[StBernard] Dallas Morning News Article on St. Rita's

[Westley Annis]

*Torrents of anger and sadness follow nursing home deaths *

*Everyone in St. Bernard Parish loved someone in St. Rita's before 
Katrina made it a death trap
*

*11:19 PM CDT on Saturday, September 17, 2005 *

*By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News *

ST. BERNARD, La. – The agony of this parish lies in a stinking, 
mud-choked nursing home named for the patron saint of the lost and 
forgotten.

The wall of water and misery unleashed by Hurricane Katrina came up hard 
and fast, wreaking biblical horror at St. Rita's Nursing Center as it 
rolled across this working-class suburban parish southeast of New Orleans.

A resident's son would be the first outsider to see the frail bodies of 
St. Rita's residents who didn't get out.

Two days after the storm, firefighter Steve Gallodoro came upon the 
bodies floating just inside the entrance when he reached St. Rita's by 
boat to check on his father, who used a wheelchair. He says he'll be 
haunted for the rest of his life that he couldn't save him – or even 
recover his body – as he rescued so many others from the monster storm.

"I acted as a good fireman. I was doing my job," said Mr. Gallodoro, a 
St. Bernard Parish Fire Department captain. "I failed as a son. I only 
hope that my father understands."

There are few in St. Bernard Parish who do. Three weeks after Katrina 
roared through this arc of land between the Crescent City and the gulf, 
the questions and the pain remain angry and raw.

The owners of St. Rita's, Salvadore and Mable Mangano, were charged last 
week with 34 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of 
residents killed in the flooding. Relatives of the home's residents and 
others in St. Bernard Parish have grimly praised the arrests, but 
Mangano family members and the couple's lawyer say the two actually are 
heroes and are now being made scapegoats. They say the Manganos 
frantically tried to save the nursing home's residents, pulling as many 
as they could from the murky flood and circling back for three days to 
look for other survivors. Mrs. Mangano found one mentally retarded 
patient clutching the top of a chifforobe.

"It's heartbreaking because that nursing home was their whole life. I 
know my sister-in-law would give her life for those residents," Patricia 
Buffone, who is married to a younger brother of Mable Mangano, told /The 
Dallas Morning News/.

The Manganos could not be reached for comment.

Mrs. Buffone, a licensed practical nurse, worked at St. Rita's and was 
among the survivors. "The water came up so fast, and we were grabbing 
everyone we could," she said Saturday. "We just couldn't reach everyone 
in time."

'100 percent devastated'

St. Bernard bore the brunt of the storm's fury before it crashed into 
New Orleans. Then the parish waited for help that never seemed to come.

Parish officials had no communications with anyone beyond their parish 
borders until five days after the hurricane. Beleaguered firemen, police 
and volunteers organized their own rescues of 4,000 people stranded on 
roofs and levees. Officials note with visible disgust that their first 
outside aid came from a group of Canadian Mounties who arrived after 3 ½ 
days.

Katrina's vicious winds and water left the lowland parish and its towns 
– Chalmette and Arabi, Violet and St. Bernard, Poydras and Meraux – 
wastelands of toxic mud, downed trees, splintered homes and wrecked 
cars. Every business was inundated. On Judge Perez Highway, the parish's 
major commercial district, much of one of the main shopping centers 
burned in the days after the storm.

"We are 100 percent, 100 percent devastated here," said Joey DiFatta, 
chairman of the St. Bernard Parish Council. "There's nothing here that's 
good. Nowhere."

When parish leaders finally flew over the parish and took in the scope 
of the disaster, they were stunned to see that a third of its landmass – 
the marshlands providing a buffer from the Gulf of Mexico – had washed 
into the sea. They say they're being optimistic when they estimate that 
90 percent of the parish's houses are uninhabitable and it will be at 
least four to six months before anyone can even think about moving back.

The parish's 70,000 residents were finally allowed back in on Saturday 
after officials decided they needed to see the devastation for 
themselves to comprehend how bad things are. But a 250,000-gallon oil 
spill at one of the parish's two refineries, Murphy Oil in Chalmette, 
left contamination so severe that a quarter of the parish's residents – 
including many of its leaders – can't be allowed near their homes.

Even the most resolute are uncertain of the future for a community that 
survived the devastation of Hurricane Betsy in 1965. A hand-lettered 
sign posted in front of the sodden courthouse reads "The St. Bernard 
Alamo."

"We're tired. We're worn out," said Parish Emergency Operations Director 
Larry J. Ingargiola. "This has been going on for three weeks now, and 
there's no end in sight."

