Charged With Murdering Her Dying Mother - Rachel Waters | Miss Understood with Rachel Uchitel #365

[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to Misunderstood.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Rachel Eucatone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, just a few months ago, if you can believe it, Rachel Waters was arrested and charged with murdering her own mother.
[SPEAKER_01]: This wasn't just some cold case or something from years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: This literally just happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her mother was in hospice care, suffering from Alzheimer's and cancer, and Rachel was the one taking care of her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like many families in that situation, she was given access to end-of-life medication, including morphine, to keep her mother comfortable
[SPEAKER_01]: And then suddenly everything changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Prosecutors claim that she gave too much.
[SPEAKER_01]: And just like that, she went from caregiver to facing multiple murder charges.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chargers that could have put her away for life.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's where it gets complicated.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because in hospice care, morphine isn't unusual.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's expected.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of how people pass peacefully.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the question became was this a crime, or was this part of the process that happens every day in end of life care.
[SPEAKER_01]: The medical ruling was later changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The charges were dropped.
[SPEAKER_01]: but by then her name was already out there, tied to one of the most shocking accusations you can make about somebody.
[SPEAKER_01]: So today we're sitting down with her to hear exactly what happened, what it felt like to be accused of something like this and how your life changes overnight when the headlines says you killed your own mother.
[SPEAKER_01]: Please enjoy my conversation with Rachel Waters.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today on misunderstood.
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having me cold, but doing all right over here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Good.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so happy to have you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your story is absolutely incredible.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad, you know, as I was doing research on you, I'm so glad that this did not draw out.
[SPEAKER_01]: for years and years as it could have.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I can't wait for you to tell everybody your story and for me to be able to ask you questions because I have so many.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I really want to start at the beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you just tell me about your childhood so we get an idea of like, where you grew up?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you're from Georgia, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And where you grew up, how many kids are in the family?
[SPEAKER_01]: What your relationship was like with your parents, all that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I was born and raised in a very rural Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we grew up in the county, which was off a dirt road.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am an only child.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did have three half brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I now only have two.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were much older.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were my father's children.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I grew up with my mom,
[SPEAKER_00]: My father until they split it 11, and my grandparents, my maternal grandparents, who live next door, and, you know, the home life was a bit tumultuous.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mother and father, they had a lot of hardship together, but my mom was always my steadfast defender, along with my grandparents too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also kind of idyllic in the sense of I grew up in the woods with this amazing loving family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had the privilege that so many children don't have, which was being close to their grandparents.
[SPEAKER_00]: So rather than conventional babysitters growing up, my mom was incredibly busy, she was an engineer for the federal government.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she was constantly traveling on business, but if it wasn't her, it was them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was kind of where I got my first taste, also, with caregiving, because my grandmother was a diabetic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my granddad also being old, and my mom working so much, I, you know, very quickly sort of stepped into the role.
[SPEAKER_00]: of taking care of my family and and other loved ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, giving her insulin injections and just, you know, also being really close to her.
[SPEAKER_00]: My grandparents passed when I was 17 my granddad and 20 respectively.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I stayed home to go to college there and I stayed close to my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my mom and I's relationship, we were kind of thick as thieves, I think, being an only child and having gone through that divorce together and also living in rural Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: I certainly had friends my age, but my mom and I had a lot in common as people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were both artists, we were both very much, you know, book nerds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was always a lot for us to connect on, especially as I grew up in grew older.
[SPEAKER_00]: She ended up giving me when I married my ex-husband.
[SPEAKER_00]: My childhood home was gifted to me, so we lived next door to each other for a long time, until
[SPEAKER_00]: My marriage was starting to fall apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was done with the rural Georgia life.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had been working as a model on the side.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized I needed to get out of Harlem, Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: And New York City was where I had a lot of friends, a lot of connections.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I ended up moving here when I was 29.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even though I,
[SPEAKER_00]: had moved away from home.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom and I had the type of relationship where we stayed and touched every single day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were seeing each other maybe four times a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Always the holidays, I would come there and she would usually come, you know, once you're twice a year here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we maintained that closed relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a group of parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a group of parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was.
[SPEAKER_01]: So who was she with at that time?
[SPEAKER_01]: She said your dad left when you were 11.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did he get remarried?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did he remarried?
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom never did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight here and there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she was alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always encouraged her to date, but she was like, I just, I'm done.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had two marriages.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need it anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any more of that chaos?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a game fair enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was close to her sister.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she still, you know, her sister had moved on the same road, same dirt road to kind of be close to her.
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she had the company.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, and how long did she work?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, did she, like, 37 years at Fort Gordon?
[SPEAKER_00]: She retired.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was, God, when she retired, she, I think, she was at the, the top civilian, top ranked civilian woman at Fort Gordon, as far as I'm aware.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she, she was very eager to dedicate herself full time to her art.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a painter and so when she retired, she ended up, you know, doing more work for Audubon for Ducks Unlimited, teaching some art classes, and that was kind of how she kept herself busy after she retired.
[SPEAKER_00]: So wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when did she start seeing signs of not feeling
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I learned in 2017, we did a 23 in me, and I saw that I had one of the genes for Alzheimer's, which is APOE4.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of, it's not a deterministic gene in the sense that you're definitely going to get it, but it dramatically increases the risk.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's sort of similar to Braca for breast cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I saw the genetic result come back, I remembered growing up with my grandparents, my grandmother describing how my grandfather's mother had died of senile dementia as they called it back in the early 1900s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized then, you know, I'm, so my profession is, you know, sort of life sciences and medical copywriter.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very well versed in medicine and,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just sort of a blood-run cold moment of oh God.
[SPEAKER_00]: I bet I inherited it from mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And around that same time, I have been noticing some odd speech blips.
[SPEAKER_00]: Completely isolated from any other sign of decline, but she was reversing pronouns a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: All he's were she's, well, she's were he's.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was such an odd speech quirk to happen over the secret hatchet or she didn't even hear it.
[SPEAKER_00]: She would often not catch it, sometimes she would.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it happened with such frequency.
[SPEAKER_00]: It set off a little flag.
