Inset: Kim Zaheer (Flagler County Sheriff’s Office). Background: The home where Zaheer allegedly neglected her mother to death in 2018 (Google Maps).
A 68-year-old woman in Florida will be going to prison for killing her elderly mother, starving and neglecting the 88-year-old woman so severely that medical personnel compared the victim’s condition to that of a World War II concentration camp prisoner.
Seventh Judicial Circuit Judge Dawn D. Nichols on Thursday ordered Kim Zaheer to spend six years in a state correctional facility for her role in the 2018 death of Frances Hildegard King. However, Nichols also credited Zaheer with more than 4 1/2 years of time already served, meaning she has just over one year of detention remaining on her sentence. Following her release, Zaheer will be required to spend an additional 10 years on probation.
Due to the nature of the case and Zaheer’s own health challenges, the state attorney’s office waived state sentencing guidelines, which called for a minimum of more than 11 years in prison.
The sentence was handed down after Zaheer pleaded no contest to one count of aggravated manslaughter in September.
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At about 11:46 a.m. on Dec. 5, 2018, deputies with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office responded to a call regarding an unresponsive elderly female, later identified as King. Upon arriving, first responders walked into a grisly scene, describing King as “cold to the touch,” “very malnourished,” and showing “signs of apparent rigor mortis.” She and her clothing were both covered in fecal matter, including rat droppings on and beneath the body, and she was found dead in a bed “clothed in [a] garbage bag for a diaper,” the charging affidavit said.
The conditions of the home were said to be “extremely bad,” with police writing that the home “was dirty and the odor was unbearable.”
The medical examiner’s notes stated that King’s “eyes appeared to have dehydrated back [into] her head” and the funeral home’s body removal personnel told investigators that she had “never observed someone in the same or similar condition” to King’s. The body removal specialist also stated that King’s condition “resembled the condition of prisoners in a concentration camp,” and the medical examiner agreed.
The medical examiner determined that King’s cause of death was “severe emaciation” and emphysematous cystitis, a rare infection of the bladder wall most commonly caused by E. coli.
During the sentencing hearing, Nichols repeatedly referred to a photo of King taken immediately after her death, when she weighed a mere 53 pounds, Flagler Live reported. The judge called the photo “devastating” and “truly horrific,” adding that the picture of King “says it all.”