The worst of it is on a desolate stretch of Louisiana Highway 46, in a 
brick and pre-fabricated steel building surrounded by reeking 
floodwaters and filled with ankle-deep mud. St. Rita's was the only one 
of four nursing homes in the parish that did not take its patients to 
higher ground, and its death toll represents half of the parish's known 
hurricane losses.

"The parish took a very hard blow. There was devastation everywhere," 
said Tammy Daigle, a licensed practical nurse who last worked at St. 
Rita's two nights before the storm and evacuated to Alabama.

"But what happened at that nursing home did the whole parish in because 
everybody in that place, if they weren't somebody's uncle or grandparent 
or cousin, they were friends with people all over that parish," she 
said, her voice breaking. "The whole parish had to have known somebody 
who lived or died in there. It's horrible, just horrible what happened."

A family enterprise

St. Rita's residents were regular working folks, elders of big, 
sprawling families. They were fishermen and artists, a one-time bag 
lady, a retired teacher, a card-carrying Teamster who loved growing 
vegetables and played the clarinet.

Their surnames were largely Italian and French and Spanish, and many had 
some "Isleno" blood – a legacy of the Canary Islanders who settled the 
marshy area in the late 1700s.

St. Rita's longtime owners, "Mr. Sal" and "Miss Mable" Mangano, lived in 
a brick home adjoining the nursing home. Their son, "little Sal," and 
his wife lived in another beside it, keeping pens of goats and ostriches 
that they encouraged home residents to visit when their relatives came 
to the home.

The Mangano family has been in the parish for years, a blend of Sicilian 
immigrants and islanders from the tiny Gulf Coast community of 
Delacroix. They opened St. Rita's 20 years ago and named it, relatives 
say, to honor Mable's grandmother. They made the business a family 
enterprise, with their son and daughter-in-law and Mable's sister-in-law 
working alongside them in the 100-bed home.

"They were nice people. I thought they were, anyway," said Mr. 
Ingargiola, who attended school with the elder Manganos. "Regular folks. 
Everybody knew them around here."

St. Rita's was one of the nicer facilities in the parish, with homey 
rooms, a crystal chandelier in the lobby and daily activities for the 
residents. There was nightly bingo and a weekly Mass, and people said 
the Manganos laid an impressive altar for St. Joseph's Day, the March 
feast day when New Orleans' Sicilian community offers special foods and 
good intentions to share their blessings with those in need.

A picture of St. Rita inside the front doors greeted visitors to the 
home, just across from a statue of the blessed Virgin. A framed picture 
of a praying Pope John Paul II hung above Mr. Mangano's desk.

"Be nice to your kids. THEY'LL CHOOSE YOUR NURSING HOME," read a blue 
bumper sticker stuck on his office window, still visible days after the 
devastating flood.

"It was like a great big family. I can't understand how this could 
happen. Sal and Mable, I know that they're getting the blame," said Ms. 
Daigle, the St. Rita's nurse. "But they spent their whole life running 
this place. They were there from 7 am to 6 p.m., six days a week, and 
their son, too. They took care of these old people like they was their 
own."

Like every other nursing home in Louisiana, St. Rita's had an evacuation 
plan for hurricanes and other disasters. Parish officials recall reading 
it, and some relatives of St. Rita's residents say the Manganos assured 
them that they would bus everyone to Alexandria or Baton Rouge if the 
need arose.

But as Katrina bore down on southeast Louisiana over the last weekend of 
August, it became apparent that the Manganos weren't going to take their 
elderly charges anywhere.

Several relatives, packing up to leave town themselves, said they called 
and were assured that the Manganos "had things under control."

St. Bernard Parish coroner and family practicioner Brian Bertucci called 
St. Rita's on Sunday afternoon, after the parish had ordered a mandatory 
evacuation, because he had about 40 patients there and wanted to hear 
personally that they were being moved out.

Dr. Bertucci said Mrs. Mangano explained that they were properly 
equipped for the storm, with five nurses, a generator, and permission 
from residents' families to stay put. She added that she had no way to 
move some of her most fragile patients because ambulances that had 
agreed to move five of St. Rita's residents to the New Orleans Superdome 
had never shown up.

He said she waved him off when he urged her to reconsider, explaining 
that he could immediately send two buses and drivers "to take you 
anywhere you want to go."

Mr. Gallodoro, the firefighter, said he twice contacted Mr. Mangano 
because he was anxious about his father. He offered to help load buses, 
but he said Mr. Mangano responded "that if he loaded these people into 
buses, there was a possibility of losing two or three."