[SPEAKER_00]: But nothing happened for a few years.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was still, she was the type of person who's doing everyone's taxes in the family and doing them right and well, she performed at a very high cognitive level.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
[SPEAKER_00]: You kind of write it off at the time as, you know, maybe this is just a quirk of aging, um, maybe what age, what age, what age, what age at this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: So at that point, she was just in her late 60s and that's also very young.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my mom was sort of the picture of health.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was the person in the family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone that would live to 100, you know, she, she ate her veggies.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was very active outside around the house and she was incredibly sharp.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when the pandemic came, that was when it became clear to me that there was something seriously wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had made plans to come down and see her for her birthday, which was March 18th of 2020, and we all know what happened just before March 18th.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I didn't get to come see her, so I had last seen her around holidays of 2019.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of the summer, I noticed her text to me, we're getting progressively more garbled.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had immaculate grammar and spelling all her life and suddenly she didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when I turned to my now husband and said, oh my God, it's happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to get down there now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think she's developing.
[SPEAKER_00]: cognitive impairment at least, whether it's full-blown Alzheimer's or Malcock that I don't know, but we need to get down to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got down in August and when I arrived, she looked like she had aged 20 years and eight months.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had lost a huge amount of weight, and her spine was completely doubled over with osteoporosis.
[SPEAKER_00]: she was frail and even though she was still speaking mostly normally you could see that there was something serious happening and that's when I jumped into action and got her with a gerontologist, got her on re-classed for her bones because it was just it was like every system had was collapsing at once and sure enough it did it was from there on out it was a really rapid decline from
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... mow cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's to severe osteoporosis and then her cancer diagnosis multiple myeloma so wait i'm convinced so when you went down there had you been talking around the phone or just mostly text like i had been talking to her on the phone every day but not when she would speak no she um... she hated face time but you had no idea what i didn't know what she looked like and her sister had never gone over there
[SPEAKER_00]: Her sister saw her frequently, but was either in denial or didn't catch the changes because she saw her every day about it, but the family believed the family had a hard time believing that there was anything wrong with my mom when I tried to convince them and that was sort of the start of the.
[SPEAKER_00]: rift with my family.
[SPEAKER_01]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you said to her mom, I want to take you to the hospital or to the doctor, I want to see what's going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did she fight you or did she know something?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was she did not?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because her back pain was so bad from that collapsed spine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And and that to be honest was my primary concern too because if you have that kind of pain and inflammation, whatever cognitive issue you have is going to really accelerate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was the most critical thing was getting
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, we focused on her spine, but when it came to discussing medications for her memory, my mom was very mentioned to Nile that she had any memory issues, but she knew her speech was garbled.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she chalked it up to pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was when I began talking to the doctor about Mamanteen or another, you know, all the time was medication for my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, my family intervened at the time, especially my aunt and said,
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't, I'm not going to allow you to give her this medication.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has all these side effects and basically,
[SPEAKER_00]: threatening to not cooperate with any of her care on down the line if I got her on an Alzheimer's medication, which was sort of the first devastating blow.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're still thinking at the time the progression of Alzheimer's tends to be quite slow, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The doctor had said, you know, you're not going to be looking at her needing in-home care or anything like that for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're still years away from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's still in very early stages.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, this can take a decade or more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I sort of was like, well, that's a lot of time for the family to come around and thinking that we had some time to process it and work through it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, that was not the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom accelerated.
[SPEAKER_00]: incredibly rapidly.
[SPEAKER_00]: In large part, probably due to the cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, okay, so were you able to fix the back issue at all?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh boy, for a time, we did.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were able to, so we got her on reclass, which is a bypass venetrogue.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got her on hormone therapy, which stopped the loss until the cancer diagnosis, because multiple myeloma eats at bone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so those when those bone lesions came up in her spine at that point the collapse was unstoppable and that was in the last year of her life
[SPEAKER_01]: So was that an accidental diagnosis?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you guys were, she didn't feel well and you were looking for a camera?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it was incidental.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had started noticing on her blood work, because of course when you have complex medical issues, like cognitive impairment and osteoporosis, you're getting that regular blood work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were noticing her blood cells, her red blood cells were quite large, something called macrolitic anemia.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they tried B12 correction and then they were like, we don't think this is a B12 issue and they did an MRI and they saw the lesions on her bones and then she went on to test for multiple myeloma got the biopsy and came back positive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that point,
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that is multiple mylama a bone cancer?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a technically a blood cancer, but it does start in the bone marrow and eats at the bone lesions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is what lay people would think of as a bone cancer in the sense that it causes excruciating bone pain and broken bones.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: oh wow no way okay and is there was it stage four at the time that you found it so it was not stage four it was so she was stage one or two at that point and we were able because of her cognitive impairment you don't want to put the full court press out for chemotherapy it was a not something she was going to tolerate and be it would have
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have impaired her quality of life further without really any real benefit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we got her on one of the new biologic treatments, which is much jettler, but it's typically like a third, second or third line treatment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the remission that she experienced from that was only a few months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the time she came out of remission, she had already advanced to the and close to the end stages.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when her oncologist said, I think it's time we put her on
[SPEAKER_00]: more than about six months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was in December of 2022.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just about to go into 2023.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to set the stage.
[SPEAKER_01]: So December 2022.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has cancer.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has more full blown, like have they actually diagnosed her now with, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how is your family?
[SPEAKER_01]: They are agreeing with you now or they're still giving.
[SPEAKER_00]: They agree that she is very sick with Alzheimer's
[SPEAKER_00]: for just about everything and the sense of like if she experienced a worsening it was because of some medication that I had her on or it was because I didn't have the right doctor that they they liked and if it wasn't blamed for her decline it was feeling that
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not manage her care in the way they wanted, which was for me to quit my job.
[SPEAKER_00]: Leave my marriage completely moved down to Georgia and be a full-time caregiver rather than hiring caregivers.
[SPEAKER_00]: When my mom did not really want to accept care for me, I was certainly a caregiver to my mom, but when it came to activities of daily living,
[SPEAKER_00]: changing her underwear diapers.
[SPEAKER_00]: She still thought of me as her child and she would have a lot of angry outburst because she didn't like to feel babyd by her child.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas when we have outside caregivers come in, it was much easier for her to accept care from them.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it enabled me to still be her daughter for as long as I could and participate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And certainly, I showered her and fed her, but I tried to outsource some of the care that she was least comfortable with.
[SPEAKER_00]: to other qualified caregivers also who are training to deal with people with dementia because I wanted to preserve our relationship to as long as we could in home and and we maintained and home care for as long as we could until the home was no longer a safe place for her as her dementia advanced.
