Who are Cheri Landry and Lori Budo?
Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were nurses at Memorial Medical Center’s surgical intensive care unit when Hurricane Katrina and the flood that followed happened. After the bodies were found, autopsies were done, and morphine was found in nine of the bodies right away. Budo, Landry, and Dr. Anna Pou were all arrested in July 2006 and charged with four counts of second-degree murder because they were said to have given four LifeCare patients doses of morphine and another drug that killed them. Based on the book that gave the show its name, which was written by Sheri Fink, the police thought that Budo and Landry were working with Pou.
Landry was working at a local hospital when she was arrested. Budo was at home with her husband and two teenagers when she was arrested. Nurses who had worked with Budo and Landry set up a support fund to help them with money. Budo and Landry were given monthly allowances and other gifts of money to help pay their bills, buy food, and buy clothes. At the same time, the families of three of the four patients who had died sued the two nurses. Budo and Landry were eventually given subpoenas to appear before the grand jury without a lawyer in exchange for not being charged.
The Louisiana Supreme Court turned down Budo and Landry’s appeal against their subpoenas. This meant that they had to testify before the special grand jury in exchange for immunity in the case. According to the source text, Landry testified that she “had injected up to four LifeCare patients on the seventh floor and two patients on the second floor” without knowing their medical conditions. She also said that she thought they were all “going to die” and that she thought they had orders not to try to save them.
According to the show’s source text, Budo said in court that she didn’t know how sick the patients on the seventh floor were or if they had DNR orders, but that they seemed to be dying. She also said, “I put morphine and midazolam into two of them.”
Who knows what happened to Lori Budo and Cheri Landry?
Lori Budo and Cheri Landry both worked as nurses even after they were given immunity. Sheri Fink’s source text says that when Ochsner Health System took over Memorial Medical Center and changed its name to Ochsner Baptist Medical Center, Budo and Landry joined the hospital as nurses. In 2012, Fink went to the hospital and wrote in her book that she remembered seeing Budo and Landry’s happy faces on a bulletin board in the staff room.
Budo wrote a book called “Katrina Through Our Eyes: Stories from Inside Baptist Hospital” in 2010. It was based on the experiences of the ICU staff at Memorial Hospital and their families after Hurricane Katrina. Except for hers, almost all of the staff’s names in the book are made up. Since then, Budo has chosen to stay out of the public eye. Fink tried to talk to Budo several times while she was writing the show’s source text, but Budo turned her down through her lawyer. Budo and Landry have both decided to keep their private lives quiet.