There are many disturbing stories emerging from the gulf coast as a result of the horrific effects of Hurricane Katrina – murders, suicides, rapes, starvation – so much pain and mayhem. But, here’s the first tale I’ve heard of someone who had to be put to death because it was decided he could not be evacuated.
ARRIVING in New Orleans last Sunday, I have spent a week reporting the unfolding misery and ruined lives in the aftermath of the hurricane.
But nothing, in the plethora of grim tales of disaster, compares with a terrible incident recounted to me as the week drew to a close. There was a 380-pound man stranded on the seventh floor of a New Orleans hospital. Unable to get him down five flights of stairs to the second-floor exit, through which other patients were being evacuated onto rescue boats to escape the rising floodwater, a female manager took a shocking decision. She ordered that he be given euthanasia.
A bearded, middle-aged doctor, who is still wearing his green hospital garb, tells me the sad story as he and his colleagues sit at the muddy, squalid refugee-receiving post on New Orleans’ I10 Highway. He does not want to give me his name and will not identify the patient out of respect.
But he wants people to know what happened in there. His lower jaw quivers as he recalls the events of Wednesday night.
“We had minutes to get out, and I asked, ‘What are we going to do about this guy, because he’s a big man. It was going to be tough getting him down those stairs – the elevators weren’t working. That woman turned to me and said straight out, ‘We’re going to help him to heaven’. It makes me want to break down, how that man’s life was taken away.”
As reported in Scotland on Sunday
‘We’re going to help him to heaven’.
I cannot pass judgement on what happened to that poor man in that hospital. I wasn’t there. I can’t imagine the pain of that decision. What I can say, however, is that I know I will mourn for him and the thousands who who have suffered, continue to suffer, and who have died.