[SPEAKER_00]: And okay, so as of 2023 right so at the end of 2022 had you moved full time to Georgia or you are still going back and Oh, no, I was still going back and forth, but I was there half the month right, so I was like two weeks in New York two weeks in Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: My aunt was stopping by daily, but she didn't stay with my mom for more than about an hour or so a day, and she wasn't comfortable with a lot of the ADL's or activities of daily living.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I also had a caregiver that we hired.
[SPEAKER_00]: But me, my husband, we all alternated, coming down.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would come down to assist.
[SPEAKER_00]: And were you married at the time or are you that married after I was married at the time?
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually, um, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, more than helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're family at this time, I mean, I understand that you said they're upset about the drugs and your doctor, but at any time today say, listen, this seems to be getting worse.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's try something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a different doctor or no, they didn't offer different doctors, but we all agreed at that point that it was bad enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: She needed to be moved into care.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem was they didn't understand why it couldn't happen overnight.
[SPEAKER_00]: As there was a lot of impatience around it, as I was looking for a facility that would take my mom, my mom was also, she was difficult in the sense that she had a lot of strong behavioral issues that took a very special touch, kind of calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because her dementia presented, because her Alzheimer's presented as aphasia, which is problems with speech, she was harder to comprehend
[SPEAKER_00]: she would use replacement words for everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for her, her Alzheimer's presented.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her memory was better than her speech.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me put it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a lot more frustrating that she couldn't get what was in her head out of her head.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that was, I think, the source of a lot of the behavioral issues got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was this inability to convey what she felt or thought to other people?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really torture for her and everyone else, frankly, because she resort to writing note for that she could no longer write at that stage.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a lot of breakdowns where, you know, the only word that could come out was, you know, how angry she was and how she wanted to die or like, I'm just sometimes she tell caregivers, I'm going to kill you, you know, I don't think it was was the anger because everything was deteriorating and everything was painful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: So at some point in the beginning of 2023, you do move down full time, is that what happened?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did not move down full time ever, but I did come down for like nonstop for months on end and just stayed there in her home.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you said that the home was no longer a place where she was safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: So did you actually move her to people don't understand hospice?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't even know if I understand hospice because my grandmother died.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had hospice with the came and stayed with her.
[SPEAKER_01]: So can you explain hospice?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: So so where she moved was not affiliated with hospice in any way.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's important to note.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when she went on hospice, it was what we call home hospice, which is what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Closed to 50 million Americans will rely on, which is Medicaid or Medicare Hospice, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, a nurse in New Selector Hospice Company, they can be for-profit, non-profit, and a nurse will come to your home, and they will set you up with everything you need to support a person at end of life, and that includes, you know, a hospital bed if you need oxygen.
[SPEAKER_00]: toilet razors, you know, for people to use the bathroom more easily, but it also includes something called a comfort care kit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is prescribed to the family and or any caregivers you've hired.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the caregivers, whether they are family or hired, are then deputized by hospice to use these medications as instructed at end of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And these include things like sublingual
[SPEAKER_00]: difficulty breathing or pain at end of life, then Zodiazepines like Larazepam for anxiety.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are suppositories for constipation, things to help manage secretions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of this is designed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So family members don't have to have a medical professional in the home to administer these meds if their loved one begins to transition or experiences distress.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're typically hospice companies now, they vary from their protocol varies from company to company, but you probably stay to stay, I can imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: It depends, it's funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's largely been managed just by companies, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There are overarching rules, but in general, how people manage the comfort care kit and end of life, the companies have a lot of discretion in that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So sometimes people just get prescribed it and, you know, you follow the instructions on the prescription without a lot of guidance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other times people are trained on the use and they're given educational materials.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some companies say, hey, before you administer these meds, you need to call us and ask for instruction others.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't give that guidance at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It really varies quite widely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, wait, that's good to know, but I do want to go back to hospice for one second.
[SPEAKER_01]: So people that are listening to understand hospice could be something you do act your own home or at the home of the person who's sick.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it could be in the hospital too.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, do they bring so there are in patient hospices that can take place in in patient hospice facilities, but that's actually quite uncommon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, or I would imagine that maybe when people go away, their kids put them in like an old folks home or whatever, which is what happened in my mom's case, she went into assisted living, which was a memory care facility, that is still considered your home because you are effectively you paying rent there, it is not a medical facility, it's essentially like moving someone into an apartment, but with extra supportive care, it's where the caregivers,
[SPEAKER_00]: work full time for activities of daily living.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you, as the power of attorney and as the caregiver, you maintain all the responsibilities and rights and they actually stay on home hospice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the same company, when I moved her into the memory care facility, when I was no longer safe or at a standard house, they still managed the care, the comfort kit, nothing was taken away from me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I assumed it was also prescribed to the facility, unfortunately, wrongly at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's just a transition to a different residence, and it's legal classification in Georgia is different from something like skilled nursing, which would be a nursing home.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the same legal status effectively as an apartment building.
[SPEAKER_00]: Got it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You use the phrase a couple times end of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: End of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about what that means and how someone knows that they are in the end of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So typically it's a doctor that's going to make that determination where someone has been diagnosed with a progressive, incurable terminal disease.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my mom's case, this was more the multiple myeloma than the Alzheimer's, although the Alzheimer's was a significant contributor.
[SPEAKER_00]: So no longer responsive to treatment and at that point, a doctor had determined my mom had
[SPEAKER_00]: six months or less to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: So hospice in this country operates on that timeline.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone being given six months or less is typically when they're eligible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so this is interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: So is this.
[SPEAKER_01]: the same thing as medically assisted suicide when they absolutely not and thank you for asking that okay so i want to clarify the difference and what we're talking about because i i have done an episode where i had a death du la on who is hired in the state of california to be with the family when when the medicine is being administered and i heard about all the laws i think it's legal now in ten states you have to be given this um... terminal illness diagnosis you have six months or
[SPEAKER_01]: But the thing is, you have to have two doctors sign off on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get a medication that you can keep in your bathroom or wherever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: First up to six months.
[SPEAKER_01]: And but the thing is, the person going through it has to give it to themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have to be well enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's correct to themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for people listening, that is what this medically assisted suicide medication, that's the background on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Rachel, take it away, tell me the difference between what we're gonna get into with which is this hospice care kit, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, the comfort care kit, comfort care kit and the medical assistance to suicide.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, and I'm so glad that you point that out because a lot of people don't understand the difference, even people who have loved ones on hospice, they think that the morphine is meant to end people's life, and we now medically, that this is not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: The morphine, it's first of all, morphine in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Terminally ill, dying patients in the studies across the board has actually been found to slightly extend life in part because it does such a good job at easing respiratory distress and to something we call agonal breathing that will happen as a person is undergoing the active dying process.
