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BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone. Much of what we've seen and heard about the devastation in Houston evokes the memories of Hurricane Katrina exactly a dozen years ago. Submerged homes, families wading through the flood and the elderly waiting for rescue.
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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: The picture, heartbreaking, senior citizens, some in wheelchairs, trapped in the La Vita Bella nursing home just outside Houston. One woman seems to be calmly knitting in her recliner as the water rises.
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: I have to say when we saw this picture on social media, a lot of us said, is this real because it looks fake. I mean, you just would never imagine something like this.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: That troubling image from Dickinson, Texas went viral before its residents were rescued last Sunday. The episode recalled one of the biggest tragedies of Katrina, the elderly or infirm stuck in hospitals or nursing homes, with water levels rising and options shrinking. It’s a trauma that led to one of Katrina’s most widely misreported stories, which took place in St. Bernard’s Parish, a New Orleans suburb, and involved the deaths of 35 elderly residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home. The owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano, decided it was safer not to evacuate their residents, despite warnings from local officials. The morning of August 29th, 2005, after Katrina made landfall, it seemed like they had survived the worst. But then the levees broke. The coverage of the incident was wall to wall, and mostly wrong.
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MALE CORRESPONDENT: Some say that 34 senior citizens were left to die in their Louisiana nursing home.
NANCY GRACE/CNN: These two owners that made money off all of these elderly nursing home citizens were out shopping — shopping — after all these elderlies died.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Manganos were charged with 35 counts of negligent homicide. We spoke with their lawyer, James Cobb, back in 2015. And while Katrina and Harvey are fundamentally different disasters, Cobb’s book, Flood of Lies: The St. Rita’s Nursing Home Tragedy, offers a cautionary tale of how swiftly misinformation turns to blame in tragedy’s wake. He said he first learned about St. Rita's like everyone else, on TV.
JAMES COBB: Some stories said that these people left the residents and they tied them to their wheelchairs and beds, so I turned to my wife and said, why bother with a trial, they ought to just take these folks out and shoot ‘em.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mabel calls you. She’s 62. Sal is 65. What does she tell you?
JAMES COBB: She says, we are in desperate trouble. We’ve been recommended to you by the president of the Nursing Home Association, will you help us? And without talking to my wife, which got me in trouble later on, I immediately said, I will.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why?
JAMES COBB: Lawyers are supposed to represent the unpopular cause, and I firmly believed in that from the time John Adams defended the soldiers of the Boston Massacre. Everybody thought they were guilty too but, you know what, they were acquitted. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Meanwhile, it was reported that the Manganos tried to flee to Mexico on a cruise ship, that they were out shopping, that they were gambling.
JAMES COBB: Without any factual support in the media, what-so-ever. Sal and Mabel stayed with their residents. They swam out and saved 24 lives, with old people on their backs, lifting them into boats, putting them on top of roofs, and yet, they were bludgeoned in the press. It was the government and the media's attempt to put the sins of Katrina on somebody, and they put it on Sal and Mabel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So on September 12th, 2005, Nancy Grace calls for Lady Justice to bring down the hammer.
JAMES COBB: [LAUGHS] That's exactly right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, and the next day you find out that your clients have been charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide. Polling data suggested that almost three-quarters of the potential jurors in the area believed that the Manganos were guilty. So tell me about your strategy.
JAMES COBB: There’s a great old saying from my colleague Bob Habens. If you’re defending a criminal case, find someone else to prosecute and do a better job of prosecuting them than the government does in prosecuting you. So we prosecuted the United States government, the Army Corps of Engineers, the State of Louisiana, its Emergency Operations Command system. We put them on trial.
When the House and the Senate of the United states Congress investigated this, Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana at the time, said the following, and I quote, “We in Louisiana know hurricanes” —
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GOVERNOR KATHLEEN BLANCO: — and hurricanes know us. We would not be here today if the levees had not failed.
