In Atlanta, A Wave Of Coronavirus Deaths And The Questions Left In Its Wake

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A family photo shows Ernestine Mann. She moved into the Arbor Terrace at Cascade assisted living facility in 2019. Mann was one of the residents who died of COVID-19 earlier this year when there was an outbreak at the facility.

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Siblings Karla McKinney and Bill Mann last saw their mother Ernestine Mann alive on March 25, through a window visit after the facility had started restricting visitors.

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Cascade is a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood of Atlanta. The area used to be home to notable people including Rep. John Lewis and Hank Aaron.

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Arbor Terrace at Cascade is the company’s only facility in a predominantly black neighborhood in Georgia.

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Marian Hatch, a former resident at Arbor Terrace at Cascade, looks at one of the photos of her friends. Hatch, 92, tested positive for COVID-19 but survived and was one of Mann’s closest friends at the facility.

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Karla McKinney last saw her mother alive on March 25. She noticed something was off when her mom appeared dazed and unable to focus when the family visited through a window.

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«I just didn’t see it coming,» McKinney said. «I just didn’t understand why those kinds of questions were being asked.»

Later on, another call: Their mom had stopped breathing on her own.

«The doctor described what it would be like to be on a ventilator, and it was pretty much to prolong the inevitable, and she would suffer,» McKinney remembers. «We had to make that heartbreaking decision to let her go.»

Ernestine Mann died in the afternoon on March 29. She was 84.

«I understand we are all on the clock and sooner or later we have to go, but not like that,» Bill Mann said. «She didn’t have to go this way.»

Mann’s death was at the start of a wave of others at the facility. Nancy Finney died the next day. On April 3, Dr. Delutha King and Bernice Foster both died. King had been sent back and forth between different hospitals and the facility at least twice before he died, according to his son Ron Loving.

Hattie Jay died April 5. She had tested negative for the virus, but her daughter Perdita Fisher believes she died because of the stress of isolation. Eddie Johnson, Jr., died April 5 and his wife Blanche three days later. A photograph of them holding hands at the hospital went viral.

Catherine Hendrix died April 6. Her son Cedric said he still sometimes drives by the facility, wondering what went wrong. Four day later, Lois King, Delutha’s wife, died on the day her husband was buried. Dorothy McGirt and Gloria Bolds both died April 12. JoeAnn Snead had only lived at the facility for a little more than two weeks before she was sent to the hospital, where she spent about a month before she died on April 21. A week and a half after that, on May 2, Edgar Lewis died.

At least 17 were dead of COVID-19 by the end, though state records differ on whether the final death toll was 17 or 19. NPR was able to confirm the names of these 13 through family interviews, news reports and obituaries. And somewhere among all those deaths, there were at least four others whose names we couldn’t find at all.

‘We weren’t just going to leave them by themselves’

Four families, including the family of Ernestine Mann, have ongoing lawsuits against the Arbor Company. The lawsuits allege that staff failed to wear personal protective equipment, or PPE; that asymptomatic staff who had been exposed to COVID-19 continued to work; and that the company failed to restrict outside visitors. The company denies any wrongdoing.

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Ernestine Mann’s family is one of four families that have filed lawsuits against the Arbor Company. The company denies any wrongdoing.

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Georgia state records from March 27, when the outbreak at Arbor Terrace at Cascade had already begun, say the facility needed more PPE.

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A view of an empty John Lewis Freedom Parkway into downtown Atlanta on April 4.

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Signs of disinvestment are visible even in middle-class neighborhoods like Cascade. Though the median household income of that area is similar to that of Atlanta, the median home value around Cascade is around $120,000 less than Atlanta’s median home value.

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Former Cascade staff members told NPR that Arbor Terrace at Cascade was simply not as nice as the other Arbor Company locations.

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Pastor Gary Dean, at Hoosier Memorial United Methodist Church, said Mann’s funeral «would have been standing room only» if it wasn’t limited to family members because of the pandemic.

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A photo of Ernestine Mann sits on the pew where she sat most Sundays at Hoosier Memorial United Methodist Church.

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A photo of Ernestine Mann sits on the pew where she sat most Sundays at Hoosier Memorial United Methodist Church.

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«This day is going to come for all of us, be it by way of COVID, be it by way of accident or heart attack,» he tells them, and then turns to the Bible: «We have to be ready because we don’t know the day nor the hour when it might come.»

But there’s another kind of readiness, a more secular one, learned from past mistakes.

«We’re seeing this time and time again. Not just in this current moment, but the housing crisis, guess who suffered more? Hurricane Katrina, guess who suffered more? Now COVID, guess who’s suffering more now?,» Perry of the Brookings Institution said. «There will be another disaster that’s inevitable.»

The question, he says, is who will suffer more the next time.

Hanna Rosin, NPR’s Huo Jingnan and NPR’s Barbara Van Woerkom contributed to this report.