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Criminal charges reinstated in deadly Holyoke Soldiers' Home COVID-19 outbreak

The Holyoke Soldier's Home where more than 76 veterans died in a COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020.
Mass.Dept of Veterans Services

Former Superintendent, medical director facing trial for their parts in the deaths of more than 76 veterans

The highest court in Massachusetts today reinstated criminal charges against two former top officials at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home who were indicted following the deaths of more than 76 veterans during a COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.

A Superior Court judge had dismissed the charges against former Superintendent Bennett Walsh and the former medical director Dr. David Clinton. The state Attorney General’s office appealed the dismissal.

The Supreme Judicial Court in a 5-2 decision ruled the criminal proceedings can move forward.

Matt Szafranski, the editor-in-chief of Western Mass. Politics & Insight – and who is also an attorney – was at the SJC in Boston for the oral arguments in January and has written about the case. He spoke this afternoon with WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.