GALLATIN, Tenn. (WTVF) — Jury selection starts Monday in a wrongful death lawsuit against a Gallatin nursing home that stemmed from its response during the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
Attorney Clint Kelly is representing the family of Clara "Ruth" George Summers, who died after turning 89 from COVID-19. Her family alleged that the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing mishandled the pandemic crisis, which led Summers' death. The nursing home was the center of Tennessee's first big outbreak.
For the latest update on where the trial stands watch the player above.
The trial will happen inside the Sumner County Courthouse at 100 Public Square.
We will cover the trial through the two-week scheduled period. Streaming of the trial will begin once opening arguments start on Monday afternoon.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates reached out to CareRite, the parent company of the Gallatin Center, and never got a response when we did our initial reporting on the lawsuit.
Jennifer Kraus — who has followed this story from the outset — will go on NewsChannel 5+ on OpenLine Monday at 7 p.m. to talk about the context of the case.
What has happened in the case
Who could forget the scene outside the Gallatin nursing home four years ago?
One night as the COVID-19 pandemic began, emergency crews were called in to remove all of the elderly residents from the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing after the virus had somehow gotten into the building and quickly spread. But how did that happen?
We explain.
Internal documents obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates showed how the nursing home may have allowed COVID in.
It was Tennessee's first big COVID outbreak.
Weeks before the outbreak at the Gallatin Center, federal regulators had instructed nursing homes to screen all residents and employees before allowing them in to help keep COVID out.
One of the residents evacuated from a Gallatin nursing home amid the COVID-19 outbreak ended up dying. At that point, 40 others were hospitalized.
Dozens of elderly residents were evacuated from the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing during the night. NewsChannel 5 Investigates was the first to report on the outbreak in Gallatin and was at the nursing home, watching the evacuation unfold.
A second person from the facility died.
But the first was Clara "Ruth" George Summers, 89, and she was one of the first residents at the facility to test positive for the virus.
National Guard members conducted mass testing of all people in the facility. At the time, 59 more residents and 33 more staff tested positive for COVID-19. It took five hours to transport the 59 residents.
It took a total of 54 ambulances, two EMS buses and one wheelchair van to transport all patients to Sumner Regional Medical Center.
We talked to Summer's family.
"She's not just a person who died from the nursing home with coronavirus. She was a person. And she was my mom," Debbie Bolton told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
Her mom was Clara Summers, but everyone called her Ruth. And everyone from her kids to her grandkids and great-grandkids loved her.
"My mama always said she was going to live to be a hundred," Bolton said.
But Summers died just days after turning 89.
Just days after that disturbing video of elderly patients being moved out of the nursing home in Gallatin because of a Coronavirus outbreak, they made plans to reopen the facility.
Sumner County officials objected and they called the idea "irresponsible."
They're concerned not only about the residents and staff but also all of the emergency workers who were called in from Sumner and surrounding counties to move all of the patients to area hospitals.
At the time, the governor's office told NewsChannel 5 Investigates a state surveyor would be inspecting the facility. We asked then if that would include any sort of testing and the governor's office never responded.
Neglect and intentional disregard of safety rules. Those were the allegations made against the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing.
A pre-suit letter was sent alerting the Gallatin facility that a wrongful death lawsuit would soon be filed.
This stemmed from elderly patients — many of them who got sick with COVID-19 — had to be taken from the facility in late March 2020. In all more than 100 residents and employees tested positive. By this point, eight people had died.
The first coronavirus-related lawsuit was filed against the Gallatin nursing home that was the epicenter of a huge outbreak in Sumner County in late March 2020.
More than 160 people from the Gallatin Center for Rehabilitation and Healing ended up testing positive for the virus and more than two dozen elderly residents died.
Now the daughter of one of those patients is suing the Gallatin Center because she says the facility needs to be held accountable.
"She was my mother. She was my brothers' mother. She was my grandkids' grandmother. She was my great-grandkids' great-grandmother. And we don’t have her now," her daughter said.
And now, we may know why so many here got sick.
"There’s no way you could look at the screening forms and say, 'You all are screening properly,'" attorney Clint Kelly said.
Weeks before the outbreak at the Gallatin Center, federal regulators had instructed nursing homes to screen all residents and employees before allowing them in, to help keep COVID out.
Kelly now represents 25 families who are suing the Gallatin Center and its owner, the New Jersey-based CareRite. As part of the discovery process in those lawsuits, Kelly obtained the completed screening forms filled out at the Gallatin Center just before and at the beginning of the outbreak.
Anyone with a fever or symptoms, the form stated, was supposed to stay out. Kelly said the Gallatin Center repeatedly allowed people into the facility with screening forms that left multiple questions blank.
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