[SPEAKER_00]: So hospice means that people are going to die naturally and that comfort care kit is just so you can help minimize the suffering that comes with a natural death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the morphine specifically in that comfort care kit, aside from reducing pain, it is very useful at reducing the air hunger that comes when the muscles that would enable us to take a deep breath, these intercostal muscles stop working.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that point, people start because they can't take a deep breath as they're dying, the body starts to experience these
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my mom began displaying that where it's like this hard-shutting where the jaw is almost like gulping down air, it's extremely distressing, not only to watch as a person is naturally dying, but also for that person to experience in their final moments, you don't want people to experience air hunger.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so morphine is what uses that breathing and prevents the intense air hunger as people are dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can also...
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, at end of life, you can use La Raza Pamel, though combining those medications is not ideals, especially in high doses, but the assumption with hospitals is that these medications are used while a person is actively naturally dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would die with or without the morphine.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only difference the morphine is going to make is it will ease that transition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's what people in hospitals are given as they die to.
[SPEAKER_00]: that it's the morphine, but it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I was going to say.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a misunderstanding.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the morphine process of dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's interesting about this and correct me from wrong, but I remember when my grandmother died and my mother went and stayed, she was telling us on the phone that one from hospice was very knowledgeable in this, what you say, the active dying process, meaning that
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a couple days before they can call it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And apparently the day after she's like, she's, she's probably gonna die in the next six hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: These people are so well trained in knowing the signs that the body goes through in naturally dying, that they could literally buy an hour, say if someone is going to be passing away.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm assuming these kits are made leading up to that, but then also going through it, correct?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while no one can be super precise down to the hour, yet do have an idea of the days, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're absolutely right, that they are trained to recognize those signs.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is exactly what happened with my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I was talking with the day before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my mom, I had gone back to New York
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we were thinking about moving my mom to a different facility any way we had some concerns about some of the care of the facility.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was going to come back down in a cyst.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I got a call.
[SPEAKER_00]: from hospice, as well as the facility, they were both on the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, your mom has been found doubled over.
[SPEAKER_00]: She has non-responsive her oxygen saturations in the 70s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we think she has hours today's left.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to get down here immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the hospice nurse had determined that she was actively dying, and that was charted and documented, and at that point my husband I moved to heaven and earth to get down there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a huge storm here that had canceled all the flights.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we took an Amtrak to DC and then flew out of race from the station to the airport and flew from DC to Augusta to get down by my mom's side.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was non-responsive, appeared essentially paralyzed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her eyes were already starting to dry out because her advanced directive had stated comfort measures only which just means oxygen and medications from things like a comfort care kit, but no fluids and no food, no feeding tubes, no, I have no drip of fluid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with that, something that she had chosen or used.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was something that she chose.
[SPEAKER_00]: She wanted to die a natural death with comfort measures.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was something she chose for her advanced directive when she also named me her power of attorney.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, for people listening, with comfort measures is not something that is gonna make you die.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just makes you comfortable.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, go ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that point, we set up shop in her room.
[SPEAKER_00]: We learned at the time that the facility did not have a comfort kit there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my husband, you know, you're not thinking anything of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, well, I can at least have the one from the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll have something on hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll just hope that the hospice company gets it to the facility in time, knowing that she's about to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you don't think anything of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been trained to use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hospital's company, everyone knows that you have it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's for residents, the main concern is you don't want it getting in the hands of other residents.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're affected in the car, you know, where no one's going to access it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we would be able to run out and get it if we needed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess you were talking about before that certain companies do it certain ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what was your training with it?
[SPEAKER_00]: So my training with it when it was prescribed was just the explanation, the nurse sat down explained what it was for, said, here's the number you can call, you know, if you can't get any by, you know, the instructions are very clear on the prescription, you know, you don't want to use this liberally.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is really for.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, when we start to get to end of life or if there's, you know, real distress, whether it's pain or difficulty breathing, but that was kind of the extent of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't super in-depth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think she also knew that I had a medical background.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was very educated.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's sort of an assumption too.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew that it wasn't going to terminally overdose or I'd been managing my mom's medications for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, um,
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just something with a pill.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's just a liquid morphine solution is what's contained in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little dropper that goes under the tongue because people usually, they can't swallow pills if they're dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's not a particularly high dose, either the prescribed dose is not something that would even kill you or me, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's especially for my mom who had a fentanyl patch because of her cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't pick that up because we knew or my husband wouldn't pick that up from the house because we knew we might need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're just, we're not thinking anything of that at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, I was getting increasingly desperate for the hospice company to prescribe it to the facility, because I didn't want to be responsible for administering medication at this facility,
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's, it's, if it had been prescribed to her as a drip, I hoped that they would.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't quite know what it looked like and if the facility, I, you know, in my dreams, she was going to be put either on a drip or someone would just come in and administer it regularly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, that is a responsibility that no one wants because there's always this fear of like, God, what if I, you know, mess up or, you know, you don't want, I think that, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: that wasn't the case, but you would prefer not to have to give it yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to train medical professional to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, my request for that prescription or denied repeatedly, I didn't understand why at the time it was pretty upsetting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I certainly had some words for hospice about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, but they gave you a reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They only said, well, she just appears comfortable to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, you see her for five minutes out the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not watching the agony on her face when she's turned.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was when I started documenting my mom's breathing and signs of pain because I was desperate to prove to them, she needs comfort measures.
