NEW ORLEANS -- The Orleans Parish district attorney will not be pressing charges against a local doctor for a death that happened at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The district attorney's decision comes on the heels of an announcement earlier Thursday from Coroner Dr. Frank Minyard, who said the death was not a homicide. The coroner said he is ruling the death of a Jannie Clark Burgess, 79, at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina, "unclassified."
"Now I know that some people were wondering why we didn't call this homicide because of the statements made in the paper by Dr. Cook, but this patient was extremely sick. She had serious surgery a week before. She'd been on morphine around the clock. She had kidney failure, liver failure," said Minyard.
Dr. Ewing Cook, a retired pulmonologist and administrator at Memorial, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor. There's no question I hastened her demise," he said. He also said he believes he did the right thing under the dire circumstances during the flooding and lack of water and electricity, but that opened the investigation.
"I have made efforts to try to speak with him through his attorney, and his attorney said he didn't think that was a good idea," said Minyard about wanting to learn about Cook's intent. Cook is now living in the Lafayette area according to Dr. Minyard, and his attorney is Ralph Capitelli.
Minyard said he spoke with the deceased patient's sisters and invited them to come in and talk to him. He is preparing a full report for them. Burgess' brother said she was a nurse, mother and a good soul.
"She was a mother of two children. She lost a son in Vietnam and she was a gold mother and she hasn't yet gotten a metal from the marine corps," said Johnnie Clark, Jr., Burgess' Brother.
He is skeptical about the unclassified finding.
"If I had committed a crime there is no doubt about where I would be. I would be back at Tulane and Broad. Then why can't you do this with other people. Why come up with double standards?" said Clark.
He said he knows his sister was ill, but feels she would have lived longer. He will not speculate about future family actions.
"I'm going to check it out. That's all I can do. I'm not making any statements about what I might do or what I want to do," he added.
The coroner says the seven injections of morphine that Burgess received at Dr. Cook's orders did not take her life right away, as an overdose of narcotics usually does. He said she didn't die until more than three hours later.
"She was 240 pounds, and from the surgery and her physical condition, she developed blood poisoning in medicine. We call it sepsis, and this blood poisoning along with an anemia that she had before surgery. We think that this probably contributed mostly to her death, and I'm saying mostly because we really don't know. And when you really don't know, you have to be 100 percent sure when you're saying the word homicide," said Minyard.
In response to the coroner's findings, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro would not go on camera, but he did issue a statement saying, "Since it is the coroner's opinion that this victim did not die as a result of being administered a lethal dose of narcotics, I cannot pursue a homicide charge at this time."
