Paul M. da Costa Quoted in NJLJ Article, “Crop of Lawsuits Hits Nursing Home After Abrupt Closure”

May 29, 2024
By Charles Toutant for New Jersey Law Journal

The operators of a New Jersey nursing home that shut down suddenly have been hit with 11 suits on behalf of former residents ordered to leave.

Residents were allegedly only given a few hours to vacate the facility when Princeton Care Center shut down on Sept. 1, 2023, said Paul da Costa of Sarno da Costa D’Aniello Maceri in Roseland, who filed the 11 suits in Mercer County Superior Court.

The scene that followed was allegedly “nothing less than utter chaos,” with suitcases and garbage bags everywhere, causing extreme distress to the displaced residents, da Costa said.

The suit names Princeton Nursing Home and Rehabilitation Center and its principals, Gail Bogner and Ezra Bogner, as defendants. It seeks damages on behalf of the residents and their family members based on claims of negligence and violation of numerous state statutes and regulations.

Plaintiff Counsel

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, da Costa, has experience representing residents of nursing homes.

In 2021 he obtained a $6.2 million settlement on behalf of 13 residents of the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell who claimed that management failed to properly respond to an outbreak of adenovirus.

And in 2021 and 2022, da Costa obtained settlements totaling $69 million on behalf of 143 residents of state-operated nursing homes for veterans in Paramus and Menlo Park that allegedly failed to take steps to halt the spread of COVID-19.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer da Costa claimed there are “three reasons that my clients and I are bringing forth the lawsuits. The first reason is that the manner in which they were discharged and evacuated from the facility clearly violates both state and federal law and is absolutely reprehensible and should never have happened.

“Second, as a result of this very sudden and chaotic evacuation and discharge, the residents were subjected to mental trauma and distress,” he claimed. “And it is well known and documented in the medical literature that geriatric patients, specifically those who are in long-term care facilities, are very fragile when it comes to change and especially very sudden change.

“The third reason my clients and I arranged for the lawsuits is very much from a public policy perspective. Going back to the Wanaque Center adenovirus cases in late 2018, and then through the COVID debacle at the veterans homes, we continue to see bad actors who are owning and operating these facilities do just egregious things to the residents and their loved ones who put their trust and their dollars in these people who own and operate these facilities, and it just shouldn’t be tolerated anymore,” da Costa claimed.

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