[StBernard] Manganos not guilty in St. Rita's nursing home case

[Westley Annis]

Posted by <http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/about.html> St. Bernard
bureau <http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/about.html>  September 07, 2007 


By Paul Rioux 
and Cindy Chang
St. Bernard bureau 

ST. FRANCISVILLE -- A six-person jury found the owners of a St. Bernard
Parish nursing home not guilty Friday night in the deaths of 35 residents
who drowned during Hurricane Katrina.

The jury's decision capped a three-week trial that brought the state's
highest official to the witness stand as attorneys tried to assign blame for
the deaths of the elderly people at St. Rita's nursing home.

Sal and Mabel Mangano, who owned the nursing home near Poydras, faced 35
counts of negligent homicide for the residents who died and 24 counts of
cruelty to the infirm for the residents who survived the flood but had to be
floated out of the building on mattresses and taken by boat to a makeshift
shelter. 

The jury deliberated around four hours. The couple was found not guilty on
all counts.

The verdict followed a day of emotional closing statements by attorneys for
the state and the Manganos.

Prosecutors told the jury the Manganos ignored repeated warnings of the
danger the hurricane posed and decided, perhaps in order to save money, not
to evacuate the home's residents to a safer place. 

Defense attorneys countered that the Manganos themselves are victims - of
the hurricane and of a government trying to hold them accountable for its
own failings. Their message to the jury: The Manganos are caring,
compassionate people who didn't want to risk residents' lives in an
evacuation and relied on the government to protect them from harm. 

After the jury began deliberating, Judge Jerome Winsberg lifted a gag order
in the case, unleashing a flood of pent-up emotion from family members of
the victims. 

Joy Lewis sobbed outside the West Feliciana Parish Courthouse as she
recalled Mabel Mangano's assurances that her 92-year-old mother, Laureta
Morales, would be kept safe during the hurricane. 

"She told me, 'If my little people drown, I'm going to drown with them,'¤"
Lewis said. "But Mabel's still here and my mother's gone." 

Lewis said she cared for her mother for 20 years before placing her at St.
Rita's about six months before the hurricane. 

"It was my worst nightmare," she said. "My mother drowned like a rat, and
they let it happen." 

Shirley Morales, Laureta Morales' daughter in law, said her husband called
St. Rita's the day before Katrina made landfall and was assured the home was
preparing to evacuate. 

"They said they had buses in front of the nursing home, but they never had
any intention of leaving," she said. "It was all lies." 

Like many of the relatives, Dale Sanderson said she trusted the Manganos
because they had taken good care of her mother, Lucile Melerine.

"I had faith in Mabel, but she just threw it all away," she said. "She
gambled with their lives and she lost." 

Afterward, Mabel Mangano, 64, received hugs and well-wishes from family
members and supporters. 

She had left the courtroom for about 30 minutes during the closing arguments
because she felt nauseous. 

Sitting in court for three weeks listening to prosecutors describe again and
again the missteps that led to the drowning deaths of the elderly people in
her care was "horrible," she said.

"It's been two really, really hectic years. We were there with these people
that we loved," Mabel Mangano said. 

Sal Mangano, 67, when asked about the trial, said simply: "How would you
feel with all that?" 

Defense attorney John Reed said following the proceedings: "I hope for a
jury verdict that's sensitive to what everyone went through during the
hurricane. Putting complete blame on anyone - on Sal and Mabel Mangano - is
utterly inappropriate." 

Assistant Attorney General Paul Knight, one of the prosecutors, said the
opportunity to present his case provides a chance for justice to be served,
whatever the outcome. 

"Whatever the verdict, it's important to us that justice be given a chance,"
he said. "I hope we did that." 

More than 125 people, including dozens of victims' relatives, packed the
courtroom Friday to hear closing arguments in the trial, which began Aug.
13. 

Never raising his voice during an hour of remarks, Knight, who has described
himself as an old country lawyer, dispassionately and methodically denounced
the Manganos for not evacuating the home, re-iterating a theme the
prosecution and some of its 40 witnesses had stressed during the trial. 

"Thirty-five frail, elderly, sick souls died on August the 29th, 2005.
Twenty-four others -- mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters -- all sick,
elderly, needing 24-hour medical care, suffered needlessly," he said. 

"And it happened for one simple, inescapable reason: because they were
there. Because they were there. They didn't have a choice to be somewhere
else." 

In their closing arguments, defense attorneys hammered away at their primary
theme: that the government, not the Manganos, is to blame for the St. Rita's
deaths due to shoddy levees and for not issuing a formal evacuation order. 

