HOLYOKE, MASS. (WHDH) - The family of a late Holyoke Soldiers’ Home resident has filed a $176 million class action civil rights lawsuit against administrators who were running the facility when a COVID-19 outbreak claimed the lives of 76 veterans.
The lawsuit alleges that the former head of the home and the state’s former veterans secretary, among others, “completely failed” in containing the coronavirus, which spread like wildfire.
“The Commonwealth of Massachusetts made a promise to its citizen-soldiers: you take care of us in times of conflict, and we will take care of you when you return. Although the Massachusetts veterans residing at the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke… kept their promise to serve their country, the Commonwealth did not keep its promise to protect and keep them safe from harm when they were unable to care for themselves,” the lawsuit read in part.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of a scathing independent investigation that identified “substantial errors and failures by the Home’s leadership that likely contributed to the death toll during the outbreak.”
Investigators concluded the Home’s superintendent, Bennett Walsh, was unfit to preside over the facility, especially amid a pandemic that exacted an unimaginable toll of death and devastation throughout the United States.
The most substantial error made by the Home’s leadership team came on March 27, when they decided to move all veterans from one of the two locked dementia units into the other locked dementia unit, where they would be crowded in with the veterans already living there, investigators said.
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