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JAMES COBB: And I asked her on the witness stand, did you say that, Governor? She said, I did. I said, was it true then? It was. Is it true today? She says, it is. And I walked over to Sal and Mabel at the counsel table, I put one hand on one shoulder and one hand on the other, and I asked her, and they wouldn’t be here either if the levees had not failed, would they? Objection. But point was made. If you thought she was a bad governor, you should have seen her as a witness.
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The jury went out maybe at 5 o’clock in the evening. By 8 o’clock they had a verdict. Generally speaking, in long trials, if a jury comes back quickly, that's not good for the defendant, so my heart sank. And when he said, we, the jury, find the defendants not guilty, I almost fell over. Sal and Mabel did fall over, fell into each other’s arms. It was no triumph in us winning the case, okay? There was no joy. It was just sadness. The courtroom was packed with 2 or 300 spectators, family members of the victims, friends and supporters of the Manganos. The room sobbed.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: After the verdict, how did the media respond?
JAMES COBB: They disappeared. [LAUGHS] There was no retrospective of, how could we have been so wrong. There were no postmortems of, gee whiz, how did this happen?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You told ABC News that virtually everyone remembers the event but when you ask them if they can recall the outcome?
JAMES COBB: And they’ll say, oh yeah, I remember that, where the old people died, they drowned? Yeah. How did that turn out? But if anybody guesses as to whether they were guilty or not guilty, they guess they were guilty.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Would you attribute that directly to the lack of media coverage?
JAMES COBB: The blanket wall-to-wall coverage early on in the case, where the presumption of innocence was destroyed and the presumption of guilt was established, because what we do as human beings when we hear a story, we form a judgment and then we don’t change our mind, do we?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what are the lessons that you think we should draw?
JAMES COBB: I can't tell you how many folks who’ve read my book have said, I will never again believe the media in the beginnings of a case where they try to cast somebody as responsible. Katrina, because it was such a visual event — the gripping pictures of people on top of rooftops, people at the Superdome, people at the Convention Center, people drowning, people dying of thirst — the competition among television was so intense, they often ran with something without any second sourcing, any verification, nothing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You still have to wonder. A health official said, we have two buses we can give you, you can get those people out of there before the storm hits.
JAMES COBB: Mm-hmm.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why didn't they evacuate?
JAMES COBB: That was the $64,000 question. Number one, the health official who testified at trial, “I offered them buses” and I talked to Mabel, Mabel said, he never talked to me. He might have talked to a nurse but he didn’t talk to me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wasn't there a mandatory evacuation?
JAMES COBB: Answer, no. New Orleans, for the first time in the history of my city, had a mandatory evacuation for Katrina. St. Bernard Parish, lower, wetter, surrounded by water, never, ever went mandatory.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why did they stay?
JAMES COBB: At the critical moment, they were conflicted. They knew they had five or six or seven patients, if they put ‘em on buses for a 10-, 12-hour trip that usually takes an hour to Baton Rouge, people would die. And Mabel's reluctance was, how do I go down the hall and start unplugging patients, and who do I unplug first, Jim, your mother? They’d survived tropical storms, tropical depressions, hurricanes and never got a drop of water in the parking lot. So, in a terrible moment of choice, she went with what had worked before. What got the residents at St. Rita was the collapse of the federal levees, which the federal government told us would hold.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How many nursing homes in New Orleans didn't evacuate?
JAMES COBB: Thirty-six out of 57 did not evacuate.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How many suffered casualties?
JAMES COBB: A good half a dozen or more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How many nursing home proprietors were charged?
JAMES COBB: Sal and Mabel, and they’re the only ones charged in Katrina with alleged criminal responsibility. They should have charged the Army Corps of Engineers, the commanders and the other folks who built these levees that just collapsed before they reached design criteria for over 1800 deaths, but they went as far down the food chain as they could possibly go. And they picked on a blue-collar, mom-and-pop grandma and grandpa in St. Bernard Parish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.
JAMES COBB: Look forward to hearing your show.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Cobb is the author of Flood of Lies: The St. Rita's Nursing Home Tragedy. He’s been a practicing trial attorney for nearly 40 years.
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Coming up, traditional conservatives were the last to jump on the Trump train but, despite a bumpy August, they are in no rush to jump off. This is On the Media.
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