KCK rehab center with COVID outbreak released Korean War vet. Two days later, he died
Steve Brewster knew his dad wasn’t himself, that he wasn’t feeling well.
First, there had been the new bouts of coughing, the lack of strength that he usually had to move his wheelchair by himself. Then, as they sat down for dinner last Sunday night, the 88-year-old took just two bites of his favorite go-to meal — three hard boiled eggs cut up and mixed with mayonnaise — in just an hour.
After that, he didn’t want to watch westerns on the big TV like he normally would, instead telling his son to turn it off. “I just want to sit here,” Carl Brewster said.
Fifteen to 20 minutes later, after leaving his father in the kitchen area of his Kansas City, Kansas, home and then hearing running water, Steve Brewster went to check on his dad. One touch of his body, and the son knew that his father may have already taken his last breath.
Within a minute or two, paramedics in HazMat suits were there. Soon followed by police cars and other emergency vehicles.
“You need to come outside so we can talk,” a police captain told Steve Brewster and his wife, Janis, Sunday night. “... We suspect he’s had the virus, we’re not coming in.”
After Steve Brewster turned on the lights in his father’s house and opened all the doors — exactly how the captain had instructed — police sent in a drone, capturing the scene inside to make sure there was no foul play. That’s standard procedure when there’s a death in the home, police told Brewster. Usually police officers do the search, but because of the possible exposure to the virus, the drone was sent in.
It wouldn’t be confirmed for another four days, when the test results were released, but Wyandotte County had another case of COVID-19. Yet another victim of the coronavirus pandemic that has shut down the country and devastated countless families in nearly every state in the nation.
Carl Donald Brewster — a Korean War veteran and “railroader” whose father and father’s father also worked on the rails — had only been back home a couple of days when he died. After a fall in early February, a doctor told his family he needed to have therapy inside a rehab center for awhile, to work on strengthening his body.
He had just gotten home that Friday night. A detail his son included when he called 911. And one that tells so much about his father’s last days.
“I think my dad just passed away,” Steve Brewster recalls telling the dispatcher, “and he’s just been in Riverbend.”
A horrible outbreak
The son knew all about the virus.
He and his wife had been paying close attention to the threat on nursing homes since Kansas’ first death, a man in his 70s who was a resident of another Kansas City, Kansas, facility. After visitors were no longer allowed inside nursing facilities, his dad would keep him updated by phone.
He told him when the cafeteria at the Riverbend Post Acute Rehabilitation center was shut down, and the therapy room.
Then, on Friday, April 3, the day his dad would come home, the Unified Government said 17 residents and two employees at Riverbend had tested positive for COVID-19.
So he understood why the police said they weren’t coming in the house.
“They’ve had a horrible outbreak over there,” the captain said of Riverbend.
The thought hit Steve Brewster then and every day since: Why would they send my father home? Did they know he was sick? That he could infect his family?
By Monday morning, 37 cases had been connected to Riverbend and four had died. Three days later, on Thursday — the day the Brewsters found out their father and grandfather had the virus when he died — the count was up to 61 confirmed cases and seven dead.
And by Friday, cases had jumped to 92, with 84 of them residents. Ten had died.
It’s become the largest outbreak in Kansas since the virus arrived here early last month.
Unified Government health officials won’t say when — or if — Carl Brewster’s case was included in the numbers from Riverbend.
“We do not confirm personal information on individuals in order to protect privacy,” said Janell Friesen, a spokeswoman with the UG’s public health department, in an email Friday afternoon.
Cory Schulte, executive director at Riverbend, released a statement Friday about what the facility was doing to address the coronavirus outbreak. But he did not respond to a list of questions about Brewster’s case sent by The Star.
Carl Brewster’s family has struggled with all that’s happened with Riverbend. Early on, when Steve Brewster saw stories online about the outbreak and read how people were criticizing the facility, he defended Riverbend.
“I said, ‘Listen, I have experience, it’s the nicest, they are the cleanest,’” Steve Brewster said.
But what’s unfolded in recent days, and how the facility has managed the outbreak and information coming out, is hard for the retired railroad worker to understand.
“I don’t want to ruin their reputation,” Brewster said. “Because out of the three nursing homes he was in, it was the best. At Riverbend, the staff was wonderful, kind, attentive. It’s like the management, what are they thinking?
“They’ve made some horrible mistakes here these last couple of weeks. Undeniable mistakes.”
And he and his family are left with too many questions.
Some of them go back to the day Steve’s dad called to say he was being brought home. Earlier than expected.
‘Didn’t tell us anything’
With the therapy room closed last month, and therapists coming to his room to do small exercises — ones he could easily do at home — Carl Brewster wondered why he needed to stay at Riverbend. Everyone agreed.
So the plan was for him to go home this past Wednesday, April 8.
But five days before that, on April 3, he called his son.
“They’re going to bring me home,” the father said. He told his son that the staff said plans had changed and someone would be bringing him home that afternoon.
Carl Brewster would later tell his son that he thought “a bunch of people got it (COVID-19), and they wanted to clear a bunch of people out of there.”
So Steve and his wife, who live next door to Carl, waited. It was getting dark, and still no Dad. Then between 8 and 8:30, the elder Brewster called from Riverbend.
“Dad where are you?” Steve asked. “We’re expecting you.”
Carl Brewster said he was in his wheelchair, sitting alone in the hallway on the third floor. They had “forgotten him,” his son said. And all the transports were done for the night.
“He was very upset,” Steve Brewster said. “He said, ‘They’ve let me sit here for hours. ... I want you to go on Google and find every handicap taxi you can to come and get me. I don’t care how much it costs. I don’t want to spend another night in this place.”
