Ginger Roques and Barbara Schnauder didn’t have much time to prepare for their father’s death.

A hospice nurse at the state-run home for veterans in Reserve called on the morning of March 29 to say their 87-year-old dad, Robert Handy, hadn’t eaten for two days and was declining rapidly. If they wanted to see him, they needed to get there quickly.

The home was on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before Roques and Schnauder arrived, they called the home to see which door they should enter through. They were told they wouldn’t be allowed in.

They called the hospice nurse back for help, who said it was too late: Their father was already dead.

Handy, who served during the Korean War, is among 25 people who have died at the Southeastern Louisiana Veterans Home since March 23, an astonishing number in a place that has just 156 beds. Eight others died in the preceding five weeks.

Yet to date, only a dozen of those deaths, all coming March 23 or later, have been attributed to COVID-19. St. John the Baptist Parish Coroner Christy Montegut thinks the number is higher, and he’s awaiting results from posthumous tests on three of the dead.

It might never be known how many recently deceased residents were victims of the pandemic. Handy’s death, for instance, is not among those Montegut is reviewing post-mortem, though the funeral home that received Handy’s body was told that COVID-19 was suspected.

+3 Here's why these 13 Louisiana parishes have some of the highest coronavirus death rates in the U.S. The cluster of coronavirus deaths that began in New Orleans and spread to Jefferson and St. John the Baptist parishes has now made its way up …

It’s unclear how many recently deceased residents of the home have been entombed or cremated without being tested.

Officials with the state Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs the facility, acknowledge they can’t rule out coronavirus in many -- or perhaps any -- of the 21 recent deaths there that officials have not chalked up to the coronavirus. Montegut said he was confident there were at least a few cases that didn’t involve the virus, but he couldn’t say how many.

A spokeswoman for the agency declined to provide any figures showing, for instance, how many veterans living at the Reserve facility died last year. They also declined to answer questions about testing.

It’s not clear when the home first began testing residents for the virus. Montegut said he was told that outside testing was suspended shortly after it was initiated due to a shortage of test kits.

Department of Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Brandee Patrick said agency staffers “consistently follow medical advice from each veteran’s treating physician and the coroner in whether or not COVID-19 testing is warranted in a particular case.

“As we have throughout this public health emergency, we continue to test in-house or send out for testing, depending on physician’s recommendations, and are following all updated CDC health protocols in treating symptoms our residents exhibit.”

At least one family resorted to their own post-mortem test in a different parish. It confirmed that their 98-year-old patriarch had the disease when he died -- though he hadn’t been tested earlier.

Barbara Serpas said her father, Raymond Doran, was doing well when she last saw him at the home on March 10. But early in the morning on March 29 a veterans home staffer called to say his condition had deteriorated quickly overnight. She said she was told that he began gasping for breath and died.

Serpas, who lives in Slidell, immediately suspected COVID-19. But when she asked if her father had been tested, staff members told her that his death was likely due to natural causes.

“I know people die of natural causes; he was 98 years old,” she said. But workers at the home had been diligent about informing family members about the rising number of cases and deaths at the facility, and she was flummoxed about why they didn’t suspect it had taken her father.

“I said, ‘You got a cluster there,’” Serpas said. “What is this with not worrying about getting my daddy tested?”

Because a St. Bernard funeral home was handling the service, Serpas said, she was able to persuade the St. Bernard coroner’s office to conduct the test. Several days later, that agency called her to confirm that her father had tested positive.

Serpas immediately called Montegut to make sure that COVID-19 was listed on the death certificate. She also called Southeast Louisiana Veterans Home to notify them of the test result.

Serpas left messages and voicemails with several staff, including Administrator Brian Fremin and the director of nursing at the home.

“No one would ever return my calls,” she said

Patrick said the agency “would only be speculating” to tie the virus to the deaths of any of the eight Reserve home residents who died between Feb. 15 and March 23, when the home recorded its first positive test for COVID-19. The first known case of coronavirus in Louisiana was recorded on March 9 and the first death on March 14.

+11 St. John residents flock to drive-thru coronavirus test site; St. Charles also ramps up testing More than 80 people were tested for coronavirus at a drive-thru testing spot in LaPlace Tuesday as St. John the Baptist Parish ramped up testi…

It’s not clear that the coronavirus’s outbreak in the home is over. While the home reported no deaths Thursday, Montegut noted there had been two deaths from COVID-19 there on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday.

“Hopefully we’re starting to see a decline, but you never know,” Montegut said.

Montegut was setting up a mobile freezer in a used food refrigeration truck on Thursday. Without a morgue of its own, St. John has been reliant on Orleans and Jefferson parishes for autopsies and body storage, but those options have closed up in the pandemic, he said.

Coronavirus deaths overall have reached 37 in the parish, making St. John the nation’s leader among U.S. counties in per-capita coronavirus fatalities. Montegut said state health officials recently changed their policy on death classifications during the pandemic to allow coroners to make discretionary calls on likely COVID-19 deaths that lack test results.

Lambeth House, an upscale retirement home in New Orleans, is the Louisiana facility that has incurred the most reported deaths due to coronavirus thus far -- a number that stood unofficially at 18 on Wednesday. The state is no longer releasing counts of deaths at individual nursing homes and senior complexes.

Epidemiologists have been little surprised at the discovery of coronavirus cases at nearly 100 of the 436 nursing homes and senior complexes in Louisiana. Places where large groups of people live and congregate are natural breeding grounds for a virus that kills an outsized share of the elderly and infirm.

But a number of those of who have lost loved ones in the home have expressed frustration at the limited information they received, and they suspect the outbreak was poorly managed.

Berlin Hebert Jr., 74, who lived in the facility’s memory care wing, was one of the Reserve veterans home’s confirmed COVID deaths.

Hebert lost a leg to a landmine in Vietnam, his son Neal said. “They used to have the infantry walk in front of the tanks so if a mine went off they’d lose a man instead of a tank,” was how his dad wryly explained the injury.

Neal Hebert said he got a call from a nurse at the home. He said that the nurse read from a script, saying that coronavirus had been detected in the facility and that his father was OK and there was “no concern” he’d been exposed. He got similar calls in the next two days.

On the next call, he was told his dad had taken very ill and was being hospitalized with COVID-19. Hebert feels his father was well cared for in the hospital, but that he was taken there late, and almost from the beginning doctors were talking about palliative care. He died within a few days.

Louisiana nursing homes with coronavirus clusters won't be ID'd anymore, officials say The state announced Friday that 60 residents of nursing homes and other long-term senior care facilities have died of the novel coronavirus, b…

A combination of limited mobility, dementia and a tendency toward obsessive-compulsive disorder meant that his dad didn’t move around much, Hebert said.

“They can track my dad really easily -- he doesn’t wander off,” Hebert said. “When I found out he was exposed, I thought, ‘Everyone in that hospital had to be exposed.’ He was such a homebody.”

Roques and Schnauder wish they had been alerted to their dad’s worsening condition sooner. They would have brought him home to die, they said.

“We just feel we weren’t given information in a timely manner,” Roques said. “And if all this does is help another family not go through what we went through, it will be worth it.”