[SPEAKER_00]: She has bone cancer and she's not getting adequate pain management, which is
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm confused, isn't it the same time that hospice was the one telling you she's at the end of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was also confused.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: That did not make sense to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's actively dying and yet, and I had another friend who was a hospice nurse who was also coming in at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was very confused.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was like, I don't understand why they're refusing morphine for her end of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we assumed maybe it was some concerns with the facility, we didn't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: All we knew was well, thank God at least we have this comfort kit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if she starts to actively die and has distress, we can respond to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sure enough, early in the morning of July 12th at around four in the morning, I was awakened by the sound of teeth smashing together, and it was that air hunger.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I woke up my husband and we realized that now was the time to definitely try and get morphine.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we immediately, I immediately went to the front desk to see if that prescription had come through because I was still holding out hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had not.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my husband got the comfort kit and I followed the instructions I called hospice to get directions and guidance and administered just the single dose of some legal morphine to my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it made no difference to her breathing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, she continued to gasp for air until
[SPEAKER_00]: It was incredibly painful to watch her die like that because I had seen my grandparents passing in hospitals with the benefit of a morphine drip where it was a lot calmer and more peaceful and my mom's death was not and.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was devastated, but I was also, I had been mentally preparing for this because I knew she'd been dying for days, and I knew how immense her suffering was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so after she passes, you know, we have the family come, hospice comes into Clarezer, they bathe her, they change her, we're not thinking anything is a lie, until
[SPEAKER_00]: as we are heading back to the house because the funeral homes that it would be several hours before they could pick her up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were like, just go home and rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we hadn't slept all night.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the way home, I get a call from the funeral home and they said, there's been a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't pick up your mom's body because it's been taken to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in Atlanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you react to that phone call?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, oh my god, and hung up, I immediately knew that someone had implicated me in something terrible because I, uh, I didn't, I wasn't born yesterday.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's only one reason a body is taken to the crime lab.
[SPEAKER_00]: in Atlanta, and that's if someone is alleged, Cal Play.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, was this a shock to you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you had been getting a lot of push-back from people?
[SPEAKER_00]: I, it was, it was a shock, but I immediately had my suspicions of who might have implicated me, and I was, you know, and there were a lot of, and mind you, there's like, there was like a few candidates in my mind that I can't really speak of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, but I certainly, so it's a shock, but, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: half expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, because things were so, so tense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew that they were tense, but it was amazing that it had ever gone to that point and also it blew my mind because everyone knew I was there because she was dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I immediately googled the first criminal attorney I could find in the area.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted someone who understood the county.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found a man, Robert Humler, and called him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I gave him the five-minute rundown, or ten-minute rundown.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stories were getting home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, I'm afraid that I've been accused of murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, it sounds like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: and you hadn't heard from the police station yet, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was and so he was telling me possible charges and he's saying, well, in the state of Georgia, you have felony murder, you have all this and I had never heard of felony murder, so I'm starting to Google all the stuff on my phone while he's talking to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he tells me to be prepared because we're going back to my mom's old home, which of course was where we were staying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, you know, you can expect a visit from investigators from law enforcement any moment now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you arrive and sure enough about 30 minutes after we got back to the house five Columbia County Sheriff's cars pull up to playing close investigators at the door Demanding my phone wanting to talk to me and I said you can talk to my attorney this is his number and you can get a search warrant and they said you know how this looks right and I said yes, it looks like I know my rights
[SPEAKER_01]: And why they were saying, it looks like you're guilty, because you knew how to, that seemed to be the implication.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I was prepared.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, I'm a prepared person, it was, again, I didn't, I wasn't born yesterday, you know, and I, I've also worked in criminal legal reform.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was an investigator for the federal government for years, I used to read people, they're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I,
[SPEAKER_00]: I understood what was going on and I knew that now was the time to hand it over to my attorney and not myself because I am volatile, I am emotional, I am angry.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, you know, first of all like, you don't want to talk to the police if you've been suspected of a crime in general without an attorney present, but certainly not just ours after your mom died when you are feeling every
[SPEAKER_00]: I waited for them to get the warrant.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came back with it about three hours later and had my name on it and homicide.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew then that I was a murder suspect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: So did they take you in that day?
[SPEAKER_01]: Did they question?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, couldn't question me because I handed them over to my attorney.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the assumption was, despite all the fear and the horror and the pain
[SPEAKER_00]: it was so obvious like we knew that there was no abundance of records out there that I had not killed my mom right we had so you weren't you couldn't have been that nervous that they were going to find something but at the same time if you are accused of murder I think and it's it's being nervous that you've been accused but not nervous that's going to go anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, it's the agony of like they've taken away my phone just days before my mom's funeral.
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of, what am I going to tell people?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I told people I'd lost my phone, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what's going to happen with the family, with her state?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like all of these moves that you have been anticipating for closure and healing, they just stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything freezes in place because you also can't get a death certificate and that's important for the estate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's important for life insurance.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need it for all of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so your ability to move through those processes of grieving is put on hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we had hope, though, that it would be quickly resolved, A because she got so little morphine, or, like, well, toxicology.
[SPEAKER_00]: If toxicology doesn't clear us, then, you know, we couldn't imagine a world in which it didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll say that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had even started calling medical examiners, telling them the dose, asking about,
[SPEAKER_00]: one being charged with murder after subling one morphing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't be a worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is when people push a lot of, they're like morphine redistribution is definitely a thing, but just never heard of anyone being charged with murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think you have to worry about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I spoke to the former medical examiner for the state of Tennessee.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I called everybody that did like consulting to try and understand what timeline I could expect.
[SPEAKER_00]: What findings?
[SPEAKER_00]: I was aware of post-mortem redistribution of morphine being unpredictable just from my own research through the medical literature.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was the only thing I had some concern about, but I was also assured, they were like, you know, they're going to the good medical examers going to take that into account.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, by all accounts, everyone knows that you're called down, that your mom had been declared actively dying, you had witnesses to her death, you had a legally prescribed comfort care kit.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what was the accusation of motives?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I don't get it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it just because you had overdosed her to get her to die, to get her out of agony, or was it worse?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, so, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we,
[SPEAKER_00]: It that's a great question because you can only infer in some of the interviews given to investigators in just actually just one of the interviews that I know of, the implication
[SPEAKER_00]: was that I wanted her to die sooner, and there wasn't a reason, really, given other than there was a lot of harsh language like get rid of her or hassle didn't want her to recover, which was very odd language considering that she was not going to recover.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, where they suggesting that you wanted a life insurance, or you wanted her home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that I know of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there was certainly, it seems to have been that there was some implication of money at one point because the DA, what she latched on to was, well, we need to pull the bank records.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she brought it up as a, you know, that not everything necessarily makes it into the file, into the discovery file, but that seems to have been a possible allegation, of course, when the DA, you know, when she pulled those bank records, she did do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, this had nothing to do with money.
