SUFFOLK COUNTY, N.Y.– New York law firm Napoli Shkolnik has filed suit against the Long Island State Veterans Home, as well as the State of New York and the agencies responsible for overseeing the home, on behalf of the estates of three nursing home residents – all veterans – who died during a COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. The suit, which seeks to establish a class to include all 486 residents who contracted the virus and the estates of 124 residents who died, alleges that Long Island State Veterans Home’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak was grossly insufficient and resulted in the residents’ illness and death.
Nursing homes were among the first hotspots of COVID-19 infection during the pandemic, with the first nationally reported outbreak at a nursing home in Washington State. As a result, guidance for safety at nursing homes was issued quickly at the federal and state levels. Had nursing homes followed that critical guidance, they would have protected their residents, who represented the highest-risk class for COVID infection. However, many did not, resulting in over 15,000 deaths in New York alone between February 2020 and October 2021.
The Long Island State Veterans Home had the second-highest death rate statewide. In filing the case, Napoli Shkolnik Partner Joseph Ciaccio, Managing Partner for COVID nursing home cases, points to this fact as being a failure, not just to provide adequate medical care, but also to protect those who had given the best of themselves to defend the country in times of war. In a county with the largest veteran population in New York, and one of the highest in the nation, the Long Island State Veterans Home promised to care for the well-being of the state’s veterans with dignity and compassion. Instead, as the suit states, it became: “a death trap for 124 of our nation’s veterans.”
“We filed a class action complaint against the Long Island Veterans Home, a nursing home facility owned by the State of New York. Our local veterans deserve the highest levels of care, especially in their later years. Instead, in this instance, they were left helpless as over 100 veterans lost their lives in this facility to COVID-19,” commented Mr. Ciaccio.
