A timeline that is not what it seems...
Those who had been following the run-up to Katrina and its horrible tragic aftermath will certainly remember Mr. Aaron Broussard's interview on Meet the Press -- an excerpt:
BROUSSARD: ... The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.
It seems the timeline for this tragedy was a lot earlier than Monday through Friday.
MS/NBC found the son:
Subsequent reporting identified the man whom Broussard was referring to in the Meet the Press interview as Thomas Rodrigue, the Jefferson Parish emergency services director. Contacted on Friday by MSNBC.com, Rodrigue acknowledged that his 92-year-old mother and more than 30 other people died in the St. Rita nursing home. They had not been evacuated and the flood waters overtook the residence.
The chronology of the phone calls described by Broussard came under particular scrutiny by bloggers.
Rodrigue said he didn’t see or hear Broussard’s comments on Meet the Press. When told of the sequence of phone calls that Broussard described on Meet the Press, Rodrigue said "No, no, that’s not true."
"I can’t tell you what he said that day, why he was confused, I’m assuming he was under a tremendous amount of pressure," Rodrigue told MSNBC.
"I contacted the nursing home two days before the storm [on Aug. 27th] and again on the 28th of August," Rodrigue said. "At the same time I talked to the nursing home I also talked to the emergency manager for St. Bernard Parish," Rodrigue said, "to encourage that nursing home to evacuate like they were supposed to and they didn’t until it was too late."
Broussard must have been confused "because I was calling, not my mother calling me, I was calling her," Rodrigue said. Further, Rodrigue says he never made any calls after Monday, the day he figures his mother died, based on conversations he’s had with another person who had a family member perish inside St. Rita’s. Officials believe that the residents of St. Rita’s died on Monday, Aug. 29, not on Friday, Sept. 2, as Broussard had suggested.
What a tragic way to loose your Mom!
And this would have transpired during the Municipal and State Efforts and not during the Government Efforts that were finally invited in a few days later by Governor Blanco.
The one ray of light:
The husband and wife owners of St. Rita’s nursing home in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette have been charged with homicide in the case.
"The pathetic thing in this case was that they were asked if they wanted to move them and they did not," Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti said Tuesday. "They were warned repeatedly that this storm was coming. In effect, their inaction resulted in the deaths of these people."
"They had a duty and a standard of care to people who could not care for themselves," Foti said of the owners. "If you or I decided we are going to stay, we do it of our own free will. ... The people at the nursing home don’t have that choice."
"Thirty-four people drowned in a nursing home when it should have been evacuated. I cannot say it any plainer than that," Foti said, his voice rising with anger.
And dammit, these people will probably walk in five or ten years.
I am thinking more along the lines of: Rope. Tree.
Or a couple cinder-blocks on each foot in a slowly filling swimming pool if you have the time and want to give them a foretaste of the purgatory that awaits them. And this is before Satan clears out his calender and pencils them in for a few eternities of real work...
Posted by DaveH at September 19, 2005 8:23 PM