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably because she saw that I had been supporting my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, this was, my mom was not, my mom had home, but my mom was not wealthy.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had a good retirement pension, which helped.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that pension ends with death that's not something a survivor that I would get.
[SPEAKER_00]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did help support her time and memory care, along with my income, which was why we were able to have her in a nice facilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Physically, I channeled my entire income, my,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what point were you taken?
[SPEAKER_00]: Were you ever taken into custody?
[SPEAKER_00]: I was.
[SPEAKER_00]: So after 18 months of absolutely nothing, of, you know, just waiting for a death certificate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Waiting for the lady to find out what they were.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they were going to charge you or had they charged you?
[SPEAKER_00]: They had not charged me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And which was also unusual.
[SPEAKER_00]: And lawyers that I spoke to, kept saying, if you haven't been charged now,
[SPEAKER_00]: Talks call.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's been back for ages.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they're not making a move now, it's, we don't think they're ever going to make a move.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're probably in the club in limbo because we're stuck in limbo where they end up on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't get the death certificate.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And before you speak into your family.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, my family stopped speaking to me about a month or two after I became a suspect and I had no idea why they just completely cut off contact.
[SPEAKER_00]: So no response to text.
[SPEAKER_00]: No response calls blocked on all social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: I
[SPEAKER_00]: I still don't know the exact answer to the only thing I can assume, because when sympathy cards came in the mail, they were all addressed to my mom's siblings to not to me, even though people hit no me for the entire my entire life.
[SPEAKER_00]: My only assumption is that my aunt probably informed everybody that I was either a suspect or I killed my mom, my mom, my aunt would sometimes a ledge that I was trying to kill my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: To of note, as far as I'm aware, my aunt was not a primary accuser, but she was
[SPEAKER_00]: involved with law enforcement early on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she didn't put it to rest and get you off the hook.
[SPEAKER_01]: She no, she let that narrative play out whether that's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it seems the rest of the family fell in line and I was just sort of dead to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you weren't able to contact them and say, this is crazy, you guys know that I have nothing to do with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I couldn't contact them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was reaching out to them telling them I love them and missed them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mostly wanted to grieve because they were the last repository of memories of my mom when she was cognitively intact and of my childhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like these were people I grew up with.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were my last remaining family.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was aside from my mom, my aunt was the person
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had hoped that after my mom's death, we could kind of let bygons be bygons in terms of our disagreements around our care, and hopefully become closer.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was not to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the meantime, or not in the meantime, after 18 months of misimming, did you get a phone call?
[SPEAKER_01]: Did they accuse you of murder?
[SPEAKER_01]: How does that go down?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh boy, I was leading up to my birthday, and I made an Instagram post about the last birthday gift my mom had ever given me, which was teaching me how to paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just a post grieving my mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: An anonymous commenter said, shame on you for murdering your mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why your family has disowned you and then posted an indictment that was very official looking and it was Rachel Waters with the indictment number, two counts of murder in the state of Georgia, felony murder and malice murder had the judge's very flaming name on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my blood ran cold because I had seen court documents before my time as an investigator and it looked like a court document.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looked real.
[SPEAKER_00]: I took a screenshot of it and sent it to the attorney who'd been advising me, Robert Humler, and I said, is this real?
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I about to be arrested?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he just wrote back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what a way to find out, I don't understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody was going to call you and tell you they, oh hell no, you don't get, you don't get a courtesy call.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cops come and pick you up and take you to jail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just from anywhere, that you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, I had just flown home from Georgia where I was caring for my mom's house just days before the war for my arrest was issued across the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I had flown when I had planned to fly, I came home early because my kitty was actually diagnosed with cancer, so I rushed home to be with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I would have been caught at TSA in Augusta, Georgia, and I might still be jailed to this day.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because, uh, this person who was meaning to be hostile tipped me off on Instagram, I was able to reach out to Robert, who is the person who got me Brian Steele.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, he said Rachel, you know, we got on the phone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said he was on vacation with his family and he was like drinking in the hot tub, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, he's a Friday night just before my, you know, 42nd birthday party and he's like Rachel, if this happened to me, I would have the only man in the country jump into to defend me and that's Brian Steele.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I'd heard of Brian Steele because he was the young thug attorney.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone from Georgia kind of knows who he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, there's no way Brian's going to take my case.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like a celebrity attorney.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a nobody.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said he will, I have them
[SPEAKER_00]: And I immediately got on the phone with Brian and his wife while they were driving down the highway in Atlanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was like a Deus Ex Machina.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he, he was like, listen, I stand with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are one.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to make arrangements so you can get out on bond and you can build your case.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we are going to, to beat this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: And from there, I mean, you have to share yourself in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: OK.
[SPEAKER_01]: So did you go back down to Georgia too?
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, with Brian, I mean, you have all this terror because you know those charges in the state of Georgia subject to the death penalty, Georgia being a death penalty state.
[SPEAKER_00]: And right now, I'm trying to fathom how this even happened, how I even ended up charged.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was wild to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no precedent for it that I could find anywhere in the country or that any lawyer could find of someone being charged with murder for arriving at the deathbed of someone who'd been declared actively dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And none of that was relevant to Brian.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that was relevant was getting me out on bond because you cannot build a very effective case while you were jailed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to be able to make bond.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he immediately worked with the DA and the judge to make arrangements for me to turn myself in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it was like a little less than a week and a half after.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I went forward with my birthday party the next night and made the announcement to my friends about what was gonna happen to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of what my future might hold and also for their, you know, saying you if you want to speak for me or vouch for me because part of what's important with the bond hearing is for the judge to know that you're embedded in a community, you're not someone who's going to flee, you're not someone who poses a danger to society, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were very eager to, you know, they were like, we'll do whatever it takes, we'll travel to Georgia, you know, whatever you need and really lucky to have a very strong
[SPEAKER_00]: And how did your husband take it this much?
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, for example, absolute horror, horror, terror, disbelief, other confusion as to how I ended up charged.
