‘Dead for two days, and no one knew’

When the state first made the dire situation at Quincy public in 2015, the story quickly got picked up.

Springfield resident Steve French was in his car when he got a phone call from his brother in Waukegan, who had heard a news report that the illness was spreading at the veterans’ home. Just a month earlier, their parents had become residents there.

Dolores French, a native Chicagoan and lifelong Cubs fan who was 79, had only one health malady: deafness. Otherwise, she was in good health and was allowed to move into the veterans’ home with her husband of 57 years, Richard French Sr., because he was a U.S. Army veteran who served during the Korean War.

She was assigned to an independent living unit at the facility, Steve French said, while her husband was placed in another residential building at Quincy because he needed care for his worsening Parkinson’s disease. Typically, French said, his mother would walk to her husband’s room and spend eight hours a day with him.

When the phone call about Legionnaires’ at Quincy arrived, Steve French said he immediately wanted to check on his parents’ well-being and tried calling his mother, who had a device that translates phone calls into text. He got no response. He tried the desk in her building and also got nothing. The next call went to the facility’s administrative offices.

“I said, ‘This is Steve French. I heard the news. I’m just checking on my dad and mom,’” he recalled. “And she just said that they’re OK, that if something happens, we’ll get a call.”

That was Friday, Aug. 28, 2015.

But it wasn’t until the next morning, as French was contemplating making the drive to Quincy from Springfield to check on her, that he was notified by the home that his mother’s neighbors had reported her missing, and staff wanted permission to enter her room, he said.

Within 10 minutes, as the Frenches sat in their basement, another call came from Quincy to report his mother had been found on the floor in her apartment, dead.

As the news began to sink in, yet another call arrived, this time from the Adams County Coroner’s Office. French’s wife, Deann, took the phone.

“He said, ‘We found Mrs. French, and this is going to be difficult for me to tell you, but she has been dead for a significant amount of time,’” Deann French remembered. “So I’m processing that, and I said, ‘Do we know what happened to her? What happened?’ At this point, I’m not thinking Legionnaires’. I just wasn’t. And he said, ‘No, she was found on the floor in front of her recliner, pretty badly decomposed.’”

Within another hour or two, the coroner called back with confirmation that he suspected Legionnaires’, and that state law required an autopsy because an outbreak had been declared at the home. Bewildered, Steve French said he asked that his father not be informed so that he could go tell him face to face the next day.

“I didn’t think he was going to make it out of the room,” French said. “He shut it down. The first thing out of his mouth was, it should have been him. That is what he said: ‘It should’ve been me.’”

And in a moment of clarity that no one else had, French’s father also offered that he was wondering why he hadn’t seen his wife, Dolores, since the previous Wednesday. The question was a poignant one, considering that Parkinson’s sometimes robbed him of the ability to recall people’s names or recognize points in time. But on other occasions, his family said, he would be exceptionally lucid, just as he was at that painful moment upon learning of his wife’s death.

“That was the first time we had anybody put a timeframe on anything,” Deann French said. “So, when Steve called them on Friday and said, ‘I’m concerned about my mom and dad,’ and they said, ‘I can assure you they’re fine,’ his mom had been dead for two days, and no one knew it at all.”

After delivering the grim news, the Frenches insisted on a Legionella test on his father. It came back negative, but they decided on the spot they wanted him out of the Quincy veterans’ home. Steve French said the troubles didn’t end there: In checking Richard French out of the home, staff erroneously marked him as deceased, meaning he faced a cutoff in Social Security benefits as he was moving into another nursing home. It was a monumental hassle to undo, Steve French said.

Just four months after his wife’s death, Richard French died.