Kim Zaheer, the now-68-year-old woman accused of letting her mother die of such neglect that neither the medical examiner nor the funeral home personnel who handled the body said they’d seen anything so abject in their careers, was sentenced to six years in prison this afternoon.
Frances Hildegard King, 88, was found dead on Dec. 5, 2018, at the house she owned at 20 Rocket Lane in Palm Coast since 2008.
Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols referred half a dozen times to a photograph of King at her death, not shown in court, as “truly horrific,” a “devastating photo” that “says it all.” Zaheer, she said, “clearly was not equipped to care for her elderly mother.”
Zaheer was charged with aggravated manslaughter. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. The sentencing guidelines call for a minimum of 11.5 years. The State Attorney’s Office waived the minimum guidelines as it recognized the anguish touching many aspects of the case: siblings at war with each other or with themselves, Zaheer’s incapacities, “dumping the hard day-to-day care on another family member who herself has health limitations,” as Nichols put it.
Nichols was not willing to waive prison time altogether, as Assistant Public Defender Brian Smith sought, though she almost did.
The six-year sentence is not what it seems. Between the time at the Flagler County jail and in state prison, which count as part of her incarceration, Zaheer has already served 1,675 days, or over four and a half years. She will have to serve an additional 515 days. With gain time, or early release for good behavior, she will be eligible to leave prison in 437 days, or a year and two months. She will then have to serve 10 years on probation, presumably with the ability to end probation after five years, as she is entitled to, if she abides by all the rules.
The sentencing took place in an empty courtroom but for the judge, the lawyers and some court personnel, even though Zaheer has several siblings (one of them died of drink at the house where his mother had died shortly before). When she was taking care of her mother, to the extent that she was, Zaheer had locked one of her brothers out of the house. That brother is now living in the house, and let the prosecution know that he wished his sister would serve a lot of prison time.
“They don’t come to the table with clean hands but I don’t think Ms Zaheer does either,” Assistant State Attorney Mark Johnson, who prosecuted the case, said.
Smith in his defense of Zaheer outlined her own medical history and the difficulties she faced with her siblings, one of whom was an alcoholic, another one of whom used his mother’s money to his own ends, dining at will in Flagler Beach restaurants.
Zaheer has had her own physical and mental health challenges. She had suffered a stroke in 1999. She had cared for her father as he died in the Bronx, then moved to Palm Coast in 2011 to care for her mother, refusing to take her to a nursing home. She was her medical proxy, but hadn’t taken her to her physician since 2017. She wouldn’t let her siblings see their mother inside the house.
“There’s many things about this case that both of us equally find distasteful,” Johnson said. “The thing that I keep thinking about was, she cared for her father, she cared for her mother for a number of years. Why? Because she was capable of doing it for a period of time. Why, suddenly, now she’s not? The stroke did not impair her ability to care for people in the past after she had a stroke. So I think just quite frankly, this is a matter of just lack of care, a lack of understanding that an individual needs more than what they are providing, and when that’s the case, you have to go and seek the help. If nobody’s helping, you have the resources available to get the help that you need.”
King was down to 53 pounds at her death, having lost 52 percent of her body weight in four years, based on medical records. She was so emaciated as to look like a mummy, “with dried skin, sunken eyes, and temporal muscle wasting.” She had been “intentionally neglected, abused and starved,” according to a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office report. Her body, encrusted with dirt and dried fatty substances, was found in her bed in a pool of fecal matter, including rat droppings. A garbage bag was duct-taped to her privates by way of a diaper. Her nails hadn’t been clipped in a very long time.
Elizabeth Latta of Lohman’s Funeral Home Body Removal Services told authorities that she’d never seen anyone in that condition, and compared King’s condition to that of a prisoner in a concentration camp. The case would not have been pursued as a criminal matter had the funeral home not alerted authorities to the gravity of King’s condition. The medical examiner concurred. A criminal investigation was opened.
