‘We trusted them’
Distraught family tell of attempts to learn about loved ones at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home
Susan Kenney learned of the deadly coronavirus outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home not from her father’s case manager, whom she’d spoken to twice that day in March, but on the news that night.
“I didn’t get an answer for over 30 hours,” an emotional Kenney recounted on Tuesday, periodically dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “The numbers kept rising, and I still didn’t know if my father was dead or alive.”
Kenney wrote the question on the window of her car and had already started driving to the soldiers’ home when she learned her 78year-old father, Charles Lowell, had tested positive for COVID-19. He died on April 15.
“We trusted them to be giving the best care to our veterans,” Kenney told a special joint oversight committee of the state Legislature of the outbreak that killed her father and 75 other veterans. “People need to be held responsible for it, and it needs to not happen again.”
Kenney was one of a handful of family members who offered heartbreaking testimony in the first of two hearings this week set up by Beacon Hill lawmakers as they probe the circumstances surrounding the fatal outbreak that left former Holyoke Soldiers’ Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh and former medical director Dr. David Clinton facing criminal neglect charges.
“Your strength, your courage, your determination to seek justice and a better future for the home is truly inspiring,” said state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, who represents Holyoke.
One by one, family members detailed their desperate struggles for answers about their loved ones’ conditions — channels of communication they say are still flawed half a year later despite interim leadership and assissTuaRT tance from the state. They pushed for a seat on the soldiers’ home board of trustees and called for upgrades to the facility that would help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and other future illnesses, while lamenting the limited visitation hours that exclude Sundays.
Roberta Twining said her husband, Timothy, 77, kept being bounced around the facility as the virus spread. At one point he was squeezed into a room with two other veterans and, with no walker, wheelchair or buzzer, “literally had to crawl and hold on to the walls to get to the bathroom down the hall,” she said.
While Twining lauded the National Guard for bringing the virus under control at the soldiers’ home, she said interim staff seem “more concerned about being held responsible rather than being reasonable.”
Cheryl Turgeon spoke of how seven months of nearlockdown inside the facility have left her father, Dennis Thresher, a 90-year-old Korean War veteran, largely cut off from his family and depressed as he recovers from COVID-like symptoms and pressure ulcers from laying bedridden.
“He’s a shell of the man that he was,” Turgeon said. “But he’s gotten there because of his grit and his fortitude and we need all of us to fight like that for them, because they deserve it.”