12:00 AM CST on Saturday, December 3, 2005

/ Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS – The bodies of as many as 100 hospital patients who died during Hurricane Katrina are being tested for lethal doses of drugs such as morphine because investigators fear people may have been euthanized.

Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard, who is conducting Katrina-related autopsies, said Friday that samples from 75 to 100 people who were patients at various hospitals and nursing homes have been sent to a lab in Philadelphia for toxicology testing. He said that reports had not been returned yet and that he didn't know how long they would take.

At least 140 patients at New Orleans-area hospitals and nursing homes died during the storm and its aftermath. Two owners of a nursing home in nearby St. Bernard Parish have been charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide in flood deaths at that facility.

Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti's office has subpoenaed 73 people – all hospital employees – in an inquiry of deaths at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. The toxicology tests are part of that investigation.

"There's been plenty of movement because it's an active investigation, but there's nothing that we can talk about," said Kris Wartelle, a spokeswoman for Mr. Foti.

Ms. Wartelle has said previously that six hospitals and 13 nursing homes in Louisiana are under investigation.

Allegations include patients being abandoned, evacuated improperly or euthanized to spare them from further suffering while waiting for rescuers to arrive, she has said.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, the coroner in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County and a nationally known forensic pathology expert, spent about a week helping do autopsies in Louisiana in late October. He said he worked on 30 bodies and found most of them in advanced stages of decomposition.

Dr. Wecht said the tests should be able to show if drugs such as morphine, heroin or other opiates were in a victim's system when he or she died and if so, how much was in the body and whether it contributed to the death.

Steven Campanini, spokesman for Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., which owns Memorial Medical Center, said that he had no information about the tests but that the company is cooperating in the investigation.