N.J. nursing home where 17 bodies were stuffed into morgue hit with lawsuit

This story originally appeared on NBC10.

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against a New Jersey nursing home where 17 bodies were found stuffed into a four-person morgue during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, NBC News reports.

The lawsuit against Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center I and II in Sussex County alleges that the facilities did not take the proper precautions to keep residents safe from contracting COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

The suit alleges that in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak, both facilities were cited by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for “a litany of systemic issues,” including that Andover II “continuously failed to meet the requisite safety and sanitary standards needed to protect against the spread of infection and communicable disease.”

Both facilities were told to implement changes, but the lawsuit claims those changes were never made and that the nursing homes misled potential residents by claiming to be “high quality and regulatory-compliant.”

In March, there was a coronavirus outbreak at both facilities that killed 94 people, according to the lawsuit.