It was getting late on a Friday night and Steve found someone who could pick him up the next morning, but he could only find one company in Olathe that could maybe to do it that night, if he couldn’t find anyone else.
After his father said he couldn’t wait until morning, Steve and Janis went to pick him up, and would just load the wheelchair into their trunk.
At Riverbend, it appeared deserted. A nurse found Carl alone on the third floor, Steve Brewster said, and brought him down, saying: “He was the only person there. It’s like they totally forgot about him.”
Steve still thinks back to when he and Janis left Riverbend for home with Dad.
“They didn’t tell us anything,” he said. “They didn’t say, ‘Be careful, he may have the virus.’
“It just seemed like they wanted to kick everybody out, that’s what it seemed like. ... Essentially they were turning him out to maybe infect our whole family.”
‘Broke my heart...’
On the way home, Steve Brewster noticed something with his father he hadn’t heard or seen before.
“I realized he had this cough problem — it was a new problem,” he said.
Like a “smoker’s hack cough,” the son said, but his dad’s not a smoker.
“Did they check you for the virus?” Steve asked.
“They checked our temperature,” his dad said, “and if we didn’t have a fever they said they didn’t need to check us.”
Family members still can’t understand that.
“My concern is that my grandfather had symptoms,” said Emerald Given, Steve’s daughter and Carl’s granddaughter. “He would have tested positive, if they would have bothered to test him.”
The next morning, on Saturday, Steve Brewster started noticing more changes. His dad still had the cough, and at times, it would go on for a while.
And at one point in the day, Carl Brewster called his son who was next door at his home.
“Steve, I’m having trouble moving, getting into the kitchen,” his dad said.
Here’s a guy, Steve Brewster said, who at 88 years old still did his own bills. He ate healthy food and stayed away from salt and a lot of sugar. Strong and independent. He was in a wheelchair, yes, but he always got around by himself. In and out of bed and the bathroom.
Now, he appeared weaker than when he went into Riverbend two months before.
“He always seemed rather indestructible,” Steve Brewster said. “It kind of broke my heart when he said, ‘Can you push me?’ For him to ask me for help, that was my first real indication that his strength wasn’t good. I had to push him through the house, which I’ve never done before.”
Sunday was more of the same. His dad was confused at times. At one point, he mistook a razor on the bathroom sink for his teeth. Later, he held a lid under the faucet, as if he was trying to fill it with water, thinking it was the container he put his teeth in. And there was his lack of appetite at dinner.
When he left his dad to sit in the kitchen like he asked, Steve went to join his wife.
“Dad’s acting pretty strange here,” he told her.
Never thinking that within minutes, he’d be gone.
No final goodbye
Once there was nothing more the paramedics could do for his dad Sunday night, Steve Brewster advised that his body would need to go to Maple Hill Funeral home. That’s who took care of his mother’s funeral 17 years ago and his dad would go there too.
No, he was told, first his dad would need to be taken to the morgue.
“They’ll have to test him for the virus.”
Police officials and emergency workers told Steve and his wife they would know the results of the test “right away.”
By Thursday, four days later, still nothing.
Carl Brewster had been buried the day before. Nobody could be there. Not even the family.
And now they still didn’t know for sure what had happened.
Given decided to call the health department that day and ask about her grandpa’s test results. That’s when she was told her grandpa tested positive for COVID-19.
None of it adds up, the family said.
“It’s almost like they didn’t want dad to die over there,” Steve Brewster said. “They had to know he wasn’t 100 percent healthy. It doesn’t make any sense telling him they were going to give him a ride home and just leave him there.”
That’s what still gets Given. Thinking of her grandpa sitting there all alone inside a facility with the state’s largest coronavirus outbreak.
“A patient should never be forgotten, ... no matter what!” she said in an email to The Star. “I feel like the facility made it so my Grandpa didn’t have a chance. My heart is broken!!”
No one in the family got to say a “final goodbye,” Steve Brewster said.
After their daughter told them about the test results Thursday, Steve and Janis called the family doctor. He said they needed to get tested. They did and were told they’d have to wait three to four days for the results.
“Hope we don’t get sick,” Brewster said. “I told my wife when we got back from testing, I bet we got it. We were with my dad for nearly three days.”
The couple, who are both 68 and diabetic, were told to stay at home, don’t visit anyone.
On Saturday, they got their answer: both tested positive for the coronavirus.
So they quarantine. And try to process what’s happened in just one week.
“I’m still kind of numb,” Steve Brewster said before he had received the test results. “I’m sitting in his house and it seems like he’s in another room.
“I’m still stuck on those last three days with him — what signs did I see? Him thinking the razor was his teeth, him running water on a lid? Dad was mentally really sharp, so there was something getting to him.”
The family wrote a long obituary, the one thing during this pandemic they were able to do for him after he was gone.
They made sure his time in the service was in there, when he served in Korea. His Masters of Arts degree from Webster University, which he was proud of.
And, of course, his long career. First as a railroader with Virginian Railway Company in Princeton, West Virginia, and then as a general car foreman for the Union Pacific Railroad for 30 years in Kansas City. Then, his last five years before retirement, he was a railroad safety inspector for the Federal Railroad Administration.
After a collision or derailment, he was the one they would call to figure out what had happened. His dad would walk back, examine the rails and ties. He’d look at the cars and the engines and determine what caused it.
“The way he could do it, it was incredible,” Steve Brewster said, the pride evident in his voice. “He was like Sherlock Holmes. The best ever.”
Memories like those have helped this past week. And may help others who knew him, his son said.
At the end of his obituary, the family sent one last message from their father and grandfather:
“Carl Donald asks that instead of sending flowers for all his relatives and friends to remember him in their prayers and just remember him as a railroader, that would please him so much.”
