In Nursing Home, a Fight Lost to Rising Waters (Broussard less than truthful on Meet The Press)
".. >St. Bernard Parish officials say that 32 of the home's roughly 60 residents died on Aug. 29, more than a week ago.
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Update 9-11-11
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"..And finally, on the question I raised a few days ago about Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s tearful story about his emergency manager’s mother drowning in a St. Bernard nursing home, I think the evidence shows pretty clearly that Broussard was embellishing the story. Readers helpfully pointed me to the following news accounts:
New York Times: In nursing home, a fight lost to rising waters.
Newsday: Desperately seeking survivors.
MSNBC: This anger comes from watching death.
From the MSNBC item:
The man he was talking about is Thomas Rodrigue, who told “Dateline” that his 92-year-old mother was one of 32 elderly people found dead at the St. Rita’s nursing home.
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MSNBC Quote:
"..The man he was talking about is Thomas Rodrigue, who told “Dateline” that his 92-year-old mother was one of 32 elderly people found dead at the St. Rita’s nursing home..."
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But the 32 people who died at St. Rita’s nursing home didn’t die on Friday; they died earlier in the week, when the floodwaters first inundated the low-lying facility. Rather than being attributable to the federal authorities’ slow response (which was pretty much the point of Broussard’s version of the story), the death of those senior citizens was more the fault of local authorities (who failed to evacuate them) than of federal officials (who wouldn’t have been there in time to rescue them under the best of circumstances).
So, assuming the MSNBC story is accurate, Broussard’s story was at least significantly embellished. The tear-jerking account of the repeated calls to momma were fictional (or at least were displaced from their actual time of occurrence, which would have to have been before or during the storm, not during the several days afterward when FEMA was MIA). And if that part was fiction, it would mean that Broussard, for all the apparent sincerity in his emotional on-air breakdown, was willing to lie in order to make his story work better as political theater, which in turn makes it harder for me to credit the rest of the slow-FEMA-response anecdotes he described .."
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I don't know it the account is accurate, but I heard on a local Fox radio news broadcast that the nursing home patients were believed to have been dead BEFORE the storm hit.
I don't know it the account is accurate, but I heard on a local Fox radio news broadcast that the nursing home patients were believed to have been dead BEFORE the storm hit.