Brooklyn VA Doctor tested positive for COVID-19 after treating patients

VA physician tests positive for COVID-19, treated patients before being quarantined

Military Times
Patricia Kime
March 17, 2020

A memo distributed to VA New York Health Center employees and obtained by the New York Post said the employee was “doing well,” and “those who interacted with the employee are being contacted.”

The Brooklyn VA Medical Center last week discovered the first case of the novel coronavirus in an employee. (Department of Veterans Affairs photo)

A doctor at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus last week, after seeing patients and working alongside other staff members before knowing he had the virus.

VA officials confirmed Friday that an “employee tested presumptive positive for the novel coronavirus” on March 11, but they would say little else about the case, citing privacy concerns.

The employee is the first known VA worker to have contracted the virus.

“On March 11, 2020, one New York Harbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center employee tested presumptive positive for COVID-19. In accordance with CDC guidelines and the patient’s clinical status, the veteran is currently in home isolation, mitigating further risk of transmission to other patients and staff,” Steve Piork, director of the VA New York Public Affairs Office, told Military Times.
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Brooklyn veterans fighting to keep VA clinic open?

What kind of a message does this send? Increase funds for private care but close down VA Clinics that treat disabled veterans? 

Veterans and supporters mobilize in opposition to closure of ENT clinic at Brooklyn VA Hospital
Brooklyn Reporter
By Jaime DeJesus
June 1, 2018

Fearing that the Brooklyn VA Hospital could ultimately be in jeopardy, supporters of the facility — which treats veterans from across the borough as well as Staten Island — are staking their position in support of the hospital, which recently decided to shutter its ENT clinic.

ebrooklyn media/Photos by Jaime DeJesus 

Danny Friedman addressing the group.

On Friday, June 1, veterans, Congressmember Dan Donovan and the New York City Veterans Alliance joined together at a conference at the Knights of Columbus, 1305 86th Street, to protest the closure and express their concern that the hospital so many former members of the military rely upon will eventually downsize to an outpatient only clinic or transform into condos.

“It’s already hard for some of our local veterans to get to the Brooklyn facility and now many will have to travel to the Manhattan facility or one in the Bronx,” said Donovan. “This could be particularly devastating to those who are elderly or disabled, who may forgo visits instead of facing long and difficult commutes to get to their appointments. The decision needs to be reversed.”

“We’ve been seeing a gradual decline in services,” said Danny Friedman, president of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 72. One of the worries is that the facility will be the victim of a gradual diminution of services, effectively death by a thousand cuts. In 2015, the U.S. Veterans Administration decided to close a 25-bed inpatient medical surgery unit at the hospital, another move that was vocally protested by veterans and their supporters.
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Pearl Harbor 97 Year Old WWII Veteran Being Evicted

Pearl Harbor veteran, 97, faces eviction from Brooklyn home

PIX 11 NEWS

Magee Hickey

December 24, 2017

CROWN HEIGHTS, Brooklyn — A 97-year-old veteran has already lived through many battles and now he's facing one more: eviction.

James Blakely, a Navy veteran who survived the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, will be in Housing Court in less than two weeks. A group called Black Veterans for Social Justice intends to evict the World War Two vet from his studio apartment, where the walls are covered with certificates of recognition and appreciation.

“I am so angry,” Blakely told PIX11. “And we will fight this legally.”

Six years ago Blakely, who is also an ordained minister, was living in a trailer with no running water in a junkyard on Buffalo Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant columnist Denis Hamill wrote an article in the Daily News about his living conditions.

That’s when, according to Hamill, a representative from the Black Veterans for Social Justice offered the studio apartment on Bergen Street to this World War Two vet rent free for the rest of his life.

Now the group says Blakely owes years in unpaid rent.
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Brooklyn VA Shutting Down Inpatient Unit

Brooklyn VA Hospital closing 25-bed inpatient unit in July
Staten Island Live
By Tracey Porpora
June 16, 2015

The move has 91-year-old Bay Terrace resident Jim Luzzi, a World War II Army veteran who received two Purple Hearts, concerned that there may not be bed available for him at the hospital if he needs one.

World War II veteran Jim Luzzi, 91, of Bay Terrace, holding a photo of himself in the U.S. Army.
(Staten Island Advance/Irving Silverstein)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y -- The VA New York Harbor Healthcare System has decided to close one of the inpatient units at its Brooklyn campus effective July 1.

