After waves of COVID deaths, care homes face legal reckoning

PARIS (AP) — The muffled, gagging sounds in the background of the phone call filled Monette Hayoun with dread.

Was her severely disabled 85-year-old brother, Meyer, choking on his food? Was he slowly suffocating like the Holocaust survivor who died a few months earlier in another of the care home’s bedrooms, a chunk of breakfast baguette lodged in his throat?

Meyer Haiun died the next day, one of the more than 14,000 deaths that tore through care homes for France’s most vulnerable older adults when they were sealed off to visitors during the coronavirus’ peak.

Three months on, the questions plague Monette: How did her brother die? Did he suffer? And, most gnawing of all, who is responsible?

“All the questions that I have about Meyer, maybe the truth isn’t as bad as what I imagine,” she says. Still, she adds, “You cannot help but imagine the worst.”

As families flock back to nursing homes that first reopened to limited visits in April and more widely this month, thousands no longer have mothers, fathers, grandparents and siblings to hug and to hold.

With graves so fresh that some still don’t have headstones, grieving families across the country are increasingly demanding a reckoning, turning to lawyers to try to determine why almost half of France’s nearly 30,000 COVID-19 deaths hit residents of nursing homes, scything through the generations that came of age after World War I, endured the next world conflict and helped rebuild the country.

Many homes had few, even no deaths. But others are emerging with their reputations in tatters, having lost scores in their care. Increasingly, homes are facing wrongful death lawsuits accusing them of negligent care, skimping on protective equipment and personnel, and lying to families about how their loved...