the pace of recovery of the storm's other casualties increased.
Louisiana authorities said the number of confirmed dead in the state increased to 423, a substantial rise from the 279 reported on Monday. Bob Johannessen, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said the number of confirmations was expected to rise each day.
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said the pace of recoveries should have been much faster, however, and accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of slowing the retrieval of the dead to the point where the contractor responsible for that work had threatened to pull out.
After days of news reports of bodies in the streets of New Orleans, Ms. Blanco, with palpable frustration, said the state would bypass FEMA and sign its own contract with the company, Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management.
"In recent days, I have spoken with FEMA officials and administration officials to convey my absolute frustration regarding the lack of urgency and the lack of respect involving the recovery of our people whose lives were lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina," Ms. Blanco said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. "We have pleaded for contract resolution. In death, as in life, our people deserve more respect than they have received."
FEMA officials responded by saying that the recovery of bodies was a state responsibility, while the federal role was to assist state officials.
"The state has always maintained direct control over the mortuary process following this tragedy," Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who is directing FEMA efforts in the region, said in a written statement. "We are committed to a process that treats the victims of Katrina with dignity and respect and accomplishes the mission as quickly as possible. We will work with state officials on what they believe to be the best solution for their constituents."
Kenyon officials said they had been struggling under cumbersome conditions to execute a task that gets grislier by the day. The company, which has a contract with FEMA to respond when called, arrived Sept. 1 but was not asked to begin recovering bodies until Sept. 6, said Bill Berry, a company spokesman.
The company's 100 or so workers have bunked in a funeral home in Baton Rouge, forcing them to drive four hours round-trip each day, and Kenyon officials said they had repeatedly asked for living quarters in New Orleans.
On Sunday, Kenyon officials told FEMA that they would not enter into a contract with the agency and would pull out as soon as a replacement was found, Mr. Berry said.
Mr. Berry said the company was already responding to Ms. Blanco's request that it increase its staffing even before the new contract was completed. "We just keep moving the cots a little closer together," he said.
Mr. Berry said he did not consider it appropriate to discuss why the company did not want to continue working under FEMA. But he had high praise for the state, which reached out to Kenyon after the company notified FEMA on Sunday that it would not accept a contract.
"I can't say enough about the Louisiana state people," Mr. Berry said. "They heard our problems, and they simply fixed them. It's beautiful to see a general sitting there from the National Guard saying, 'I can do that,' and it's done."
In an effort to explain why Kenyon may have walked away from a federal contract, a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security, who would not allow his name to be used because the department had already issued an official statement, said Tuesday that the state's proposed contract was "less detailed than the plan we were negotiating" and had four provisions compared with nine that FEMA had wanted.
For example, the official said the federal proposal would have required that the Kenyon employees have specialized training and use personal protective gear and have appropriate security, provisions that the federal official said were not included in the state contract.
Mr. Berry declined to respond, except to say that the company had 76 years of experience in disasters. It was hired in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and last year's tsunami. "We will let our record speak for itself," he said.
Kenyon - a unit of Service Corporation International, a giant funeral company - operates worldwide and handled preservation of remains after the World Trade Center attacks and the cleanup of mass graves in Iraq under government contracts. The company, which is based in Houston, has contributed heavily to President Bush's campaigns. The chairman and founder of the company is Robert L. Waltrip, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation.
In New Orleans, anger over the slow collection of bodies, which officials say has been hampered by floodwater and debris, still smoldered. Dr. Brobson Lutz, a former health director for the City of New Orleans, led an impromptu and morbid tour on Tuesday that he said reflected the extent to which those who perished had been neglected.
It included a nursing home on Dauphine Street, where three bodies had stayed until Dr. Brobson had mentioned them on Fox News, and the kitchen area of his own office, where he wiped at blood from the body of Michael Lala, the owner of Old N'Awlins Cookery.
Mr. Lala had died from heart failure a week after the storm, but the authorities did not respond to requests to pick up the body, Dr. Brobson said, so he stored it in his office for a week until it finally was collected on Tuesday morning.
"FEMA couldn't get the live people out in time and they can't get the dead people out in time," Dr. Brobson said. "They failed the living and the dead."
The residents of St. Rita's did not have to die, Attorney General said, and he warned that other nursing homes that failed to remove residents also faced prosecution.
Local officials had ordered a mandatory evacuation amid news reports about the approach of the storm, Mr. Foti said. Because St. Rita's was licensed as a Medicaid facility, it had an evacuation plan in place, but it did not use it, he said.
In addition to the mandatory evacuation order, officials offered to send two buses to the nursing home, but Mr. Foti said the Manganos declined that offer. Also, the owners had an agreement with an ambulance company, signed in April, to provide ambulances to evacuate special-needs patients, but "they were never called," Mr. Foti said.
At least two drowning victims at the home could have been family members who went to the scene or people who took refuge there, he said, adding that the remains were being identified.
James A. Cobb, the lawyer for the Manganos, said that they were not guilty of the charges and that they were unaware a mandatory evacuation order had been issued. Mr.
Cobb said that if the patients - some on feeding tubes, oxygen and in need of medication - had been put on a bus for 12 hours to evacuate, "people are going to die."
A deputy at the East Baton Rouge jail said the Manganos had posted a bond of $50,000 and were expected to be released.
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