Families of 2 victims of Legionnaires’ disease sue Rocky Hill nursing home over water safety issues

The families of two victims of Legionnaires’ disease at the same Rocky Hill nursing home over the past two years have filed lawsuits against the facility’s parent company Apple Rehab for failing to meet water safety standards designed to protect residents from the potentially deadly Legionella bacteria.

The complaints from the estates of Carlos Paez, who died in July 2019, and Angelo Gionfriddo, who died in April, both closely mirror the findings of state public health inspectors who concluded this spring that the Apple Rehab group did not develop or implement necessary safety measures and did not report repeated positive tests for the bacteria or confirmed cases of the disease to the state.

Inspectors visited the facility on April 5, the day after Gionfriddo left the nursing home with Legionnaires’ disease, and issued a scathing emergency order closing the facility to new patients until it addressed its water safety issues on April 12 — the day after Gionfriddo died, records show.

Both lawsuits against Apple Rehab, filed first by Paez’s estate late last month and by Gionfriddo’s estate on Tuesday in Hartford Superior Court, seek monetary awards for the loved ones of the late patients.

Apple Rehab, which operates more than 20 locations across Connecticut, has not responded to either filing in court and attempts to reach a spokesperson for the company on Tuesday afternoon were unsuccessful.

“The Gionfriddo family was devastated by the death of their father and grandfather and they’ve engaged me to seek all remedies for which the law provides,” attorney Steven Seligman said. “This case is in its infancy, so we have not had the benefit of discovery, but based upon the emergency action taken by the Department of Public Health in April of this year, there is more than a good-faith basis to believe that the plaintiff will prove the allegations of its complaint.”

Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia often caused by breathing in aerosolized water that contains the Legionella bacteria, which is normally found in freshwater lakes or streams but also can grow in the water systems inside buildings, like showers and sinks, if safety protocols are not followed. The disease does not usually affect most healthy people, but people more than 50 years old, current or former smokers, those with lung diseases and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk — making nursing homes particularly dangerous locations for the bacteria to spread, public health officials have said.

Paez was one of at least two confirmed cases of Legionnaires’ disease at the Rocky Hill facility in the summer of 2019, according to a public health alert issued at the time. Paez had been a resident at the nursing home for about six weeks when he became sick and was transferred to Hartford Hospital, where he was officially diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease, according to the lawsuit.

He battled the illness for more than a month and died on July 21, 2019, records show.

At the time of Paez’s death, public health officials said they were working with Apple Rehab to implement federal safety guidelines designed to prevent bacterial growth in nursing home water systems but DPH did not issue any emergency orders at the time.

This spring, however, inspectors learned during a recertification survey that water quality problems had continued for months at the facility and sent inspectors to review the location again, records show.

Inspectors found Apple Rehab Rocky Hill had conducted Legionella testing of the drinking water at the facility four times from the end of October 2020 to mid-March 2021 and that “on one or more of such dates” had found the water tested positive but did not report it to the state, according DPH records and the Gionfriddos’ lawsuit.

Gionfriddo joined the nursing home at the same time of those issues, moving into the facility on March 12 — two weeks before the March 27 test for Legionella, according to his family’s lawsuit. He left the facility on April 4, the day before state inspectors descended on the home, and died a week later on April 11.

The following day then-acting Public Health Commissioner Deidre Gifford issued an emergency order barring the facility from taking in any new residents and ordering Apple Rehab to begin remediating the bacterial contamination within a matter of days while the entire facility switched to bottled and filtered water, according to the order.

Gifford’s order found Apple Rehab had run afoul of as many as nine different public health regulations by failing to develop a worthy water management plan, staff and train for such a plan, or respond appropriately to the results of the tests they did conduct, according to the order.

Gifford also ordered Apple Rehab to review the previous three months of resident information to try to identify any additional possible cases of Legionnaires’ disease, but details about that review were not immediately available Tuesday and it was not clear if any other confirmed cases were ultimately reported to DPH. Further information about the department’s investigation into the facility or Apple Rehab’s response to the other requirements of the emergency order was not immediately available Tuesday.

At the time of Paez’s death in 2019, the Apple Rehab Rocky Hill location was rated “below average” overall and “much below average” for health inspections by the federal government’s Medicare nursing home comparison tool and had been subject to $195,000 in penalties over the three previous years.

As of Tuesday, however, the Rocky Hill location had no Medicare rating “due to a history of serious quality issues,” the agency reported.

“This nursing home is subject to more frequent inspections, escalating penalties, and potential termination from Medicare and Medicaid as part of the Special Focus Facility (SFF) program,” according to Medicare’s rating dashboard for the facility.

Zach Murdock can be reached at zmurdock@courant.com.

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