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Prosecutor to Review Patient Deaths After Katrina

NEW ORLEANS — The Orleans Parish district attorney said Friday that he was conducting an “evaluation” of the events surrounding patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center here in the days after Hurricane Katrina, though he said he had not formally reopened an investigation.

The evaluation was prompted by an Aug. 30 article in The New York Times Magazine, in a collaboration with ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative organization. The article raised questions about the deaths of at least 17 patients, who appeared to have been injected with high doses of sedatives after a long-delayed rescue effort was under way...

... Nina Killeen, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said the evaluation had so far consisted of an interview with the Orleans Parish coroner, Frank Minyard, who testified in the 2007 grand jury investigation and was quoted in the article as saying that he considered four of the patient deaths to be homicides.
Read entire article at NYT (Digest)