SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — A federal judge on Monday signed off on a $58 million settlement for victims of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak at the Soldiers Home in Holyoke, Mass., the largest of its kind nationwide.
The class action lawsuit was filed in July of that year against ousted leaders of the state-run home, plus gubernatorial appointees in charge of veterans’ and health and human services for the commonwealth. The approved settlement figure crept up from $56 million after three more families were added to the lawsuit, according to plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Northampton, Mass., lawyer Thomas Lesser’s voice became choked with tears near the end of his presentation to U.S. District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni during the morning’s final settlement hearing.
“If we hadn’t filed this lawsuit, it very well might have never been brought — and that would have been a black mark, a blot on our system of justice. These veterans deserved to have their claims heard, and they more than deserve the compensation they will receive,” Lesser said in front of a small group of family members of veterans stricken with the virus in the spring of 2020, when 84 lost their lives.
The death toll was placed largely at the feet of former administrators of the home. Former Superintendent Bennett Walsh and medical director Dr. David Clinton were indicted for criminal neglect over the outbreak, but a Hampden Superior Court judge dismissed that case last year. State Attorney General and Governor-elect Maura Healey appealed the judge’s decision to the Supreme Judicial Court.
The lawsuit class was broken up into two groups: veterans who lived at the home and died from the virus by June 23, 2020, and those who survived beyond that date. Surviving family members of the first group will receive settlements between $400,000 and $600,000, while members of the second group will receive payouts of $10,000 to $51,000, Lesser told the judge.
The plaintiffs numbered 168 at the start; 40 more veterans have died since the lawsuit was filed.
Attorneys in the case will receive $11.5 million in fees, which Lesser was careful to note did not come out of the plaintiffs’ settlements under the structure of their agreement with the state and is slightly less than the average lawyer windfall for class action cases.
The settlement is the largest of its kind across the country, Lesser said, exceeding a $53 million settlement inked last year by the State of New Jersey with 119 families over a similarly disastrous outbreak in veterans’ homes there.
In Holyoke, an independent study commissioned by Gov. Charlie Baker found that an early decision to combine two dementia units, intermingling veterans who had and had not contracted the disease, sharply drove up the death toll before top staff there were suspended and the state sent in the National Guard to take over. By late March, desperate staff at the facility on Cherry Street had summoned refrigeration trucks as makeshift morgues to keep up with the dying.
Tom Conner, of Easthampton, Mass., was among the family members who came to the federal courthouse on State Street Monday morning for the hearing. He lost his father, Robert “Bob” Conner, both a World War II and Korean War veteran, on May 8, 2020. He was 96 years and eight months old, exactly, on the day he died.
Conner said that his, like many families, was relieved when his father got a spot at the Soldiers’ Home in 2018 after a year on the waiting list. He was suffering from Parkinson’s disease but was otherwise healthy and on few medications, Conner said.
“We were able to take him places. I was sure he would have lived to be 100. COVID felled him before his time,” said Conner outside the courtroom, adding that the level of care prior to the outbreak was “exceptional,” in terms of nursing and assistant nursing care.
Mary Pitoniak made the four-hour trek from Princeton, N.J., to Springfield on Monday morning. Her uncle, John Pitoniak, was among a band of four brothers who served in World War II. He and Pitoniak’s father lived at the Soldiers’ Home together until her father died in 2014.
John Pitoniak died at 93 years old on April 30, 2020, said his niece, who also spent years working in health care.
“I would have known not to do what those people did,” she said of administrators. “That was just a shame.”
Pitoniak said she did, however, respect that the state settled the lawsuit quickly, seemingly out of respect for the veterans and their families. And she thanked plaintiffs’ attorneys for their work.
“I applaud their David to the state’s Goliath,” she said.
Conner said he was initially on the fence about whether to even participate in the lawsuit, but an assistant to class action lawsuit administrator Donald K. Stern convinced him it was a way to honor his father. He said the process of having to delve into memories of his father — both early and in his final days — was emotionally fraught but ultimately fulfilling.
“For my dad, he would have wanted this. He would have respected the Herculean task the lawyers completed on behalf of the families, and the benefit of the settlement will ultimately go to his grandchildren,” Conner said.