Mrs. Buffone was one of the nurses on duty that Sunday night, just hours 
before the storm hit. She said she never heard anyone mention anything 
about a mandatory evacuation. No one was worried, she said, because she 
and other employees and many of their relatives had long used St. Rita's 
as a shelter from major Gulf storms.

In fact, her own 16-year-old son and husband came to St. Rita's to wait 
out Katrina, and other staffers brought in relatives, too – spouses, 
ailing elderly parents and children as young as 2 years old.

"Everyone thought it was going to be OK," Mrs. Buffone said. "It was 
real calm. We had been listening to television all night long into the 
early morning."

The water came

But shortly after breakfast Monday morning, she said, as residents 
lingered in the hallways, or rested in their rooms, one of the men 
waiting out the storm stuck his head outside as the winds appeared to 
ease a little.

He saw what looked like a solid wall of brown headed toward the home. He 
rushed back inside, yelling that the water was coming, and slammed shut 
the double glass doors.

In what seemed like an instant, Mrs. Buffone could see muddy water 2 
feet high and rising against the outside panes of glass.

She said she and other staff tried to gather patients in one place as 
torrents of water poured through the hallways. As she rushed about, she 
heard people yell that water seemed to be coming through the air 
conditioning vents.

The staff tried a new strategy, "trying to get as many people as we 
could back on the beds because we knew the mattresses could float."

Within a few minutes, she said, the force of the water pushed her and 
others toward a rear entrance of the home. She said they swam out a 
broken window to one of the Manganos' homes just behind the nursing 
facility. Rescuers in two boats arrived and ferried Mrs. Buffone and 
other survivors to the nursing home's roof. They began trying to move 
everyone to the highest place they could find.

"Myself, my husband and my son were on top of the roof for hours with 
nine patients," she said. "We pulled them up with our arms as they were 
coming out. My sister-in- law and brother-in-law were in the building 
with them, and they would hand them up."

She said she saw Mrs. Mangano pushing against chest-high water, trying 
to move a patient on a mattress as Mr. Mangano pulled others out of the 
flooded home. She said her sister-in-law refused to get out of the water 
and into one of the boats "because she still had people in the building."

At some point, someone began crawling into the space between the roof 
and the interior ceilings, ripping out ceiling tiles, hoping to spot 
anyone in the murk below. Three more patients were found, desperately 
hanging on to the attic supports, and they, too, would be pulled onto 
the roof, she said.

Particularly fragile patients were laid in the bottom of the two boats 
and taken to a nearby house, Mrs. Buffone said. Later, the boats began 
transferring the surviving patients and staff to a school about a 
half-mile from St. Rita's.

First to arrive

Two days after the storm, Steve Gallodoro managed to find a boat and 
enough time away from saving storm survivors to get down the parish from 
Chalmette to St. Rita's. He was particularly worried because his 
82-year-old father, Tufanio, was deathly afraid of water. Neither he nor 
his fire department colleagues had heard from that part of the parish 
since the storm.

When they reached St. Rita's driveway, he said, he saw water everywhere. 
Once the boat got close enough to the building's front entrance, he 
jumped out and sank into water over his head. The glass double doors 
wouldn't budge, so he tried to batter them open with a boat anchor, and 
then had his boat companions move him to a nearby patio where a door 
appeared to be broken.

There, the water was only four feet deep, so he began moving inside. "I 
bumped into a body floating. It was an elderly female. ...five foot into 
the building, I bumped into another body. ... I walked 10 feet into the 
main hallway. I bumped into another body. I didn't go any further 
because I knew what I'd find."

Returning to his boat, he and his companions motored back to the highway 
and flagged down a passing sheriff's "duck" boat to tell the authorities 
what he'd seen. The sheriff's deputies already knew and directed him to 
the nearby school where survivors were still sheltered.

There, Mr. Gallodoro said, a nurse trying to wrap a naked patient in a 
sheet saw him and lowered her eyes. "She said, 'I'm sorry, Steve. I'm 
really, really sorry.' "

Frantic to know the fate of his father, he and his companions motored 
back toward St. Rita's and came across "Mr. Sal" Mangano in another boat.

"I asked him what he was doing out riding in a boat when he's got 35 
people floating in his building," he said.

"I said you were afraid to lose two or three in transport, and now you 
have 35 floating in your building. And he said, 'They're floating all 
over the parish.'

He told the home's owner: "You are responsible for those people, and you 
should've gotten them out."

Mr. Gallodoro's companions drove their boat away to avoid a physical 
confrontation. He grabbed a fire department radio to ask for 35 body 
bags. Told there weren't that many available, he radioed back for one. 
All that anyone could offer was a black plastic bag, and he was told 
that if he managed to find his father, "no one would take the body."

