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.