Posted on 09/11/2005 2:36:06 PM PDT by kenth
Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.
In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.
Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."
Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.
Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.
'These people were going to die anyway'
The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.
"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."
The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.
"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.
"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.
"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.
"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.
"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.
"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.
"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."
Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."
Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."
I agree. I didn't mean that I wanted someone to end my kin's lives..... only that I begged someone to do something rather than see them suffer an agony I hope I never witness again.
Mom, my sister and brother weren't able to drink, let alone eat their last days.
I also believe that in the Plan of Life.... He decides when and where.
Nana
ack!
The number of Freepers believing this story is really disturbing.
A stressful toll on haggard cops
NEW ORLEANS - (KRT) - After spending his career reassuring the people of New Orleans that the forces of law and order always prevail, police Sgt. Paul Accardo wasn't supposed to die this way.
Not sitting in numbed despair in his patrol car. Not parked alone outside a shuttered restaurant some 40 miles from his hurricane-gutted city. Not with his own service pistol in his hand.
Accardo, a well-known New Orleans Police Department media affairs officer, fatally shot himself in the head Saturday, Sept. 3. Another colleague, Patrolman Lawrence Celestine, killed himself in the same manner the day before. And the news of the two men's shocking deaths quickly emerged as the pre-eminent symbol of the ruthless toll that Hurricane Katrina has inflicted on New Orleans' overwhelmed emergency response personnel, and on the city's historically troubled police force in particular.
"Paul always came across as the perfect policeman," said a still stunned Capt. Marlon Defillo, Accardo's supervisor. "He was a spit-and-polish officer. He never complained about any duty. Never. But what we've been through this past week wasn't duty. It was hell."
Accardo, 36, who was buried Wednesday in Baton Rouge, indeed seemed a perfect choice for public spokesman of the newly revamped New Orleans Police Department.
The once impoverished force, which had gained a dismal reputation for police brutality and corruption through much of the 1990s, had just cleared its last U.S. Department of Justice civil rights probe in March 2004. And Accardo, the youthful and clean-scrubbed officer with an easy smile and a crisp uniform, showed up frequently on local TV sets as the face of the reformed police force.
That is, until Katrina ripped a gaping hole through the department, and swept its affable spokesman forever away.
"Look, some men have left our ranks because they couldn't deal with this catastrophe," said Deputy Chief Warren Riley, who estimated that of the 1,641 officers on the payroll in New Orleans before the storm, only about 1,000 have returned to active duty so far.
"Like other citizens, we lost our homes. Some of us lost our loved ones. We had no ammo. No communications. We were without food and water," Riley added. "As to what exact circumstances led up to Paul's death, we simply don't know, and maybe never will."
But at least this much of his last hours can be reconstructed from interviews with colleagues and family.
Accardo, a soft-spoken New Orleans native who was a stickler for protocol and neatness, seemed utterly undone by the awesome scale of the hurricane's chaos and destruction, fellow officers say. By the time Katrina breached New Orleans' levees, sending floodwaters gushing through the city and forcing thousands to scramble for their lives, Accardo began acting strange.
"He just couldn't believe what was happening," said Defillo, his superior officer. "It took him three or four seconds to answer simple questions. His clothes were all disheveled. It wasn't like him."
Accardo's home was wiped out by floodwaters. But what unmoored the officer far more, Defillo said, was his inability to alleviate the tide of human suffering engulfing his city.
"We were going out in big military trucks, passing up desperate people because we were already too full - old people, poor people," said Defillo. "Paul took it hard. He didn't want to leave them behind."
Finally, after spending nine nightmarish hours helping to evacuate some 30,000 people from the pestilential confines of the Superdome, Accardo stopped talking altogether. His alarmed superiors ordered him to take a day off to decompress.
Accardo drove aimlessly to the nearby town of Luling. There, in his patrol car - a vehicle he ordinarily kept immaculately washed and waxed - he took his life. Ever considerate, the department spokesman left a note with a police phone number for passersby to call and report his death.
"He fell on his sword," said Thomas Accardo, Paul's brother. "I think he decided he was dishonored. He couldn't protect the people of New Orleans as he was sworn to do. He couldn't save those who wanted to be saved."
