No Way Out

Produced by Paul Ryan and Sara Rodriguez

[This broadcast originally aired on Feb. 2, 2008.]

After Hurricane Katrina had passed over southeastern Louisiana in August 2005, many people thought the region had been spared from the most severe damage.

But the worst was yet to come: the region's protective levees started to fail, and entire communities were overwhelmed by floodwaters.

Thousands had evacuated the region, but others stayed behind to ride out the storm, including the residents and staff of St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish.

The wall of water and its aftermath left 35 of the residents dead, and prompted negligent homicide and other charges against the owners of the nursing home.

They faced the possibility of spending the rest of their life in prison.

Would and should the owners be held responsible for their decision not to evacuate?

Correspondent Harold Dow reports.

"To hear that my dad was left in a building, and drowned, that's just unforgivable," Cheryl says.

The people Cheryl can't forgive are the nursing home's owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano. "I was told that he would be cared for the way he needed to be cared for. And taken out of harm's way," she says.

"They lied to us and therefore my father perished," Joe adds.

The last weekend of T.J. Galladoro's life was in late August 2005. All over the Gulf Coast, preparations were being made for Katrina, the hurricane many predicted would be "the big one."

Larry Ingargiola was the director of Homeland Security for St. Bernard Parish. "I believed that we were gonna see 20, 22 feet of water," he recalls.

Parish clerk Polly Boudreaux says St. Bernard officials were desperately telling residents to leave. "There were messages over and over, not just parish government messages on our cable station, but the news media was out saying the same thing," she says.

"The reality sunk in for a vast majority of our residents Friday and Saturday. That made them pack up and go," she adds.

That Saturday night, Cheryl was checking in on her father one last time at St. Rita's, before she took her family north. "My dad looked up and calls me 'Shay.' That was a little pet name he had for me. And said, 'Shay, you coming to get me tomorrow? They have a hurricane coming,'" she remembers. "I looked at him and I said, 'Well, dad, you know. You're going to be taken care of.' He listened. He heard. He knew it. But waits a little while and again, the same question came. 'Shay, you coming to get me tomorrow?'"

Cheryl knew it was too risky to move her frail father herself, so she was relying on St. Rita's to take him out of harm's way.

"One of the nurses came in. Sat on a chair. Knee to knee with me. Held my hands. And she said, 'Cheryl, you need to go. And no, don't worry about your dad. The home has an evacuation in plan. He'll be fine. You need to leave your dad with us, because you're not able to tend to his needs.' I was crying and she kept assuring me, 'This is where your dad needs to be, he will be taken care of,'" Cheryl says.

Also relying on St. Rita's to take care of his mother, Eva, was Tom Rodrigue, an emergency management official in neighboring Jefferson Parish. But Rodrigue was having trouble getting in touch with the Manganos.

"I called at least twice on Saturday. I asked if they were available, and they told me they were not available to come and talk on the phone. So and when I hung up, I called the emergency manager for St. Bernard who I knew. I spoke with him, and he told me, 'Hey, tomorrow they're gonna call for a mandatory evacuation. They'll have to respond,'" Rodrigue remembers.

By Sunday morning, Aug. 28, Katrina was churning through the Gulf and upgraded to a category 5 hurricane, the most dangerous kind. At 8 a.m., parish officials broadcast their starkest warning yet to those who might still be in the parish. "You need to leave. You must leave St. Bernard Parish and head north," they warned.

But just after that message was broadcast, parish officials learned that St. Rita's nursing home had still not evacuated. "It was shocking," says Polly Boudreaux. "I think we were all mortified that, you know, at that stage that they would still be there."

"Did you want St. Rita's to evacuate your mom and all the other residents?" Dow asks Rodrigue.

"Absolutely," he says. "I really never had any options. I had to depend on them."

Boudreaux was ordered to call Mabel Mangano to see if St. Rita's needed buses to evacuate. "Her comment was that they were concerned about the condition of the very frail patients, that if they put them on the buses, those who were the most frail would not survive the trip on the bus," Boudreaux says.

