More than a month ahead of the opening gavel to Texas’s 87th legislative session, some lawmakers are putting together a spate of bills to protect families with loved ones in senior care facilities. At least four potential bills have been considered in response to revelations in this newspaper’s investigation into Billy Chemirmir, a man who has been indicted on capital murder charges in the deaths of 14 people, and accused in civil lawsuits of killing eight more.
Recall the gruesome details. Chemirmir preyed on the most vulnerable: elderly women in senior living facilities. Police say he posed as a maintenance worker to gain access to their rooms, smothered them with pillows, and then took what loot he could find, sometimes family heirlooms worth a few dollars in hock but priceless to the families they came from. Chemirmir was arrested in 2018.
Now, lawmakers are considering measures to prevent such atrocities from happening again, and to care for families affected by violence.
At the top of the list should be Frisco Republican Jared Patterson’s HB 723, which would require state officials to notify next of kin when a death certificate is amended.
Many of the victims now ascribed to Chemirmir were originally thought to have died of natural causes. Frisco resident Cheryl Bixler Pangburn lost her mother in September 2017. But more than a year later, Pangburn learned through Facebook that her mother might have died at the hands of a serial killer. She called police who confirmed that her mother was on the victim list and the death certificate had been amended.
“It’s just an incredible tragedy,” Patterson told us this week. “And to find out something like this on social media instead of having a courtesy call from someone to say, ‘Hey we have reason to believe that your 90-year-old mother might have been a victim of this guy.’ It just breaks my heart.”
We understand that such knowledge is hard to deliver, that it will only deepen a family’s grief, and that police sometimes need to control information to protect their investigations. But families have a right to know if their loved one’s death was the result of a criminal act. Patterson’s bill is a chance to inject some humanity into the bureaucracy of morgues and medical examiners.
A second measure, not yet drafted, would create a certification program for security standards at senior care facilities, including employee background checks. That also seems to us like an obvious and much-needed reform.
Two other possible bills have been discussed, but this early, we don’t know what form those might take or if they’ll ever be introduced in Austin.
But we support this momentum, led by these grieving North Texas families, to make senior homes safer and our state more humane.
