Cook felt this was the best route of action, according to Fink, who wrote that he told her, “‘The humane thing would be to put ’em out.”’
What happened after the bodies were found?
Following a state investigation into the unusual death toll from Memorial, Dr. Pou and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo were arrested in July 2006 in connection with the deaths of four LifeCare patients, as reported by the New York Times, who wrote that the charges against the nurses were later dropped in exchange for their testimony against Dr. Pou. (Landry and Budo haven’t publicly commented on the case.)
At the time of Pou’s arrest, her attorney Rick Simmons said she was “absolutely innocent” and asserted that Pou was just doing her job. “She volunteered for storm duty and stayed there for five days,” Simmons told The New York Times in July 2007, “and then the State of Louisiana abandoned the patients and the hospitals and everybody else.”
In July 2007, a grand jury refused to indict Dr. Pou on one count of second-degree murder and nine counts of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, according to Fink, as they couldn’t definitively say that Pou had “a specific intent to kill.” The charges were expunged from Pou’s criminal record.
Since then, Pou has resumed practicing medicine. “As of the summer of 2022,” Fink wrote on her website, “she was practicing medicine as a head and neck oncologic surgeon in Louisiana.”
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