Nursing Home Owners Charged in 34 Deaths

NPR | By Robert Siegel

Published September 14, 2005 at 12:00 AM EDT

The owners of a nursing home in which several patients died after they were not evacuated during Hurricane Katrina are facing negligent-homicide charges. Aid workers found 34 bodies in St. Rita's, the St. Bernard Parish facility. Robert Siegel talks with Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti.

Lawyers for Mable and Salvador Mangano, Sr., the owners of the Saint Rita's Nursing Home, say that a few of their patients had special needs -- feeder tubes, oxygen -- and would not have survived an evacuation.

Attorney General Foti says the nursing home had a contract with an ambulance service that could have seen to those patients. And that it had ample warning of what was to come.

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Robert Siegel

Prior to his retirement, Robert Siegel was the senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered. With 40 years of experience working in radio news, Siegel hosted the country's most-listened-to, afternoon-drive-time news radio program and reported on stories and happenings all over the globe, and reported from a variety of locations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. He signed off in his final broadcast of All Things Considered on January 5, 2018.

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