The 86-year-old brother of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has died from COVID-19.
Warren, a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who has been a vocal critic of U.S. President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, confirmed on her Twitter account Thursday that her older brother, Don Herring, died Tuesday in Norman, Oklahoma.
According to an obituary in the Boston Globe, Herring was a 20-year U.S. Air Force veteran who served five years in the Vietnam War. He lived with his wife, Judith, in New Castle, Oklahoma. He had been hospitalized with pneumonia in February and was moved to a facility to recover. It was there he was tested for COVID-19 in early April and received a positive result.
As his symptoms worsened, Herring was moved to the intensive care ward at the Norman Regional Hospital on April 15, where he died six days later.
Warren described her brother as charming and funny and as a natural leader. She said that she was grateful to the nurses and front-line staff who had cared for him, but that it was hard to know there was no family there to comfort him when he died, and “no funeral for those of us who loved him to hold each other close.”
Warren has two surviving brothers, John and David Herring.