The closure of the 25-bed wing will leave the VA hospital with two inpatient units, totaling 46 beds; a 10-bed intensive care unit, and a mental health unit, said Martina Parauda, director of VA New York Harbor Healthcare.

Parauda said the administration decided to close the wing due to a budget shortfall. The closure is expected to save $2 million, mostly in staff salaries, she added.

"With my management team, we pulled data and said, 'We don't want to cut any program we provide to veterans.' ... Last year when we looked at the occupancy rate on any given day, 65 percent of the 71 beds in the three units had a patient in them. ... And this year it's been 62 percent," she said.

"This tells me that I have the ability to not affect patient care, and still provide all the services on the inpatient side, as opposed to outpatient."

All employees currently assigned to the unit will be placed in other vacant positions; no employees will lose their jobs, she said.
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Marine Veteran Stood Up to Teenager Robbers So They Killed Him

Former marine gunned down by teenage thugs after standing up to them in Brooklyn: cops 
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
BY KELDY ORTIZ , JOSEPH STEPANSKY
Friday, February 27, 2015,

Alexander Manning was fatally shot in the chest when he stood up to four teens outside his East Flatbush apartment on Sunday evening, according to cops.

A former marine who served eight years for his country was killed by a group of gun-toting teens when he refused to let them rob him in front of his Brooklyn apartment, police and his family said Thursday.

Alexander Manning, 52, went by the nickname Peanut because of his small stature as a child, but he cast a long shadow to his friends and family, relatives said.

“He was a Marine before he became a Marine,” his sister, Olivia Manning, 50, one of seven siblings, told the Daily News. “At 12 years old, he said ‘I’m the man of the house.’

Just from a young age, he stepped up.” That gusto is likely why Manning stood up to four teens who tried to rob him just steps from his modest apartment on E. 52nd St. near Winthrop St. in East Flatbush around 8:45 p.m. Sunday, family said. When Manning resisted, one of the teens opened fire, fatally striking him in the chest, cops said.
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Military Suicides Reflect the Moral Conflicts of War

Military Suicides Reflect the Moral Conflicts of War, Says Marine Captain
Magic Valley.com
Times News

Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo, a graduate student at New York University, deployed to Iraq in 2009 and to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011.

When I joined the Marine Corps, I knew I would kill people. I was trained to do it in a number of ways, from pulling a trigger to ordering a bomb strike to beating someone to death with a rock. As I got closer to deploying to war in 2009, my lethal abilities were refined, but my ethical understanding of killing was not.

I held two seemingly contradictory beliefs: Killing is always wrong, but in war, it is necessary. How could something be both immoral and necessary? I didn’t have time to resolve this question before deploying. And in the first few months, I fell right into killing without thinking twice. We were simply too busy to worry about the morality of what we were doing. But one day on patrol in Afghanistan in 2010, my patrol got into a firefight and ended up killing two people on a motorcycle we thought were about to attack us. They ignored or didn’t understand our warnings to stop, and according to the military’s “escalation of force” guidelines, we were authorized to shoot them in self-defense. Although we thought they were armed, they turned out to be civilians. One looked no older than 16.

It’s been more than two years since we killed those people on the motorcycle, and I think about them every day. Sometimes it’s when I’m reading the news or watching a movie, but most often it’s when I’m taking a shower or walking down my street in Brooklyn. They are not the only deaths I carry with me. I also remember the first time a Marine several miles away asked me over the radio whether his unit could kill someone burying a bomb. The decision fell on me alone. I said yes.

Many veterans are unable to reconcile such actions in war with the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” When they come home from an environment where killing is not only accepted but is a metric of success, the transition to one where killing is wrong can be incomprehensible. This incongruity can have devastating effects. After more than 10 years of war, the military lost more active-duty members last year to suicide than to enemy fire.
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Mass Grave in Brooklyn Fort Greene Park

The dead were sent to sea but body parts came back onshore. They ended up deciding to give proper burials in 1808. 'A Mass Grave in the Middle of N.Y.C.' And no one knows it. There's a quiet park that joggers and residents frequent -- but it sits on top of the remains of 11,500 people.

Description:This episode of 'What Remains' explores Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park; home to a memorial ... and mass grave for over 8,000 POW's of the American Revolution

War veterans hit Sandy's front lines for rescues, cleanup

War veterans hit Sandy's front lines for rescues, cleanup
By Bill Briggs
NBC News contributor

Up to his armpits in flood water, flanked by darkened buildings and submerged vehicles, Iraq veteran Peter Meijer felt oddly at home Monday night as he trudged through the streets of Brooklyn at the height of Sandy's fury: "The right place at the right time with the right mission."