"We had nowhere to put them," he said. "We were still saving lives."

Ms. Buffano said the most fragile of the patients who survived the flood 
were taken out by boat three days after the storm, and she and others 
were moved in a dump truck to the St. Bernard Parish Jail on the fourth 
day.

She said she last saw the Manganos in a boat, headed back to St. Rita's 
to search the murky, stinking water again. Eventually, she said, she and 
her family were taken to the Algiers Ferry and loaded onto buses bound 
for the Houston Astrodome.

And in the days that followed, as the dead of St. Rita's remained in the 
wreckage, families of the home's patients began finding out whether 
their relatives lived or died.

Earline Labatt, an 84-year-old grandmother, survived the flood only to 
die days later of infections from the storm water, moaning about 
alligators and rising water, said her daughter, Jeannie Bachemin.

She said her family had a chance to see her while she still could 
recognize them, and they were with her when she died in a Baton Rouge 
hospital. Mrs. Labatt had raised 10 kids in St. Bernard Parish, called 
numbers at the local bingo hall and once worked at a local restaurant 
before being confined to a wheelchair and debilitated with complications 
from diabetes.

"We got to say goodbye. She knew who we were," she said. "The people who 
drowned didn't get to do that."

Home abandoned

Another survivor, 75-year-old Trishka Stevens, told relatives about 
water reaching her mouth before a stranger appeared in her room and 
asked if she could reach up to him. She recounted being swept up in his 
arms and hauled out, breaking ribs as she was pulled onto the nursing 
home roof, said her granddaughter, Chicago-area resident Jodie Hanson.

"In my heart, I don't think the Manganos had bad intentions," Mrs. 
Hanson said. "I think they honestly just made a terrible mistake. Some 
people say it was about the money. That they wouldn't get paid. Some 
people say they were naive and expected they'd be fine. Some people say 
that nobody expected the water.

"When the lives of people are in your hands, you should run from danger 
and not take any chance," she said. "Unfortunately, they made a bad 
judgment call. When you make mistakes, you have to be accountable."

Authorities finally removed bodies from the home 10 days after the 
hurricane, and the nursing home sits abandoned, filled with the 
belongings of those who lived and died inside its brick and steel walls.

Three mud-caked body bags were dropped at one entrance, and a wooden 
pirogue, one of the shallow-draft boats ubiquitous along the Louisiana 
coast, sits just in front of the home's front doors.

The interior smells of death and is littered with furniture and 
belongings: a bright pink pillow, Mardi Gras beads and a tiara, photos 
of grandchildren, rosaries and sacred hearts of Jesus, an article 
declaring someone's loved teenager "first Miss Louisiana Shrimp Festival 
Queen."

A clock hung at eye-level in one patient's room is frozen at 10:40.

In another room, the name "Alma" is carefully arranged in 
refrigerator-magnet letters on a metal light-fixture that once hung over 
a bed. There are photos of young men in uniform, and in one room, a 
white lace curtain lays beneath a broken window, improbably clean in a 
sea of ankle-deep grime.

In Tufanio Gallodoro's room, number 306, the bulletin board above his 
bed, papered with Christmas wrap, has a yellow rosary, a bit of ribbon, 
and a white plastic cross with the sacred heart of Jesus. One shelf 
holds cheese crackers and a jar of cookies. A thick burgundy blanket 
lies on the ruined bed frame.

The Gallodoros are still waiting for word of when they can bury their 
father, a former truck driver, grandfather of six and great-grandfather 
of seven. They live, for now, in a borrowed trailer in the tiny town of 
Church Point, near Lafayette. Many in the close-knit family say they 
can't get out of their heads what their patriarch endured.

"The thought of my dad drowning is just unbearable. If they told me he 
had died of a heart attack or a stroke in the move, that would be hard," 
Cheryl Gallodoro Emmons said. "That he was so deathly afraid of water 
and he died in it – that's the hardest thing."

Mr. Gallodoro, Tufanio's firefighter son, said he's struggled with what 
he suspects made the Manganos stay. "It was a money issue. The cost of 
evacuation was something that they didn't want to pay," he said.

And like Mr. Gallodoro, other residents say they believe that the 
Manganos now should pay.

"There was no reason for it," said Mr. Ingargiola, an exhausted man who 
raises his middle finger in a rude salute to show what he thinks of his 
former schoolmates. "No reason at all for it. If they had just followed 
their damn plan, everything would've been all right."

/Staff writer Karen Brooks contributed to this report.
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