The owner of a nursing home in the northern Athens suburb of Agios Stefanos, where several people were found to have been infected with the coronavirus, committed suicide early Wednesday.
According to police investigators, Dimitris Kampanaros, 41, founder of the “Nea Thalpi” nursing home, was found dead in his home, after having apparently shot himself with a shotgun that was found at his side.
Three residents at the nursing home have tested positive for Covid-19 in recent days, including an 88-year-old woman who has been hospitalized.
Kampanaros, who also tested positive, left a handwritten letter in which he expressed his guilt for allowing Covid-19 to spread to the nursing home.
“I am a failure. I discredited the nursing home,” he wrote. “No one will ever trust me again. The coronavirus defeated me. I loved my job, but I was probably not a good leader.”
Kampanaros recently inherited the business from his father and had isolated himself in with the elderly in the nursing home for 65 days during the lockdown in spring. He wanted to be sure that the people were protected, his colleagues told the media.
He was described as “an invisible hero” for confining himself inside his nursing home, in order to protect the approximately 100 elderly people he cared for from the coronavirus.
Kampanaros was a graduate of the Department of Psychology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and continued his studies in the field of Gerontology in Germany, at the University of Heidelberg, obtaining a Master’s Degree.
He later obtained the title of Executive MBA in Health Care Administration from the University of Sheffield in England.
In a personal note on the nursing home’s web page Kampanaros had said that “I have always wanted to contribute my knowledge and myself to improving the lives of the elderly, in practice, and not in theory.
“My choice to deal with the elderly has been a fruit of purely inner motivation and love for my Muse, my grandmother Artemis,” he added.
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