After her arrest Zaheer was twice committed to a state hospital, incompetent to proceed with trial, after her arrest in December 2018. She was declared competent last month and pleaded to aggravated manslaughter two weeks later, leaving it to Nichols to set the sentence.
“I wonder if she’s even capable of caring for herself at this point,” Nichols said. Zaheer had addressed the court, speaking mostly about her own health issues, her short-term memory, her mother’s health issues and the trouble with her siblings. There did not seem to be any regret or sorrow over what had happened.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I readily admit that I’m an eternal skeptic with claims of, mental health issues,” Johnson said. “It’s probably one of the negative aspects of being a prosecutor. Sometimes you can be overly skeptical. That kind of comes with the job. So I don’t really know what the truth is. I know that she was capable of doing it before, and suddenly, now this has occurred.”
“I’m not getting that sense, and I can be skeptical at times, Mr. Johnson,” the judge said. “What I see is somebody who was worn down from years of doing this, of taking care of somebody, and yes, she should have been proactive about getting assistance. Yes, she should have done something to get some help. I don’t know. I sense that she knew that she wasn’t providing the level of care that she needed to be providing, which is why she wasn’t letting people in the house, is what I suspect. So I think on some level, she knew something was wrong. I just think it was a combination of that, like you said, kind of everything just went the wrong way, and she fell through cracks, very sadly.”
The judge asked for a specific recommendation from the prosecutor. “She should do prison time,” Johnson said.
There will be that, but not much of it, and Zaheer will be allowed to serve probation back in New York.
Atwp says
Sad!
Land of no turn signals says says
Justice?
No justice for the victim! says
This is horrifying, and she knew exactly what she was doing! I reported her while mom was alive for treating this poor fragile woman with utter abuse, threatening her mother to not feed her if she didn’t sign a check for her to cash. The mother was horrified, scared to death of her! She deserves to sit in prison, not be released to enjoy life that she deprived her poor mother of living.
Greg says
Agreed, her prision time was NOT enough.
Florida Girl says
The ones who went to investigate and left her in such conditions (if it was reported) should be serving an equal prison sentence. She should never see the light of day again.
Shame on DCF says
The DCF worker who went to the home to investigate reports of abuse should be fired. Had they don’t their job, the mother wouldn’t have continued to be abused and starved to death. So much failure here, she suffered and the agencies responsible for protecting didn’t protect her
Me says
Sentence not long enough it should have been for life.
jane doh says
the rest of the family should serve time – none of them helped out at all or reported anything. that poor daughter was saddled with the drunk brother and caring for the mother without help. The DCF worker could have done something more – like get some help in. Think about it – it’s a case of one old handicapped lady taking care of another older handicapped lady. Things would have turned out differently if she had some help.
Ray W. says
For nearly a decade, I zealously advocated on behalf of my clients against Mark Johnson. From our respective positions, I have to believe that he zealously advocated on behalf of the state against me, as well.
When Mark stands before a judge as a zealous advocate for the state and says: “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I readily admit that I’m an eternal skeptic with claims of, mental health issues, … [i]t’s probably one of the negative aspects of being a prosecutor. Sometimes you can be overly skeptical. That kind of comes with the job. So I don’t really know what the truth is. I know that she is capable of doing it before [caring for her family], and suddenly, now this has occurred.” is he expressing a personal struggle against the emotional demands of his position, a form of cognitive dissonance?
In the mid-90’s, while defending a juvenile in a death penalty case, I retained the services of a retired psychiatrist, Dr. Barnard. Prior to retirement, Dr. Barnard had headed the psychiatric college at the University of Florida’s medical school.
My father, the elected state attorney for this circuit at the time, had met him in the 60’s when Dr. Barnard had testified in trial for the defense. Impressed with Dr. Barnard’s qualities and professionalism, he made it a point to befriend him. They commonly talked, and less commonly dined together. On occasion, they traveled together or spent weekends together in each other’s homes. I knew him. So it was an easy decision for me to hire him.