Later that morning, parish coroner Dr. Bryan Bertucci called St. Rita's again. "I spoke to Mabel, and told her that I had two buses that could take the residents wherever she wanted. The response that I got was that, 'We have five special needy patients, five nurses, two generators. And I've spoken to most of the families, and they said we could stay.' My response was, 'Do you want the buses, or do you not want the buses?' The answer was no," he says.

But by Sunday night, as the storm closed in, Cheryl Galladoro was hundreds of miles away, still thinking she had left her frail and sickly 82-year-old father in good hands. "When I kissed my dad goodbye, I didn't know that that would be for the last time I would ever kiss him goodbye. He had a look on his face like, you know, 'You're leaving me,'" she remembers.

As Sunday night turned into Monday, Hurricane Katrina closed in and began to punish St. Bernard Parish. But when day broke on Monday, Aug. 29, it seemed the parish had been spared.

Parish President Junior Rodriguez was relieved. "I said, 'You know, I think we did all right. We made it,'" he remembers,

"We were on the top floor of the government complex. We said, 'We escaped this time.' And I guarantee you, within a half hour, we were cursing everybody around," Larry Ingargiola remembers.

That's because the worst news imaginable started coming in: the levees had breached and the parish was filling up with water fast. By Monday evening, parish officials were marooned on the roof of the government center.

Asked to describe the situation in the parish, Ingargiola says, "Twenty-eight feet of water. A lake."

"We had a lot of serious problems in this parish," Junior Rodriguez remembers. "There was a smell of death in the air."

Since communications were cut off, no one knew what had happened at St. Rita's. So on Wednesday, a fireman in St. Bernard Parish commandeered a boat and drove it to the nursing home's front door. That fireman was Steve Galladoro, the brother of Cheryl and Joe.

"He's calling out. No one's answering. Takes a few more steps and he bumps into somethin'. And the next thing he realizes is that it's a body. Takes a few more steps. And he realizes there's another body floating. So he told me at that point, he didn't wanna take another step because if the next body woulda been my father. He didn't know whether or not he could handle that," Joe says.

Steve says he radioed his firehouse with news of his tragic discovery. Then he went to a nearby school where he heard the survivors had been taken.

"The nurses and the attendants that work at St. Rita's were there, and he couldn't get any of them to look him in the face. And he kept on pleading with them to tell him where my father was," Joe says. "Finally, one of the attendants looked up, crying, and said 'We tried, Steve. We tried. But we couldn't save him.'"

Parish coroner Bryan Bertucci was now put in charge of a recovery effort. "It was something that you just can't imagine. Furniture was all over. Wheelchairs, beds. We went from room to room, moved furniture, retrieved bodies. We tried to identify people, but these people had been in water so long that they were bloated," he remembers.

Thirty-five bodies were ultimately pulled out of St. Rita's. Yet it was unclear what had happened to the owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano. That made them villains to some, like CNN's Nancy Grace. "And now I'm hearing that these two owners, that made money off all of these elderly nursing home citizens, were out shopping - shopping - after all of these elderlies died," Grace said on TV.

It turns out the Manganos weren't shopping. They remained in the drowned parish for several days until their surviving residents were all evacuated. Then, like so many others, the Manganos themselves were evacuated to Texas. That's when they heard the Louisiana attorney general's office was looking for them, so they hired attorney Jim Cobb.

"The public perception fueled by a ridiculous 24-hour news cycle media, was that the Manganos abandoned their residents. To this day, people say, 'Well, you know, gosh, why did they leave them?'" Cobb says.

So Cobb brought the Manganos to the attorney general's office in Baton Rouge to explain what happened. But when they got there, the Manganos were immediately arrested and each was charged with 35 counts of negligent homicide and 24 counts of cruelty to the infirm.

"When they put me in the cell and they shut that door, reality really, really sunk in. I couldn't believe that I was being locked up in this cell," Mabel says. "I hadn't even had a traffic ticket in 20 years, 25 years. And all of a sudden, I wake up one day and I'm charged with killing 35 people and being cruel to the people that we loved so much."

