Post Katrina Death at Memorial Hospital Not a Homicide, Coroner Says

Nurse Mary Jo D'Amico, from Memorial Medical Center, fans a patient in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
Photo: AsPr

(CNN) -- After reviewing the case of a woman who died at New Orleans, Louisiana's Memorial Hospital in the days after Hurricane Katrina, coroner Frank Minyard said Thursday that he cannot classify her death as a homicide.

Minyard said he hopes his findings on the death of Jannie Burgess, 79, will mark "the end of the Memorial Hospital hurricane situation."

The review was initiated after an August 2009 New York Times article quoted a doctor as saying Memorial patients were given morphine and other drugs after Katrina struck in August 2005, with hospital staff knowing that it could hasten some of the patients' deaths.

Burgess' manner of death is unclassified, the coroner said, and the cause of her death undetermined.....Full article

"I don't think -- and I could be wrong -- I don't think the morphine contributed as much to her demise as her physical condition," said