The mother of Minnesota Timberwolves player Karl-Anthony Towns, Jacqueline Towns, died after complications related to the new coronavirus, the family announced in a statement shared by the team on Monday.
"Jackie, as she was affectionately known among family and friends, had been battling the virus for more than a month when she succumbed on April 13th," the statement said. "Jackie was many things to many people — a wife, mother, daughter, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend. The matriarch of the Towns family, she was an incredible source of strength; a fiery, caring, and extremely loving person, who touched everyone she met."
Towns announced his mother and father had contracted the virus last month in a video posted to his Instagram. Both parents tested positive for COVID-19 and went to the hospital. While his father was sent home and told to quarantine there, his mother was admitted and eventually placed on a ventilator.
“She just wasn’t getting better,” Towns said in a post on March 24. “She was very uncomfortable. Her lungs were getting worse, cough was getting worse. She was deteriorating in front of our eyes.”
He added they were trying to stay positive and his mother was a force to be reckoned with.
“My mother, she’s the strongest woman I know," Towns said. "She's the head of our household, she's the boss."
In recent testimony, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo estimated only 20 percent of COVID-19 patients put on ventilators “will ever come off.
Before his mother’s diagnosis, Towns donated $100,000 to the Mayo Clinic to help with COVID-19 testing.