With a fellow veteran at his side, Meijer had driven a van from a Brooklyn high school-turned-evacuation shelter to the Gerritsen Beach neighborhood, stopping only when the van's tires met the storm surge. From there, the pair went on foot. With 911 phone lines down, the Army reservist was trying to reach and rescue a man who had climbed into his attic with his dog to escape the rising tide. Back at the shelter, the man's wife — who had been on the phone with him — pleaded Meijer to try to save him.
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NY Detective Recalls Four Shots, and His Partner Down

Detective Recalls Four Shots, and His Partner Down
By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: November 12, 2008
“Ten-thirteen Rogers and Lefferts! 85!” the officer’s panicked voice, distorted nearly beyond intelligibility, crackled across the packed Brooklyn courtroom on the radio recording played on Wednesday. “Ten-thirteen!”


A few minutes later, live on the witness stand, the officer, Herman Yan, now a detective, spoke in softer, measured tones at the trial for three men accused of killing his partner last year after the officers had pulled over a stolen BMW S.U.V. on a darkened street in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn.

“As I approached the driver’s side door,” he testified, “within three to four feet I heard approximately four shots go out. I could tell that those shots came from that vehicle. They were really loud. I immediately felt a pain in my arm and I realized I was hit. I was hit, and it was a situation where I had to take other action.”

Detective Yan said he fired at the vehicle as it pulled away. A prosecutor asked him what happened next.

“As the BMW left, I observed —” Detective Yan said, then paused to collect himself. “I observed my partner laying on the sidewalk.”

His partner that night was a 23-year-old officer named Russel Timoshenko. The prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, asked the detective if his partner appeared to be conscious.

“No, he did not,” Detective Yan replied.

In the third row of the courtroom, several of Officer Timoshenko’s relatives dabbed away tears.

Officer Timoshenko, shot in the mouth and throat, died five days later.

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Families Shaken After School Bus Takes 4 ½-Hour Trip

Families Shaken After School Bus Takes 4 ½-Hour Trip
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Published: September 3, 2008
Madinat Koroma was frantic: It was after 9 p.m., more than five hours after the school day had ended at the Achievement First Brownsville charter school, and she was still waiting at the bus stop for her daughter, Victoria Adewale, 5, a kindergartner.

As the bus rambled through Brooklyn, meanwhile, Victoria’s mind was on her parents.

“I was worried about my mother and father, that they were going to miss me,” Victoria, who was one of three children deposited at the school about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, said softly on Wednesday afternoon. “I was the last one on the bus.”

It is any parent’s nightmare: The yellow school bus that so many parents rely on to ferry their children to and from school simply does not show up on time — not an hour late, not two hours late, but about five hours late for some.

School officials told parents, in a letter sent home on Wednesday, that they could not reach the bus driver on his cellphone for more than two hours. After several parents, including Ms. Koroma’s husband, Charles Adewale, called the police, the bus driver was finally reached, and ordered to return to the school, where he deposited Victoria and two of her schoolmates. The bus had started out with at least two dozen kindergartners and first-graders.

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NY City Councilman Charles Barron ends standoff

Councilman Helps Coax Out Woman Barricaded in Apartment
By DARYL KHAN
Published: July 21, 2008
A 19-year-old woman who had barricaded herself inside an apartment in Brooklyn with her two children, ages 2 and 3, surrendered to the police early Monday after being coaxed out by a team of negotiators that included City Councilman Charles Barron, the police said.

The woman, Dameila Davis, barricaded herself in her apartment in the Linden Plaza complex in East New York, Brooklyn, around 8:45 p.m. after her stepfather called the police about a dispute. He claimed that she was armed with a handgun, the police said. No weapon, however, was found after she surrendered.
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Sister Green was woman left to die on hospital floor

'Beautiful person' died on hospital floor, friends say
The woman known as "Sister Green" to her fellow church members was remembered Thursday as a "beautiful person" with "a good heart." But a friend said Esmin Green was struggling with personal issues before she was taken to King County Hospital in Brooklyn. There she collapsed and died on the floor, seemingly ignored by hospital staff. full story
Daughter can't bear to watch the video