[SPEAKER_00]: And and you this is also confusing because my husband was the one who brought the E-kit he was the one who was in the room so you would have thought he would have been interviewed right we thought like if there was going to be something someone would have at least tried to speak to him that never happened so it was just like hard to imagine a complex maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: or a charge exactly, it just didn't make any sense to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like if something was going to happen, like when they've spoken to the direct witness, you know, when the person who was with me, yeah, was it just the two of you on the room?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just the two of us in the room, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we,
[SPEAKER_00]: My, you know, I was driven down to Georgia like a fugitive because I was, you can't fly when there's an act of war for your rest, certainly can't drive.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want to get pulled over, but we made it luckily and I turned myself in to the jail on the day of my bond hearing at like five in the morning and Brian with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no one was with me in in person except for my husband.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: I, they were still coming down from Atlanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had another local attorney.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were prepping at the courtroom, our courthouse.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had originally thought I was going to be in holdings, so I addressed, you know, for a court appearance.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I, yeah, I went through the full, the strip search, the shower, the mugshot, the orange jumpsuit, and the cell.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was in custody for 12 hours, luckily, just 12 hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: really open your eyes to what it looks like once you're inside the system and also I didn't know if I would be there 12 hours or four years because because you don't know if they're going to ask you don't know if you're going to make bond traditionally a DA will fight bond and then the judge makes the determination.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was extremely lucky that the DA in my case, she was not the one who had presented my case to the grand jury of note.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the lead investigator.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a change in leadership at the district attorney's office between the time my murder investigation took place and my indictment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was no sitting DA to present my case or even to really evaluate it, it seems.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I can't say for certain, but she's certainly seemed to, and that was evident when my bond here and came, and you don't go into the courthouse for you are sitting in a room with cameras and screens, and when she came on,
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, she, she sort of telegraphed out about the malice murder charge.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's like, there doesn't seem to have been any malice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Spoke to the brother and sister.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mom was in terrible pain, it attempted suicide.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she said, well, if anything, it seems like it was mercy not malice.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there were other odd things to me that she started mentioning, like, she Google possible charges as evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, no one knew that I was tipped off.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was something that I assumed the investigation would have revealed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I started to get a hint that some of the evidence was like,
[SPEAKER_00]: not especially strong, and also easily explained.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's also, I kept seeing a news articles, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the news articles after my indictment before I turned myself in, kept alleging that morphine had been stolen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, wait a minute, I had a prescription.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom had a prescription, and I approved of this prescription, because I photographed it before I handed it over to law enforcement.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, as she was sniffing out that there was something wrong with the case, I was also realizing there was something wrong with the evidence, which of course you feel in the first place, but you have no idea what that evidence says.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're in a black box until then.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you start to feel that little bit of rising hope at the realization of, wait a minute, there's a lot here that can be explained and now you're in a position because you've been charged for your attorney to clarify this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing that brought a lot of hope to me was seeing the courtroom fill up with people who had traveled from all over the country to be there for me and to stand for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I saw Brian on camera and him presenting and proforing witnesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just held my breath, and when the judge said $200,000 bond, I was relieved because it was just enough of what we had left after legal fees.
[SPEAKER_00]: The percentage, you don't pay $200,000, you pay, you know, 15% of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew that if I made bond when I made bond, realizing the evidence and how we can
[SPEAKER_00]: was when I had hope that we could get through this, especially with Brian.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was released that evening, you know, after the bondsman had been paid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: That is when we began the fight, because we knew there was just a matter of getting discovery and being able to answer to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And luckily at the DA, Natalie Payne, she is very good about turning over discovery quickly, because sometimes they can withhold it to the day of trial.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can actually spend years waiting on discovery.
[SPEAKER_00]: She didn't do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very odd to speak favorably of the day I realized in this case, but I didn't fault her for anything that happened to me and I do have a deep respect for how professionally and decisively she moved because we got that full discovery and when we did, we realized, oh my God.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems they didn't even have the medical records that my mom was actively dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were just so many things that were missing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There seemed to have been no context for her death.
[SPEAKER_01]: So do you seem like there was a misunderstanding?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or do you think it seems like it wasn't the police didn't do their jobs?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, therefore, in the grand jury, they were presenting things that they didn't have a full context about.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot make a judgment call either way beyond the fact that it seems that many things went wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: There certainly seems to have been misunderstandings.
[SPEAKER_00]: There certainly seems to be missed things.
[SPEAKER_00]: There certainly seems to be, and how many of them are taking place?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no misunderstanding that someone implicated me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So accusation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm being very precise and in legal terms here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because even words like innocent are are charged legal terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: But an implication was certainly made that would lead investigators to believe that that could potentially lead investigators believe that I had hastened my mom's death.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also appeared that implications were made that my mom was in a recoverable state rather than declared actively dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: It appears that implications were made, and actually we have no idea by whom, but we know it was made to media that this was an unauthorized morphine bottle that it was stolen and was not prescribed.
[SPEAKER_00]: fully ascertain the scope of what happened because that's not something you're able to do until your clearative charges because you're a hot potato.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, it's so important because I can imagine that this is not the first time this has happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would think that this is something that we what have been accused of or it is the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, as we are aware, why I'm precedent setting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am the first person in US history to be charged with the murder of an
[SPEAKER_01]: That's enormous and an enormous weight, but what, I mean, do you think that somebody had a witch hunt against you or you think that this is something that you need to call shed light on because of how easy it is to get the facts incorrect.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's that second point, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's very dangerous to attribute malice, whether you know it or not, but what I do know is if it happened to me, it could definitely happen to someone else because there are not nearly enough protections in place for family caregivers, especially when it comes to the management and use of control substances for their loved ones at end of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: that if someone doesn't know how hospice works, say they work in law enforcement, they could even be a medical examiner.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people, one of the things that really shocked me is how many people don't realize that family caregivers are prescribed and entrusted with controlled substances.
[SPEAKER_00]: They think of that as something that medical professionals can use.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if investigators thought that in my case, but it wouldn't be surprising
[SPEAKER_00]: you giving morphine to another person is automatically illegal, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Cause it's a natural assumption.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't walk up to you in squirt morphine in your mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is definitely illegal to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's a whole system that is not very well done committed in many cases when family members are verbally deputized,
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not necessarily a record of that, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no universal law showing that the family member has been deputized and authorized to use morphine for their loved one at end of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you have a murder investigation or a family member that accuses someone of using morphine to overdose, a loved one, and law enforcement comes in, the assumption that default assumption is going to be, well, if there's morphine in the person at morphine, it must be illegal.
[SPEAKER_00]: because they don't understand necessarily how hospice works and there's no official record of it, which is why after I was charged.
