A New Jersey woman whose family has been ravaged by the coronavirus died without knowing the disease had already claimed the lives of her two eldest children, according to a report Thursday.
Grace Fusco — a 73-year-old mother of 11 — was sedated and on a ventilator when she died Wednesday night at CentraState Medical Center in Freehold, her cousin and family lawyer Roseann Paradiso Fodera told People magazine.
Four of Fusco’s surviving children — two daughters and two sons — remain hospitalized there, with three in critical condition and on ventilators, Paradiso Fodera said.
Just hours before Grace’s death, her fifth-born child — daughter Bridget Fusco Betlow, who lives in Indiana — said she was shocked by the devastating impact of the coronavirus on her family.
“I am numb, I don’t believe what is going on,” Fusco Betlow, 52, told People.
“I am sitting here with my mother’s rosary that she gave me the last time she visited me and praying, saying ‘God help me, give us some kind of answer.’”
Paradiso Fodera said that neither Grace nor her children “had an underlying medical condition” and that the family wants the federal Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to perform an autopsy on daughter Rita Fusco Jackson, 56, who died Friday.
The grieving relatives hope that the feds “can use this as a tool to explore a better protocol to avoid another healthy person from succumbing to this virus,” she said.