Even as the Manganos were released on bail, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti took the case public. "The pathetic thing is in this case, once again, is that they were asked if they wanted to move them, they refused to move them. They had a contract to move them, they did not," Foti said at a press conference.

And in St. Bernard Parish, particularly among people like Tom Rodrigue, whose mother died at St. Rita's, there was little sympathy for the couple. "I counted on them to take care of her," he says.

Asked if the Manganos let him down, Rodrigue says, "I think they let every family member of the 35 people that died down."

When 67-year-old Sal Mangano and his 65-year-old wife, Mabel, visit their gutted nursing home today, it's a bittersweet experience.

Mabel says a lot of good memories come to mind. "We had some great residents. We had some good times. Enjoyed them. Loved them. And it breaks your heart," she says.

The couple has never before spoken of what happened at St. Rita's.

Mabel says they not only knew these people well, they also loved them. "How do you get into this business if you don't love the business you're in? A lot of people couldn't do the things that we did. And it was a family thing. My children were involved, my grandchildren," she says.

St. Rita's was well-regarded, not only by residents' families, but by professionals, like coroner Dr. Bertucci. "We had four nursing homes out here, and I think St. Rita's was probably the best nursing home in the area," he says.

Bertucci was once the nursing home's medical director. "The patients were well-bathed. They were well-fed. They kept them up. They would get 'em out of bed, put 'em in wheelchairs, had good recreational activities. And I think, again, a very successful and good home for somebody," he recalls.

Then came Hurricane Katrina, and everything changed. The Manganos were hunkered down in the nursing home with 59 residents and over 30 family members, friends and staff that stormy Sunday night.

"Describe what you saw, what you felt," Dow asks Sal.

"We just felt we were helpless more or less during the night of the hurricane. We had some - a couple windows blew off the building," he says.

But like others in St. Bernard Parish, they were fooled when the winds died down the next morning. "The parking lot didn't have any water in it, not even rain water was standing in the parking lot. So, we felt real good the morning of the hurricane. We felt like, 'God, it's gone. We have it made. All of our residents are safe,'" Mabel says.

They began to cook the home's traditional Monday lunch, red beans and rice, when suddenly, at about 10:30 a.m., a wall of water came rushing across the road directly at St. Rita's. It slammed into the nursing home, and water was soon cascading into the building.

The Manganos say it rose nearly ten feet in just 20 minutes.

The water rose so fast, the Manganos' son, Sal Jr., had to swim to get to his boat. "The water took us off of our feet. And from that point we just kinda went right across that white fence right there," Sal Jr. says. "Over the top of the fence."

Meanwhile, Mabel was desperately trying to hold on to two residents as the water rose. "The water was already up into my chest. And I had one resident on this side, and she couldn't stand. So she kept pulling me down. And then on the other side we had a resident on a mattress. And her husband was with her. I was actually hanging on to the mattress, and when the water got so high where the resident was starting to hit the underpart, then I started hanging onto the gutter, 'cause the water kept coming up higher. So we got all these people on the boat, and then they took me off of this," Mable remembers.

Mabel says she was afraid for her life.

"At what point did you realize, did you know, that you lost quite a few people?" Dow asks.

"We knew it pretty much all along. If they was in a wheelchair, or the wheelchair turned over, as fast as it came in the building, they drowned within a matter of just a little bit, we figure," Sal says.

"What were you thinking, what were you feeling when you knew that you'd lost so many people?" Dow asks.

"It was horrible… It was horrible that we'd lost this many people. And we were hoping we could save more. It was just horrible. Horrible," Sal says.

Miraculously, the Manganos and their staff saved 24 residents and got them to safety that afternoon. By week's end, the survivors had been moved out of the parish. But once those 35 bodies were discovered at St. Rita's, no one thought of the Manganos as heroes.

Asked how she would describe what the Manganos did, prosecutor Julie Cullen says, "Well, our position on this is not so much what they did but what they didn't do. They didn't do anything."

