Three months after an investigation into the COVID outbreak that killed 36 residents at the state-run veterans’ home in LaSalle found the facility’s management was “ineffective, reactive and…chaotic” responding to the virus’ spread, Republicans in the Illinois House are once again agitating for more information from Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration.
GOP members are also renewing their call for Attorney General Kwame Raoul to open a criminal probe into the fatal outbreak, which infected nearly all the residents at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home last fall, killing more than a quarter of the facility’s population, and spreading to more than 100 staff members.
Originally published on May 24, 2021 1:25 pm
Beth Ouimet thought she had lucked out in the summer of 2019 when her father got a placement in the state-run LaSalle Veterans’ Home after an episode of PTSD made it clear that living on his own wasn’t an option for the immediate future.
And even after COVID-19 hit Illinois and locked down the facility, Ouimet still was grateful her dad was there.
“I actually thought I was saving his life by keeping him at LaSalle,” Ouimet said.
But this past fall, the LaSalle Veterans’ Home became the site of one of the largest COVID outbreaks in any congregate care facility in Illinois. In the months that followed, multiple third-party inquiries into what went wrong at the LaSalle home found damning evidence of lapses in responsibility. High-level personnel were fired or forced to resign. Gov. JB Pritzker has promised changes at the facility and the state’s Department of Veterans Affairs.
In the months before the state-run veterans’ home in LaSalle saw a massive COVID-19 outbreak that eventually killed more than a quarter of the facility’s
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As a panel of state lawmakers prepares to grill members of Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration over how a COVID-19 outbreak at a state-run veterans’ home grew so massive it killed more than a quarter of the facility’s residents in the fall, Republicans in the Illinois House on Tuesday sent Attorney General Kwame Raoul a letter urging his office to open a criminal investigation into the matter.
The hearings and letter come on the heels of a damning report published by Pritzker’s office April 30, which places blame for the deadly viral outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home on a variety of factors, including lack of preparation, absentee leadership, lax COVID protocols and poor communication not just within the facility, but at the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
Neumer appeared in front of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Tuesday, answering questions about the process behind his investigation. The committee’s hearing on the LaSalle home outbreak will continue Thursday, when the panel will grill representatives from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Department of Public Health and Gov. JB Pritzker’s office.
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Tuesday’s hearing was much shorter than Thursday’s is likely to be, and Neumer mostly stuck to the methodology behind his investigation into the outbreak, which ended with more than a quarter of the LaSalle home’s population dead after testing positive for COVID.