After he and an associate, a neuropsychologist, examined my client, I drove to Gainesville to discuss their initial findings and, perhaps, conclusions. For a short while, the neuropsychologist stepped out of the room. Dr. Barnard immediately asked me whether, during my years as a prosecutor, I had cried over a case. Yes, I replied. He said, Good. We then began to talk about his thoughts about the case.
In my law school days, I mapped out one possible path in my legal career. In that path, which was not my only possible legal path, I planned to prosecute first and later become a judge. I am not the only one who planned in this way.
When in 1986 I interviewed with the elected state attorney for our circuit, Mr. Boyles, about a position in his administration, he told me that it would take at least three years of employment to defray the initial costs of training me. He asked me for a three-year commitment to the office. I told him about my law school plans, saying that I would give him a five-year commitment to the office. At the end of that term of years, I continued, I planned to evaluate who or what I had become. If I didn’t like the changes, if I didn’t like who I had become, I would leave the office. If I still liked who I was, I said, I would continue, and that after 10 years I would consider running for a judicial position.
I knew long before I graduated from law school that immersing myself in a culture of constant and never-ending blame would not leave me unscathed. Mark is putting into words his own interpretation about what has been happening to him over his many years of prosecution. There is such a thing as a healthy skepticism of others. I prefer to believe that healthy skepticism is a beneficial state of mind for a prosecutor. But there also exists the possibility of gaining an unhealthy skepticism of others.
In the mid-80’s, when I was responding to Mr. Boyles’ words, I was telling him that I was contemplating the potential impact, i.e., harm, that could befall me should I make the blaming others a long-term professional choice.
Some two decades later, I had the unpleasant chance of interacting with a career Seminole county prosecutor. Yes, he had developed coping mechanisms to deal with how he treated people. The name of his boat was “Upward Departure.” He was not skeptical; he was cynical in his outlook. He had become what I never wanted to be.
I am grateful to read that Mr. Johnson is struggling with his skepticism. It appears, on the face of his statement, that he too knows what can happen should he surrender into a state of constant cynicism.
But the most important component of Mark’s comment to the judge, at least to me, is that he is admitting that he doesn’t know the truth about what happened. I always understood in my years as a prosecutor that if I had been a witness to a criminal act, I could be neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney in the case. Lawyers cannot be called to the witness stand to testify about a case that they are presenting as zealous advocates to a judge or jury. The entire criminal justice system is set up so that no one involved in the presentation of a case actually knows what happened in the case. Each zealous advocate has to rely on what the witnesses say or what the evidence proves in order to argue but not decide what happened in the case.
For those vengeful people who think the judge wrong in her imposition of sentence in Ms. Zaheer’s case, please consider the great likelihood that you don’t know what you are talking about.
Here is what happened at sentencing. An experienced zealous advocate for the state told the judge about his struggles with the facts of the case, including the fact that Ms. Zaheer had been arrested in 2018 and then been twice committed to a competency restoration program that required nearly seven years to restore her to a minimal yet sufficient state of mental competency for her to understand what being in court actually meant. The competency issue wasn’t an excuse; it was an explanation. The judge added her own wisdom and experience about the issue, and about how she, too, struggled to understand what and why things happened as they did.
When Judge Nichols asked Mark his recommendation, he answered: “She should do prison time.” Not life. Not the maximum permitted by law. Not the presumptive guideline’s term of years. Just prison time in an amount left up to the judge.
For those among us who can’t understand this, none of you have an excuse for your own failures as human beings.
There is a sickness upon the land, and that sickness comes, in large part, from vengeful thinking. The ancient Greeks of 2,500 years ago understood the unhealthy cost of vengeance. The vengeful among us today do not see vengeful thinking as a cost; they see vengeful thinking as a virtue.