Cullen and fellow prosecutor Paul Knight say the Manganos should never have had to rescue anyone. "I think the thing that's important is to understand the bright line in this case. Because the case was not ever about the chaos that Katrina became after it made landfall," Knight says.

The charges against the Manganos are based on what the couple did in the days and months before the storm, beginning with the filing of an evacuation plan. "It's our position it was just a plan on paper. It was never going to be enforced. They had no intention of evacuating," Cullen says.

The plan, which Louisiana nursing homes are required to file every year, included an agreement with an ambulance company that would take the home's neediest patients out of harm's way first.

"They made no calls to the ambulance service to try to evacuate any special needs patients that they had," Cullen says.

The plan also included a letter from a busing company called "Regional Transportation," which agreed to take residents out of the parish in the event of an emergency.

"It's a letter that is on Regional Transportation, Inc. letterhead. And it's addressed to Mrs. Mabel Mangano, Administrator, St. Rita's Nursing Home. And it's signed, 'Sincerely, Salvador Mangano,'" Knight says. "It could just as easily have been signed 'Love, Sal.'"

"And the only vehicle that was owned was one nine-passenger van," Cullen adds.

With just one van, the Manganos could not possibly move all of their residents. It is proof, prosecutors say, that they had no intention of evacuating.

"How are you gonna get all the people out in one van?" Dow asks.

"Well, we figured if we would call a mandatory evacuation, if we had to go, we'd have gotten buses or something from somebody, the parish would have furnished some kind of buses for us," Sal says.

But transportation was not the main issue, says Mabel. "It was very difficult to make a decision on whose plug to pull first," she says. "Well, who do you take off of the life support first? Do you take my mom, your mom, Sal's mom?"

"So, what are you saying, then, that if you decide to unplug someone, are you saying that their life might be in jeopardy? That's what you're saying?" Dow asks.

"I would…Yes. Yes," Mabel says.

Mabel says she believes it was a life or death decision.

So the Manganos made a plan to "shelter-in-place," just as they had done for every previous hurricane.

"Sheltering-in-place is a well-recognized concept of emergency preparedness and emergency management nationwide. Not just in hurricane states. And sheltering-in-place means that you make a conscious decision to stay where you are. To batten down the hatches. To do everything you need to have supplies and food and water and medicines to last a week if you have to without any help from the outside world," says defense attorney Jim Cobb.

Yet none of the parish's other nursing homes made the same decision. "There were four nursing homes in St. Bernard Parish who were all dealing with the same warnings, the same geographical, topographical conditions. The other three nursing homes evacuated 188 elderly residents similar in age and medical condition to those residents in St. Rita's. And out of 188, one died as opposed to 35 drowning in place in St. Rita's," Cullen says.

But Cobb says the Manganos didn't commit a crime in not evacuating.

"So who killed the 35 people at St. Rita's?" Dow asks.

"We know who did that. So if you're looking for a murderer, we know who it is," Cobb says.

By defending the Manganos, Jim Cobb believes he's representing all of those who have suffered in the aftermath of Katrina. "When I walk through my neighborhood and I see empty houses and I see people that can't get back home, for any government to suggest that it's the victim's fault is outrageous. And so I take it real personal," he says.

Cobb charges that the government is making Sal and Mabel scapegoats for its own failures during Katrina. Some of the blame, he says, lies with St. Bernard Parish officials, who could have ordered the Manganos to leave by declaring a mandatory evacuation.

Had they gotten a mandatory order, Mabel says they would have evacuated.

Several neighboring parishes, and the City of New Orleans, did declare mandatory evacuations in the days leading up to Katrina. But St. Bernard Parish did not.

Parish clerk Polly Boudreaux says there was confusion about what to do. "I guess the issue that everybody faced was, 'Who has the right to call a mandatory evacuation?' And if it's called, who then is supposed to enforce it? What does it mean mandatory, how do you force people to go?" she says.

Parish President Junior Rodriguez says the reluctance to call a mandatory evacuation was also an issue of money. "When we issue a mandatory, that's when most of the businesses shut down. Banks shut down and also refineries begin to shut down. And it's a substantial loss with regard to fuel, natural gas, petroleum issues."

