It was among the country’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks: 1 in every 3 residents of a New Jersey nursing home for frail military veterans died as the coronavirus raced unchecked through the state-run facility.

The 101 residents who died in the first eight months of the pandemic included both of Regina Costantino Discenza’s parents, who had been living at the complex, Menlo Park Veterans Memorial Home in Edison, New Jersey, for about two years when the virus began ravaging long-term care centers throughout the Northeast.

“It was a horror show,” said Discenza, who inscribed the headstone at her parents’ grave with the words “2020 pandemic victims.”

A state-run veterans home in Paramus, about 40 miles north, had an equally devastating death toll: 89.

Now, New Jersey has agreed to pay $53 million to families of 119 veterans who lived in the two facilities. The families had been preparing to file lawsuits that accused the state of gross negligence. The average payout is expected to be roughly $445,000.

Attorneys involved in the New Jersey agreement said they were not aware of any other multicase settlement involving deaths at a long-term care center in the United States.

“It is, so far as I know, the first settlement in the U.S. related to mass COVID death at any kind of medical facility,” said Francisco J. Rodriguez, an attorney who represented 31 of the families.

But similar lawsuits are pending across the country against private and public nursing homes.

Officials with the administration of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy noted that the settlement, reached two days before Christmas, will allow families “to move forward without years of protracted and uncertain litigation.”

In legal filings, the families had claimed that staff members were barred from wearing masks before April 2020 to avoid scaring residents. Sick and healthy residents were allowed to congregate. And staff members moved from room to room in the nursing homes without taking proper precautions to avoid transmitting the virus.

Families said the settlement award — part of which must be used to refund hospital costs paid by Medicare — offered a vital public acknowledgment of what their loved ones endured.

“It will never justify what happened to these poor people,” Discenza said. “But it’s making a point: These veterans were not properly cared for.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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