HOLYOKE — Six years after COVID claimed the lives of at least 76 elderly veterans at the former Soldiers’ Home here, the searing memory of that tragedy — and the scandalous incompetence that enabled it — continue to gnaw at the families who lost loved ones.
Some never returned to the 74-year-old building near the Connecticut River. Others are still angry at the startling scale of neglect and mismanagement that fueled what is believed to be the nation’s deadliest COVID outbreak at a long-term-care facility.
But now, a new building has arisen beside the scene of so much sorrow. Rebranded as the Veterans Home at Holyoke, the curved, state-of-the-art, eight-story structure atop Cherry Hill is “like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” said John Paradis, a former Soldiers’ Home deputy superintendent who resigned a decade ago in protest over its conditions.
A ribbon-cutting on Thursday officially opened the new facility, although all the veterans who still live in the older building are not expected to move into their new quarters until January. More veterans will follow.
“If it were not for the sacrifice of those veterans and the advocacy of those family members, this new home would not have been built,” said Paradis, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. “The state did what they said they would do.”
Like its new name, the $484 million building is deliberately designed to separate itself from the legacy of the aging facility next door, which is expected to be demolished by 2028.
Cramped quarters are a thing of the past, officials said, and rigorous infection control is a priority.
Instead of two, three, and four veterans sharing rooms without sinks or private bathrooms — conditions blamed for helping COVID spread rapidly through the Soldiers’ Home — the new building has 212 single rooms and 11 doubles. The rooms are spacious: 150 square feet for singles, private bathrooms, large windows that overlook the Pioneer Valley, 55-inch televisions, and gas fireplaces.
The living space is modeled on a “small house” concept that places veterans in distinct groups of 10, 12, or 14 residents in multiple wings on each of the floors. Nursing stations have sight lines to all the rooms in their areas, unlike their limited visibility in the Soldiers’ Home, officials said.
During the COVID outbreak, the most egregious error was a deadly decision to move all veterans from one locked dementia unit into another occupied room for dementia patients, according to a subsequent state investigation.
As a result, more than 40 veterans were crowded into a space designed for 25. Some veterans were COVID positive, some were suspected of having the virus, and others did not show any symptoms.
According to the state investigation, released in 2020, “A recreational therapist who was instructed to help with the move said that she felt like she was ‘walking [the veterans] to their death.’ ”
Now, as the transition from old to new quarters is about to begin, the facility’s ratio of 1.36 registered nurse hours per patient per day is more than double the national average of 0.59, according to state officials. The building is expected to have 549 full-time employees, compared with 345 at the older facility.
“It’s so much more than a beautiful building,” Governor Maura Healey said in an interview Friday. “It’s about the continued commitment and hard work of staff and advocates and family members and the state to do everything we can to make sure veterans in Massachusetts have access to the highest-quality housing and care.”
The Veterans Home’s executive director, Michael Lazo, commanded the National Guard’s emergency response to the 2020 outbreak and has seen the darkest days at the site.
“I hate to put it this way, but it has a happier feel,” Lazo said of the new building during a tour this week.
Lazo recalled that when the National Guard was ordered to the older home in March 2020, 11 veterans already had died. He asked himself, “What the hell are we walking into?”
And inside the home, Lazo said, he heard a distraught and overstressed nurse saying, “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep doing this anymore.”
Now, unlike the former Soldiers’ Home, medical and health-care expertise have been embedded into the chain of command at the new facility, whose construction was paid almost equally by federal and state funds.
Lazo, a colonel in the Army National Guard, has decades of military and civilian experience in health care. His politically connected predecessor, Bennett Walsh, did not. Walsh resigned in October 2020 after he and the home’s medical director, Dr. David Clinton, were indicted on criminal charges of neglect of elders.
In 2024, Walsh and Clinton, who also resigned, admitted in court there were sufficient facts to warrant a guilty verdict. They avoided trial, and the cases were continued without a finding.
Following the outbreak, the position of state secretary of veterans services was elevated to Cabinet-level to provide more direct oversight of the veterans homes in Holyoke and Chelsea.
Medical experience became a priority. Dr. Jon Santiago, an emergency medicine physician and Army veteran, was appointed to the Cabinet post by Healey in 2023. He was succeeded by Dr. Eric Goralnick, a Navy veteran and emergency medicine physician.
When COVID swept through the Holyoke facility, then-veterans services secretary Francisco Urena, a Marine veteran, had no medical background. He resigned in June 2020 amid investigations of the tragedy.
“The whole focus of this building is the veterans out there,” Lazo said.
At the former Chelsea Soldiers’ Home, Globe and state reports of mismanagement and substandard conditions preceded Healey’s decision in 2023 to fire superintendent Eric Johnson. A new $200 million facility has been built there.
The Holyoke losses still feel raw to family members of the veterans who died, and some relatives said they have felt overlooked. Two daughters of deceased veterans said they initially had not been invited to the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“Several families were part of the advocacy efforts, and for us not to get an invitation after losing parents, that’s not kosher,” said Laurie Beaudette, whose father, Jim Mandeville, a Navy veteran of the Korean War, died from COVID.
“It makes me sad and mad at the same time,” added Beaudette, who lives in Springfield and visited her father regularly at the Soldiers’ Home for 17 years.
Susan Kenney of Ware also expressed surprise that she had not been invited at first. Invitations were forthcoming after state Senator John Velis, a Westfield Democrat and major in the Army National Guard, pressed the administration to include the relatives.
“It was unbelievable to me that family members and the [advocacy] coalition were not invited. How could that have possibly been an oversight?” asked Kenney, whose deceased father, Charles Lowell, had been an Air Force veteran.
Healey called the delayed invitations a “mixup,” adding that “as soon as I heard about that, I made sure it was taken care of.”
Many family members also want a memorial placed on the grounds to honor their loved ones. Although a commemorative garden for all veterans is being planned, officials said, no final decision has been made regarding specific references to COVID victims.
“I know we’ll stay in touch,” the governor said of the families. “I want to make sure that their loved ones are honored and remembered in the best possible way.”
For Elizabeth Brewer, a 97-year-old Army veteran, that respect for military service is being met.
“It’s the best place anywhere around for nursing care,” said Brewer, one of six women in the facility. “It’s beautiful, it’s spacious, and it’s gorgeous.”
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com.