September 2005 UTC Following up my own question I ve been pointed to the following links In nursing home a fight lost to rising waters New York Times article Desperately seeking survivors Newsday article This anger comes from watching death MSNBC article Taken together they provide some more detail The MSNBC article says The man he was talking about is Thomas Rodrigue who told Dateline that his 92 year old mother was one of 32 elderly people found dead at the St Rita s nursing home The New York Times article says St Bernard Parish officials say that 32 of the home s roughly 60 residents died on Aug 29 more than a week ago If both those statements are correct then it would appear that Rodrigue could not have phoned his mother on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday becasue she had died on 29 August 2005 Monday From this I believe that one of the following things must be true The news accounts are inaccurate Either Rodrigue isn t the person Broussard was talking about Rodrigue s mother was not one of the 32 who died at St Rita s on Monday or at least one of those 32 Rodrigue s mother died later Broussard was honestly mistaken He either misunderstood the account of what happened with Rodrigue s mother was intentionally or unintentionally misled about it or simply forgot the details or mixed them up with some other story perhaps due to the massive amounts of stress he d been under in the time leading up to the Meet the Press interview Broussard was intentionally lying when he made his statement on Meet the Press sexing up the story for maximum effect by embellishing it with a false chronology that changes the death of the mother from being primarily the fault of local authorities who failed to evacuate her before the flooding to being the fault of federal authorities who were slow to respond in the initial days after the flooding Note that as I said above even if the third option above Broussard was lying is the correct explanation it doesn t lessen the horrors of what happened in Katrina s aftermath And I could even see a case being made that Broussard had a moral obligation to say whatever he needed to during his Meet the Press appearance even lying if it would help put more pressure on federal disaster relief officials to get the so far lackluster federal response moving faster But given the emotional impact that Broussard s dramatic on camera breakdown had for me and I m sure many other people I think the question of whether his story was accurate was mistaken or was intentionally misleading is actually worth asking Anyway I don t think the evidence I ve seen so far rises to the level that would make me comfortable editing the main article to include it but I wanted to leave this material here in case it might lead to more detail and an eventual edit down the road if when more information comes to light 21 43 8