Vet in Atlanta VA nursing home dies covered in ant bites

A daughter is devastated and a senator outraged after a 74-year-old veteran died in a Veterans Affairs nursing home covered in ant bites.

Joel Marrable, an Air Force veteran who served in the Vietnam War, was staying at the Eagles’ Nest Community Living Center, part of the Atlanta VA Medical Center, when his daughter visited him a week before he died.

“His room had ants, the ceiling, the walls, the beds. They were everywhere,” his daughter Laquna Ross told WSB-TV. “The staff member says to me, ‘When we walked in here, we thought Mr. Marrable was dead. We thought he wasn’t even alive, because the ants were all over him.’”

Marrable had cancer, his daughter said. After Ross told the workers, they cleaned his room and bathed him. But the ants returned.

Only then, Ross said, were they able to relocate him into a new room – where he died last Saturday.

“I am shocked, horrified and downright maddened by the news that a veteran under the care of the VA was treated so poorly and without any regard for his well-being,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., chairman of the Senate VA Committee. “This patient, at the end of his life, was clearly not being monitored closely enough, and I am so sad for his family who had to discover his insect-infested conditions before anything was reportedly done.”

A ‘top-to-bottom review’

Atlanta VA spokesman Greg Kendall told USA TODAY on Friday that the facility has launched a “top-to-bottom review of this situation to ensure it never happens again.”

“Atlanta VA Health Care System always strives to provide Veterans with the very best health care available,” said Kendall, who added that officials have apologized to the family. “When we don’t meet that standard, we hold ourselves accountable.”

The Atlanta VA nursing home is one of 134 such facilities across the country run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Inspections of 99 of the VA nursing homes since April 2018 revealed that veterans suffered “actual harm” at more than half of them, a USA TODAY and The Boston Globe investigation found earlier this year.

The investigation also found veterans in VA nursing homes are more likely to suffer from serious pain and develop bedsores – a potential sign of neglect – than non-VA nursing home residents, according to agency data that the VA had kept from the public for years until USA TODAY and The Globe began inquiring about it.

The results of inspections of the VA nursing home in Atlanta still have not been released. VA officials said this year that they hoped to post all the results by October.

Inspections: Veterans harmed at VA nursing homes in 25 states

Ross hopes that her father’s story can spur improvements in the treatment of veterans.

“Maybe this can move the needle and improve the process,” she told CNN. “The VA is busy. They have a lot of patients and huge needs they have to address.”

Read more at USAToday.com.