Believe me Foti is too stupid to be kidding. He probably was drunk when the deadline came and he didn’t have one of his former deputies to wake him up.
http://blog.nola.com/updates/2007/08/battle_over_35_deaths_at_st_ri.html#Scene_1
Battle over 35 deaths at St. Rita’s to begin
Posted by Paul Rioux, St. Bernard bureau August 11, 2007 11:14PM
“They’ve lost their home and their business, and now they’re fighting for their freedom. But they’re the toughest, most resilient people I’ve ever met.”
— JIM COBB, defense attorney
Jury selection starts Monday in high-profile trial of a couple accused of abandoning their nursing home to Katrina’s fury
High on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, St. Francisville weathered Hurricane Katrina’s initial onslaught with scattered power outages and some downed trees.
Then came the waves of evacuees, including several hundred people who took shelter in a school in the picturesque town 25 miles north of Baton Rouge and 115 feet above sea level.
“We obviously didn’t have any flooding and there wasn’t much wind damage, but we were bulging at the seams for weeks and weeks,” West Feliciana Parish tourism director Kitty Martin said. “The town probably doubled in size overnight.”
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, MabelMangano, 64, and her husband,Sal Mangano, 67, face 35 countsof negligent homicide for notevacuating the nursing home asKatrina bore down on southeastern Louisiana in late August2005.
With jury selection set to begin Monday, TV news trucksare staking out positions aroundthe 104-year-old copper-domedcourthouse, and every motel andbed and breakfast in the area isbooked solid for the trial, whichcould last six weeks.
The deaths at St. Rita’s drewnational news media attention,with photographs of overturnedwheelchairs and walkers encased in the muck covering thenursing home floors emergingas some of the storm’s most poignant images.
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