It could not have happened as Broussard described. I have found no other reports on the lady's son, Thomas Rodrigue. I wonder what he has to say, or if anyone will ask.
Here is another article about the owner and her refusal to evacuate.
Nursing home strewn with decaying bodies
BY VICTOR EPSTEIN BLOOMBERG NEWS
Posted on Thursday, September 8, 2005
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The 60 residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home had a plan to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Instead, the staff and patients remained as the storm flooded the low-lying parish of St. Bernard.
Because of that decision, the bodies of at least 15 residents and possibly as many as 35 are now decomposing inside the one-story facility in this area about six miles east of downtown where 67,000 people once lived.
The body of one elderly woman, clothed in a thin housedress, legs spread wide, sits on the concrete floor of the front patio. A 2-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary still stands in the lobby, facing outward. Nearby, the thin, bony body of an elderly man is draped over the back of a chair where the receding waters left it. Outside, debris covers the roof of a Hummer sport utility vehicle, which area officials say belongs to a staff member. "When we saw that Hummer still in the parking lot a few days ago, we knew we were in trouble because that’s the first vehicle they would have used to escape," Parish Councilman Tony Ricky Melerine said Tuesday afternoon.
Officials of St. Bernard Parish, a bedroom and retirement community bounded by water on three sides, said the parish death toll may reach 500. They blamed the lawlessness of the inner city for diverting resources and attention from them.
The shortage of manpower and impassability of roads prevented neighboring residents from getting inside St. Rita’s until Tuesday, nine days after Katrina. "It doesn’t look like anyone has been here yet to make a count," Melerine said as he poled a skiff over the black muck of St. Bernard’s flooded streets. "This was my district. We gonna have to do it."
Inside St. Rita’s, the signature of the brown high-water mark reaches a foot shy of the ceiling inside the football-field-size structure. Six inches of sewage, mud and putrefied tissue coat the floor in a slippery, dark brown scum strewn with broken furniture, bodies and wheelchairs. "This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I drug bodies to the levee after Hurricane Betsy," said 60-year-old Raymond Couture. He and Melerine chopped their way out of the councilman’s attic with axes at the height of the storm. They’ve been working 20hour days since.
Officials fear the horror at St. Rita’s could be repeated elsewhere in St. Bernard Parish. The community’s four other large nursing homes and assisted-living facilities followed their parish evacuation plan. Still, it’s unclear how many smaller centers were emptied. OBLITERATED COMMUNITIES
Parish firefighters say the communities of Delacroix and Yscloskey are completely gone. They lay outside the protective levees and may be nothing more than prefixes in the Greater New Orleans telephone book today: 265, 267, 676 and 684.
St. Bernard must also contend with a fuel spill at the Murphy Oil USA Inc. refinery. The community’s three refineries provide 15 percent of the nation’s gasoline, according to Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez.
Only five of the sheriff’s 75 squad cars are running, and every member of the Parish Council is homeless, he said. "We have collected more than 80 bodies, and we still haven’t reached the worst part of the parish," Rodriguez said Tuesday from an emergency operations center inside an Exxon Mobil refinery. "There’s not a home left here that’s livable. There may be 25 homes out of 25,000 that are intact."
Cows, horses and dogs wander the streets of St. Bernard Parish, limping between ruined cars and boats. Elsewhere in the parish, packs of feral dogs are being shot. "Most of the animals are dead," said Rodriguez. "The dogs have not eaten, and they’re starting to get to the bodies. We had a pack of four pit bulls kill a horse."
Every home and business bears some scar from Katrina. Splintered telephone poles lean drunkenly across streets or hang in the air, suspended from tangled wires. "We have a lot of elderly residents who moved here because there’s so little crime," said Rodriguez. "They came because it was so safe."
Unlike in downtown, no one reported looting or gunfire in St. Bernard Parish. But a relentless surge of water pouring over levees pushed the parish’s populace up into their attics and onto their roofs.
Survivors say nature unleashed more fury on this community than on any other parish in the area. "It was worse in St. Bernard than in New Orleans," said parish firefighter Daren Schaeffer, 41. "We had 20 feet of water in some places."
Parish officials said the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not show up until Monday, a week after the storm. On Tuesday, FEMA approved $31 million in immediate aid and dropped off a mobile command center for the parish government.
Members of a FEMA disaster mortuary response team were expected to begin working in the parish Wednesday. National Guard troops are scarcer in St. Bernard than in New Orleans’ central business district, where truckloads of troops still hunt looters. "We’re glad FEMA finally showed up, but for the first five days after the storm, no one even came looking to see how we were doing," said parish Councilman Judy Hoffmeister. "Now they say they’re going to give us everything we need, but we were in desperate need of it days and days ago."
Generators from the Department of Homeland Security arrived Tuesday to power St. Bernard’s water plant, Parish President Rodriguez said on the parish’s Web site. He said the water level fell 6 more inches Tuesday and that five of eight pumps in the area were working. HEAPS OF BODIES, FURNITURE
Each closed door inside St. Rita’s darkened hallways is a nightmare. Some are blocked by tangled heaps of furniture and bodies. The body count is cursory. The searchers fear falling into the muck, whose composition is not in doubt.
Fifteen bodies were counted inside the building and many more are suspected of being there or of having floated outside. Some doors wedged shut with debris could not be opened at all.
The staff at St. Rita’s managed to float 20 patients on mattresses across a half-mile of floodwater to nearby Beauregard High School as the water level rose, said Couture, one of the rescuers.
One died on the way, two died there, and a fourth died afterward in the hospital, he said. Those deaths pushed the confirmed body count to 19. The nursing home held 65 patients and at least six staff members when the storm hit. "The water level rose from the ground to 8 feet in 15 minutes, and it did that all over the parish," said Melerine, the parish councilman.
Parish officials called the owner of St. Rita’s before the storm to ask her why she hadn’t evacuated patients, said Dr. Paul Verrette, medical director for the St. Bernard Office of Emergency Preparedness. "We have pleaded with those people for years to execute their evacuation plan," Verrette said. "They never do."
St. Bernard Coroner Bryan Bertucci said he called nursing home owner Mabel Mangano during a Parish Council meeting at 2 p.m. on Aug. 28, a day before the storm. He said he asked her why she had not followed the evacuation plan she filed with the parish and removed her patients to Baton Rouge and Lafayette on the two buses set aside for them. "She told me she had a generator and five nurses and had gotten the permission of the patients’ families to stay put," Bertucci said. "Then she asked me if I thought the council would be mad at her."
Mangano could not be reached for comment. Her whereabouts and safety are unknown. "This is beyond the council now," Rodriguez, the parish president, said. "I suspect that she’ll wish she had left by the time this is done, if she doesn’t already." Information for this article was contributed by Daniel Acker and Todd Zeranski of Bloomberg News.