To prosecutors, the absence of a mandatory evacuation order is just a technicality. "With a storm that's a category 5 bearing down on you … does it really make a difference?" Knight asks.

"Do you think the parish government did everything it could to make it clear that people should evacuate St. Bernard Parish?" Dow asks.

"It was crystal clear to about 61,000 people," Knight says. "92 percent of them got the message."

"And got out of there safely," Cullen adds.

The calls parish officials made to the Manganos went unheeded; so did coroner Dr. Bertucci's offer of buses.

"Now Mabel, on Sunday, you spoke with Dr. Bryan Bertucci. What did he say to you in that phone call?" Dow asks.

"I never spoke with Dr. Bertucci," Mabel says, claiming that call never happened. "I would remember if Dr. Bertucci talked to me."

But Bertucci is adamant he offered the buses directly to Mabel. "I definitely spoke with Mabel Mangano. I vividly recall it. Imprinted on my mind," he says.

In any case, the Manganos say that in the absence of a direct order, their experience convinced them that it was safer for their residents to ride out Hurricane Katrina.

"You're looking down a hallway at 60 old folks, and you know your property hasn't flooded in 40 years and it didn't flood in Betsy. And you've got two new sets of protection levees, are you going to walk down the hall and start pulling plugs, and put them on a bus?" Cobb asks.

But as we know all to well, the levee system, supposedly built to withstand hurricanes even more severe than Katrina, failed.

Cobb says that disaster was caused by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He says the Corps not only built the levees that failed, it also built a canal that destroyed thousands of acres of protective wetlands that once slowed hurricanes down before they reached New Orleans. That canal is called The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, known by locals as "Mr. Go."

"So who killed the 35 people at St. Rita's?" Dow asks.

"We know who did that. It's the MRGO. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, built, engineered, designed and constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers," Cobb says.

The Corps designed the canal to merge with another waterway, as it reaches New Orleans. That design, according to many experts, accelerates a storm's rising waves making them deadly.

"They call it the 'Hurricane Highway.' The people in St. Bernard had been complaining about it for 20 years," Cobb says. "And what has the Corps done with those complaints? 'You'll be okay. The levees will hold.' And that's what Sal and Mabel relied upon. And that's what thousands of other people relied upon."

"Those people, overnight, lost everything through absolutely no fault of their own," says Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University.

The state of Louisiana asked him to investigate the failure of the levees around New Orleans during Katrina. His well-publicized conclusion? They weren't built right, especially the one protecting St. Bernard, and failed because they were built out of porous materials, like dirt and sand. "The waves will just chew it up," Van Heerden says.

Battered by 18-foot seas, sections of the levee washed away. There was nothing to keep the water from filling up the parish and turning St. Rita's into a death trap.

"So who, then, do you think is responsible for the 35 deaths at St. Rita's?" Dow asks.

"In my opinion, the loss of life, the damage, all the destruction rests solely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," Van Heerden argues.

Attorney General Charles Foti seemed to agree by filing a lawsuit against the federal government, and asking for billions of dollars in damages for residents of greater New Orleans.

"He filed a petition under oath in which he alleges that the Corps of Engineers recklessly, willfully, wantonly, through gross negligence allowed these levees to collapse. That's the definition of negligent homicide," Cobb comments.

Instead, that same attorney general charged the Manganos with negligent homicide, blaming them alone for the 35 deaths at St. Rita's.

"Well, how can it be the Manganos fault and the federal government's fault?" Dow asks.

"Well, it can't, can it?" Cobb replies.

Still, on the eve of the trial, Cobb knows the Manganos are in for the fight of their lives. If convicted, he says his clients would face more than 200 years each.

With life in prison a real possibility, Sal and Mabel Mangano found it hard to make a new start. Their home, their business, and their reputation were all destroyed. They were shunned by people they once called friends; finding it impossible to remain in St. Bernard Parish, the Manganos moved to Baton Rouge.