"If they had built the levees the way they had promised 40 years ago after
Hurricane Betsy, not a single person would have drowned at St. Rita's or in
St. Bernard Parish,'' said Reed, who represents Sal Mangano. "It's as simple
as that." 

Reed made an impassioned plea to the jury to spare the couple from being the
only two people held accountable for the litany of mistakes that turned the
hurricane into what some have called the worst man-made disaster in the
country's history. 

"It is time to heal, time to come together, time to put Katrina behind us,''
he told the jury. "It is time for the government to stop turning on these
people. It is time to not add two more victims to the disaster that was
Katrina.'' 

The prosecution, said Jim Cobb, Mabel Mangano's attorney, is blaming the
Manganos when government officials at all levels are responsible for the
disastrous flooding in St. Bernard Parish. 

"These caregivers stayed in their posts, caring for patients,'' Cobb said.
"But they're second-guessed and railroaded and scapegoated by a state
government that clearly did not do its job.'' 

But Knight told the jury the Manganos should pay a price for their decision
to keep residents at the home. 

Despite urgent warnings about the severity of the hurricane on television
news and emergency broadcast alerts, the Manganos made no preparations to
evacuate, he told the jury. Everything they did do, he said, such as buying
generators and extra supplies, was intended to ride out the storm where they
were. 

"They're guilty because they made a decision consciously and well in advance
not to take these people out of harm's way," Knight said. 

He emphasized that the state-mandated emergency plan the Manganos designed
for evacuating residents in a hurricane relied on transportation to be
supplied by Sal Mangano's company, which owned a single, nine-passenger van,
when instead they should have had a contract with a bus company. 

He alleged that the Manganos had a financial motive for not evacuating,
citing several overheard comments where they expressed concern about the
costs of moving the nursing home's residents. 

He cited testimony from one witness, who recalled Mabel Mangano saying,
"Unless a hurricane's coming up my back door, I'm not putting people through
an evacuation and wasting money on it.'' 

"Let me tell you something," Knight said. "To even factor in cost -- one
dollar, five dollars, ten dollars -- is a reckless disregard for those
people they were responsible for.'' 

Knight acknowledged the testimony of at least a dozen witnesses that the
care St. Rita's provided on a daily basis was excellent. But he compared
their actions during Katrina to an ostrich with its head in the sand. 

"They gambled with the lives of 59 people. Thirty-five of them died because
they gambled with their lives," Knight said. 

Knight dismissed the defense's argument that government officials, not the
Manganos, are responsible for what happened at St. Rita's. 

"The defense is like a child coming home to momma, saying, 'Momma, I got in
trouble today at school. It was the teacher's fault. It was Johnny's fault.
It was Mary's fault,''' he said. 

But Reed told jurors the nine-passenger van is a "red herring,'' and that
Manganos would have found a way to evacuate the residents if they had been
ordered to do so. He noted the "resourcefulness and self-reliance'' the
couple and their family displayed in getting boats and floating 24 residents
out of the swamped nursing home on mattresses in the midst of hail and high
winds as the tail end of the hurricane passed. 

"Do you doubt for a minute that they would have been able to evacuate those
people in a safe and orderly manner if they had they been told to do so?''
he asked. 

Reed also noted that state officials have acknowledged they did not fulfill
a new provision in the state's emergency response plan to ensure the
evacuation of nursing homes and hospitals during Katrina. 

"So don't come in here and go after the little people whose plan wasn't as
perfect as it could be,'' he said. "Where's the governmental
responsibility?'' 

He said Mabel Mangano, who could not swim, would not have stayed at the
nursing home for the hurricane with her children and grandchildren if she
had known there was even a remote chance it could flood. 

"This had nothing to do with money,'' he said. "It had everything to do with
the belief that the best way to care for their residents was to gather them
together as a family and shelter in place as they had always done.'' 

Assistant Attorney General Julie Cullen called that argument a "smokescreen"
and said there is no good explanation for why the nursing home was not
evacuated. 

"It's just insane. It was insane for these people to have stayed," she told
the jury. 

Cobb, meanwhile, underlined the defense's main line of argument - the
government is to blame - by quoting from State Attorney General Charles
Foti's $200 billion civil lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers. He
pointed to the strong language Foti, whose office is prosecuting the
Manganos, uses in the lawsuit to blame the corps for the failure of the
Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. 

It is "sinful'' for Foti to prosecute the Manganos for the deaths of the
nursing home residents when Foti says elsewhere that the levee breaches and
the "human misery'' that followed are the corps' fault, Cobb said. 

"You can't blame these folks, especially when you're covering up for your
own mistakes. And that's what it's about - the oldest word in government:
cover-up,'' Cobb said.