Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a notice of appeal Tuesday in Hampden County Superior Court seeking to overturn a lower court’s dismissal of criminal charges lodged against two leaders of a veterans home where 76 residents died during a COVID-19 outbreak.
The charges are believed to have been the first COVID-19-related criminal charges filed against nursing home officials in the United States. The case is being handled by the Massachusetts attorney general’s Medicaid Fraud Division.
“The tragic loss of life at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home broke the promise that our commonwealth would honor these men who bravely served our country,” Healey said.
State Judge Edward J. McDonough Jr. issued the dismissal last month for former Holyoke Soldiers’ Home Superintendent Bennett Walsh and former medical director David Clinton, M.D. A statewide grand jury had indicted the men in September 2020 on five counts of elder neglect and five counts of permitting serious bodily injury to an elder, according to court records. The indictments stemmed from a March 27, 2020, decision to merge two dementia units at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home due to a nursing shortage. The merger combined COVID-19-positive residents with others who were asymptomatic.
McDonough noted that the five named veterans in the case had been exposed to COVID-19 before the merger of the units.
“There was insufficient reasonably trustworthy evidence presented to the grand jury that, had these two dementia units not been merged, the medical condition of these five veterans would have been materially different,” he wrote in his decision.
“We are filing this notice of appeal to pursue accountability on behalf of their loved ones and communities,” Healey said this week.