"Can you describe what the past two years have been like for both of you?" Dow asks.

"It's been very, very difficult. It's been hard on my children, my grandchildren, on the people that I love," Mabel says. "We're recognized everywhere we go. So, I feel like we have a stigma that's gonna follow us for a long time."

Prosecutors say the Manganos brought these problems upon themselves. "Thirty-five people died because they were at St. Rita's on the morning of August the 29th," Cullen says. "There's some cases that just have to be tried. There's some cases that you feel really strongly about."

Because feelings about the case are so strong, the trial was moved to rural St. Francisville, more than 100 miles from St. Bernard Parish. And in August 2007, nearly two years after Katrina, the trial begins.

There is enormous media attention, even though cameras are not allowed in the courtroom. Members of victims' families are a daily presence at the trial.

"Every family had a story about their loved one. About the joy that they brought them even though they were in a nursing home. It was a tragedy for these families beyond anything that I could imagine at the time," prosecutor Knight says.

As the trial gets underway, several family members, including fireman Steve Galladoro, testify in court that the Manganos told them they would evacuate the nursing home before Katrina struck.

But Mabel says she told people that they were sheltering-in-place. "And by the way, that's the preferable thing to do," she says.

The defense strategy is to try to make the trial about government failures that led to the flooding of St. Bernard Parish. To make that point as dramatically as possible, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco is forced to testify. Defense attorneys grill Blanco about testimony she gave to Congress in December 2005.

"We in Louisiana know hurricanes, and hurricanes know us. We would not be here today if the levees had not failed," she had said during her Congressional hearing.

"I said, 'Governor, did you say that?' 'Yes, I did.' 'Was it true then?' 'Yes.' 'Is it true now?' 'Yes.' And I pointed to Sal and Mabel and I said, 'And they wouldn't be here either if the levees had not failed, would they?' 'Objection!' But the point was made," Cobb says.

"They just took the approach of 'We're not going to talk about the Manganos. We're going to talk about everybody else,'" Cullen comments.

For four weeks, the prosecutors and defense attorneys wrestle over the issue of who is really responsible for the St. Rita's tragedy. Yet, as the defense case draws to a close neither Sal nor Mabel takes the stand to tell their story, even at the risk of a guilty verdict.

"They were just too fragile to testify, but most importantly we thought we were winning the case," Cobb says.

"I think it would have been difficult for them to answer questions about their emergency plan. And they were the only ones who could answer those questions," Cullen says.

After just three and a half hours, and ironically, just as a thunderstorm strikes, there's a verdict: not guilty on all 118 counts.

"We were relieved," Sal remembers. "My knees buckled."

"We just hugged and cried," Mabel adds.

For the Manganos and their legal team, it is complete vindication. "Our first thoughts are of our residents and their family members. Not a day has gone by since August 29th, 2005, when we have not thought of them, missed them, and prayed for them," Cobb says.

For the families of those who died at St. Rita's, it is another devastating blow.

"And this jury didn't find them guilty, but our Lord knows they are. And when they meet their maker they're never going to be able to get out of it then," Yolanda Hubert, the daughter of a victim, says.

"I know the pain that they suffered. They are suffering and I'm sorry for their suffering. But we're suffering too," Mabel tells Dow.

Despite their victory, the Manganos are like most others in St. Bernard Parish-left to pick up the pieces of their broken lives. "I regret that we lost people that we loved. But the decision is made, and we can't go back and change it," Mabel says.

"The Manganos, they have to go to bed every night, put their head on a pillow. I know what my dreams are like. I have no idea what their dreams are like," says T.J. Galladoro's son Joe.

"Forgiveness is a hard thing. Maybe, in time, that'll come," his sister Cheryl adds. "But sometimes, you know, we have to forgive ourselves first. And then we can start forgiveness with the Manganos."

Forty-four of the families who had loved ones at St. Rita's sued the Manganos; 28 of those families have settled.

Six weeks after the verdict, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti was voted out of office.

Sal and Mabel Mangano say they will never run a nursing home again.