‘I would have hugged him a little tighter’
Families give heart-rending accounts of outbreak at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home
When Donna DiPalma moved her father to the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home from another facility where he wasn’t well cared for, she thought she was doing the right thing.
She had no way of knowing at the time that the home would become the scene of one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in Massachusetts.
“What bothers me most is … no one ever mentioned COVID or that my dad might have it,” DiPalma told a special joint oversight committee of the state Legislature of the outbreak that killed her father and 75 other veterans.
He finally was tested on April 1, she said on the second day of hearings on the Soldiers’ Home, and the test came back positive two days later.
On April 7, DiPalma received a call from his social worker, who said she had better come; he had taken a turn for the worse. But when she arrived, she found her father in a room with two other men, who weren’t
wearing masks.
“I was told there was nowhere else to put him,”
she said, so she stayed with him, even though, at age 70, she was putting herself at
risk.
Her father — who had been drafted into the Army at 18, fought in Germany in World War II and later was sergeant of the guard at the Nuremberg trials — died at 2:15 p.m. the following day.
“My father trusted me,” she said as she wept. “I put him in a place where I thought he was safe, but I wasn’t able to protect him. I guess that will be with me forever.”
Cheryl Malandrinos brought her father-in-law, a Korean War veteran, to the Soldiers’ Home, only to find, like DiPalma, that what seemed like a blessing when a slot opened on the waiting list would turn out to be a curse.
“If I had known the Sunday before they stopped allowing family in that that was the last time I would see Harry, except for on his deathbed,” she said, “I would have stayed a little longer; I would have said, ‘I love you,’ one more time; I would have hugged him a little tighter.”
Malandrinos told the committee it is essential that the state ensures that nothing like this ever happens at a nursing home again.
“If we do nothing for them, and we tell them that this is just all we can offer them,” she said, “then those 76 veterans died in vain.”
Erin Schadel told the committee her father, Francis Hennessy Jr., contracted the virus at the Soldiers’ Home and recovered, but he was never moved from the second floor, where there were veterans who had tested positive.
“We are so very sorry for what you and your family have endued,” Rep. Linda Dean Campbell, D-Methuen, the committee’s co-chair, told her. “We will take that and make it right.”
Bennett Walsh, the home’s one-time superintendent, and Dr. David Clinton, former chief medical officer, have been charged with criminal neglect and face decades in prison if they are convicted.
The outbreak led to calls for reform from Gov. Charlie Baker and the formation of the legislative committee as well as a coalition of veterans, families and former administrators.