Standing on the stoop of an uncle's house in Baton Rouge, Thomas Accardo described a police-obsessed little brother while Paul's wife, Anne Accardo, stood by, covering her mouth with her hands to stifle sobs.
Paul had always wanted to be a New Orleans police officer, Thomas recalled. At age 6, their mother made him a birthday cake with NOPD - the department's acronym - emblazoned across the top. And as a young applicant to the force, the skinny youth had flattened fishing sinkers into sheets of lead, and hidden the metal inside his shoes in order to pass the weight requirements for academy recruits.
Less is known about the department's other suicide.
Patrolman Celestine, a former narcotics officer and savvy street cop, shot himself Sept. 2 in front of a colleague after being ordered to take a day off due to stress, police officials said.
"He was a big, athletic, stand-up guy," said Capt. Bob Bardy, the exhausted and red-eyed commander of the city's Seventh District where Celestine worked. "I put him in a body bag myself. No officer should have to do that. Bagging your own man. That's not in the contract."
Bardy told how another officer lost all his toenails from standing in putrid water for days on end. Bardy spent five miserable nights sleeping in the rusty cab of a truck in a junkyard.
"Maybe we're not the greatest police force in the world, sure," Bardy said. "But I'd like to see anybody survive what we've survived. We saved a hell of a lot of folks in New Orleans. And we lost two good men."
The deaths of Accardo and Celestine - the only New Orleans police fatalities related to the storm - have become a debating point in the rising acrimony over the chaotic government response to Katrina's havoc.
"Two of my officers committed suicide because they were overcome by their sacrifices," New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass declared angrily to the press earlier this week. "You should write about that, instead of finding a few cowards who walked out on the job."
But Accardo's boss and friend, Capt. Defillo, had more practical concerns.
Like finding a proper police uniform in which to dress his dead colleague. With most of their possessions still submerged, the city's remaining police have been patrolling New Orleans in recent days dressed like haggard castaways - in shorts, sneakers, sweaty T-shirts, and even palm hats. Defillo had located a clean shirt for his dead comrade, but he couldn't find a tie.
"You guys have a black tie?" he asked some passersby on a muddy street corner in the city's debris-strewn downtown. He was holding a NOPD shirt on a hanger, and was trying to blink back tears.
"Paul's gotta have a tie," he insisted. "He wouldn't have liked it any other way."
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So, the precedent is set...in case of an emergency (and who determines that?) you just make and "act of mercy" and kill. Wonder how many times this will be repeated?
This is about as bogus as the "first hand account of pulling bodies from trees, 30 at a time, and ice trucks lining up to collect the dead in MS." story posted on FR.
"Another day, another outrage."
I say, Get every living thing outta there and lay waste to the entire place. Screw it, it's not worth the trouble to rebuild.
that is not what I'm saying. My Papaw was given medicine to prolong life for a while even though we all knew, him as well what the end result would be. I think you are assuming I believe that, but I never said anything of the sort.
You may be right. I'm starting to doubt it. I think all the hospitals would have been evacuated before the hurricane. Also, I don't believe that doctors and nurses would have been so willing to start killing off patients because of the riots, etc... It just doesn't make sense.
"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."
If true, which I doubt, I will pray for God's mercy also.
In my opinion, it was the failure of the local, state and federal government to evacuate NO BEFORE the storm that was the problem. That NO had far greater chance of flooding than NOT before the hurricane, was obvious to anyone with a brain cell.
Yeah, right, a doctor is going to admit this to the media.
I would never want a doctor to make sure my mother died. What is wrong with you?
I think that it's wrong to kill people because of litmus tests - that's why I will continue to ask people to call Congress to federalize a ban on starving and dehydrating Americans if they have no directives. If people are stupid enough to sign a standard living will, then when they get nothing to eat, it's their decision.
My car was totalled about a month ago and the ER shoved a living will in my face immediately. I said "no thanks, I don't believe in them." I have no fascination with death having almost been killed a month ago. Trust me.
I find it hard to believe too but the libs will say "when in doubt, blame Bush"
Suicide is also against the law but the suicide victim metes our their own sentence by committing suicide.
just like the UK couple who said the women were forced to flash the rescue workers. Sounds more like UK's US haters. Damn the zombie stories cant be far off now!!!
My condolences on the death of your Grandfather.
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