UPDATED at 8:19 p.m.: Updated with comment from the American Seniors Housing Association.

Nearly three years after the arrest of a man who is accused of killing two dozen elderly women at senior living complexes in North Texas, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is taking steps they say will protect seniors.

Lawmakers from Dallas and Collin counties filed bills Monday in the Texas House and Senate they say will provide protection with new requirements for senior living communities, cash-for-gold shops and medical examiner procedures.

The bills are responses to the string of murders at Dallas-area senior living communities from 2016 through March 2018 before the suspect, Billy Chemirmir, was arrested in Plano.

The bills include:

• SB 1133, filed by Sen. Nathan Johnson, and HB 3144, filed by Rep. Jared Patterson, which would create a certification program for senior living communities and establish minimum security standards such as employee background checks and ID badges for visitors.
• HB 3095, filed by Rep. Julie Johnson, which would hold senior living communities liable for the deaths of residents through dishonesty or negligence and require communities to perform criminal background checks for employees and report any criminal activity to police.
• SB 1132, filed by Nathan Johnson, and HB 3123, filed by Rep. John Turner, which would enforce regulations on cash-for-gold and pawn shops like the ones where police say Chemirmir sold the items he stole from elderly victims.
• SB 864, from Sen. Angela Paxton, and HB 723, from Patterson, which were filed in February, would require officials to notify next-of-kin when medical examiners amend death certificates.

Nathan Johnson, a Dallas Democrat, said he and his staff have been working on the proposed laws since the end of the last legislative session. He said he thinks the bills will not require much additional oversight or cost and are are easy solutions to problems identified in the investigation into the deaths in Collin and Dallas counties.

“As a legislator, you look for where’s the place I can do some good? And then you do it,” Johnson said. “There just isn’t a partisanship when it comes to reasonable means to protect your family members.”

Chemirmir, 48, has been charged with 18 counts of capital murder and two counts of attempted murder. He has been linked to six other deaths, which would make him among Texas’ most deadly serial killers.

If convicted, Chemirmir could face the death penalty. He has said he is innocent and is in jail, with bail set at $17.6 million. Chemirmir’s criminal trial is scheduled to begin in early April, but will likely be delayed, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Families of the people who were slain say the bills would have helped protect their loved ones at the posh independent living communities where they lived. Many of the deaths were initially described as natural causes; it wasn’t until after Chemirmir was arrested that investigators reopened investigations and amended death certificates.

A group of families has formed a nonprofit, Secure Our Seniors Safety, to lobby legislators and bring more attention to the Chemirmir case. The families say they’ve been hoping for systemic change since they learned how their loved ones died.

“Accountability and transparency were lacking in independent-living establishments and the cash-for-gold industry,” said the group’s president, Shannon Dion, whose mother died in 2016. “When the market fails, corrections are necessary. These bills are the needed correction.”

The bill relating to cash-for-gold shops enforces existing regulations, and calls for regular inspections of businesses and referrals to law enforcement if inspectors find violations of existing law.

Dion said she also hopes the attention to the case will help improve transparency at senior living communities.

She said that many residents weren’t made aware of the rash of reported thefts and that she hopes communities will start “neighborhood watch” programs to help keep seniors safe.

The group is planning to have a news conference Wednesday in Plano in support of the bills. Speakers will include Dallas Cowboys hall of famer Cliff Harris, whose mother-in-law allegedly was killed by Chemirmir.

Drafting passable bills

Johnson said he first learned of the Chemirmir case when a constituent called near the end of the 2019 legislative session about problems getting her mother’s death certificate amended from heart attack to homicide.

The cause-of-death change is an important step for the families. Police have told them their loved ones probably were murder victims, but officials say each death must be re-examined before Chemirmir can be charged in each death.

The lawmaker met with families who would later start Secure Our Seniors Safety in early July 2019. Some even flew in from out-of-state to begin the conversations about what kind of legislation would be possible.

Johnson said it was important for his team to identify areas that not only would make an impact but also would clear political hurdles in Austin.

“It’s not easy to pass laws in the Texas Legislature, so you want to look for things that have the broadest appeal and the least resistance,” he said. “Coming in with a heavy-handed market regulation, agency oversight sort of approach struck me as unlikely to survive what was already set to be a very difficult legislative session.”

For example, with HB 3144 and SB 1133, which would create the certification program for senior living security, Johnson said extra oversight and regulation probably would not be as attractive to more conservative lawmakers. Instead, the bill would create an incentive for the market to fix the problem with low costs.

“If we could find a way for the industry itself to take up the task, to incentivize that, it struck us as not only, perhaps, a more effective way to do it but certainly politically, more likely way to pass it,” Johnson said.

David Schless, president of the American Seniors Housing Association, one of the nation’s largest groups for owners and operators of senior living communities, said that he wasn’t aware of the specifics of the bills but that the industry prioritizes keeping seniors safe.

“Criminal background checks of employees are required for assisted living residences and my sense is the preponderance of independent living communities are performing criminal background checks, as well, and would not be opposed to reasonable security standards,” Schless said in an email. “Again, it is very much the desire of all senior living providers to keep their residents safe at all times.”

Still, bills about senior living will certainly take a backseat to other critical issues in an unusual and busy legislative session. The COVID-19 pandemic and health care were already big topics before the state’s energy crisis in mid-February, Johnson said.

But the job of helping constituents who are at risk shouldn’t be put on hold while solving those larger problems, he said.

“There’s a reason that we pass 1,000 bills a year,” Johnson said. “It’s because it’s a big complex state, there are a lot of needs. If you don’t have time to attend to the more specific needs of specific constituents, you shouldn’t be in this business.”