[SPEAKER_00]: I began speaking to my friends who are hospice nurse professionals as well as contact with others saying, you know, what does the protocol look like at your your company, other people been through hospice like, what was your experience with getting morphine and administering it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And most people, there was no record whatsoever official record that they had been authorized to use this morphine.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we know all the time that when someone dies, your point is correct, it does happen all the time that people blame and accuse other people of killing loved ones on hospice.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't go as far as my case did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it often doesn't go as far because you'll have like a family accuser and it's not necessarily going to be a mandate day to report or you might have law enforcement that goes, I don't know they're on hospice it's up to just at every level it's people's discretion and all it takes is, you know, someone convincing a person in a position of authority for it to go really far.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want people to hear this for a second because Brian steals name who's famously famous for defending young thug.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he now is become even more famous because he has been added to puff daddy's defense and he is one of the active, right, lawyers on his case.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just curious now that people have heard this, I'm curious your opinion of him because I'm sure a lot of people would question how somebody could defend a criminal like that,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am not altered in my opinion of them in any way whatsoever because every single person, no matter how reprehensible they are or no matter what crime they have committed, is constitutionally entitled to a robust defense and trial by jury and court of law in this country.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when it comes to defense attorneys,
[SPEAKER_00]: They are upholding the constitution when they defend people no matter what we think of them and their crimes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a civic duty that is vitally important.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that it takes
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of grit to be able to do that because they do face a lot of personal judgment.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't look at it as them supporting the type of person that they're defending.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are supporting a person's constitutional rights at the end of the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have immense respect for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Brian is one of those people that from the moment I met him, it became very clear to me that he was someone who was dedicated to upholding the rights of every single person, no matter who they were.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, when you see, now I did not know that he was Dittie's attorney when he took on my case.
[SPEAKER_00]: I found that out kind of in the midst of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have this like panic attack because you're like, oh, God, you know, but then I caught checked myself and I was like, no, he's doing his job.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he's supposed to do is defending the constitution and these people's rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it doesn't change my opinion of him in any way, and I think it's important for people to keep that in mind that it's not about the individual they're defending it's about the right that we have under the Constitution as Americans no matter who we are as people that's a really smart and well spoken answer I will say where were you when you found out the charges were dismissed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was at home, it was, you know, we had a suspicion they might be coming because Brian had given me a call, you know, a couple of weeks prior about week and a half prior to let me know that after we turned over all of our records as well as recordings of my mom as well as the documentation of my the prescription for her and all of the medical records for her, which I had obtained about a year prior by sending a demand letter to facility.
[SPEAKER_00]: that he had revised her cause of death, and it was no longer determined to be a homicide.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when a medical examiner overturns a ruling in light of new evidence, because medical examiners, they do not make these decisions for cause of death in a vacuum, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They take into consideration the condition of the person leading up, whether or not she had food or flu, it's as far as we know, he didn't even have context for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't have context as far as we know for a more theme prescription.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we were able to provide all this context for him that he didn't have,
[SPEAKER_00]: certainly things he had never seen like video of my mom in her final hours, as well as eyewitness affidavits in testimony.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he received that, that calls a death changed and even though the state could theoretically decide to continue to pursue the case, it would be unlikely, it makes it much harder, right, because the state itself determined it wasn't a homicide.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so at that point,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just a matter of waiting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I don't have a job anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: I lost everything when I was charged your life gets obliterated.
[SPEAKER_00]: You lose your job, your career.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't earn unemployment.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're, you know, my life was basically 24 or seven case research and going to the gym just to keep myself sane.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: I had woken up in the morning saw a text from Brian to give him a call and he let me know that as soon as the DA had spoken to the medical examiner, she immediately requested that all charges be dropped and had put in the request of the judge and the case was fully dismissed on August 28th.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's pretty incredible because that's what I was going to remember six months months ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you were facing death essentially and you have been found to what are they, it's called they dropped the charges.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not the slared in the case dismissed case dismissed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So essentially brings me back to the status of if I had never been a suspect at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, except for your credibility has been completely tarnished.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have your reputation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's less the, you know, it's funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's your reputation, your ability to earn a living.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's an atom bomb for your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you gotten a job since then?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I'm, you know, even though the record is restricted in Georgia, the, they do not seal records and so depending on the type of background checks off where it will still show that I've been charged with two counts of murder.
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite away with no context.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, it
[SPEAKER_00]: This career that I built that I loved was obliterated overnight.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was just taking cat sitting gigs in the neighborhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't even get on rover because they run a background check.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you would get turned down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I realized then that my only option was to really dedicate my self-ful time to passing marshes law in total with that at least.
[SPEAKER_00]: So marshes law.
[SPEAKER_00]: the best laws I will start by saying are the most narrowly written right you can expand them out with time but it's the goal is to achieve the maximum beneficial impact with the minimal minimal amount of things that lawmakers or voters might cobble over you know cobble over rather.
[SPEAKER_00]: and marshes law would effectively require at the bare minimum that when a person goes into home hospice, that that hospice company keeps a written and digital record alike, and that written record would be on transfer paper, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So those copies can be given physically to family members showing that these family members and or caregivers who have been hired by the family have been
[SPEAKER_00]: to use the medications in the comfort care kit and a copy of that would be kept not just with the hospice company but also with the individual family that is signed and witnessed by the hospice professionals acknowledging that they have been deputized.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that in the event that there is a search warrant or someone has accused them of misuse or of theft or saying they're
[SPEAKER_00]: when that kit is handed over to law enforcement, it has that transfer paper showing like this person was authorized to use this and they were trained on its use.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that alone could probably cut off a lot of issues at the past now in my perfect world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would also mandate training for law enforcement departments and coroners offices to understand hospice and how end of life looks and the use of morphine and how it's managed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they would have some training and context.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than relying on laypeople saying, Oh, morphine is.
[SPEAKER_00]: proof it's used to kill and like people see saving private Ryan where it's like put me out on my misery and they sham the morphine into the thigh and and that's how people think of morphine and unfortunately that carries over to anyone whether they're law enforcement or you know just a well-meaning civilian and so having that kind of training for law enforcement bodies that could be involved could be tremendously helpful, but that's a much bigger ask.
[SPEAKER_00]: And something that, you know, I am still working with hospice professionals as well as lawmakers planning to go state by state starting with Georgia, so that is underway now, I'm already talking to people in offices to help craft the law and the language, so that when I travel down to meet with folks, we have really clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Comprehensible, short legal language of saying, you know, hey, can would you sign on to this for your constituents?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you start building momentum in states, especially in the south, things that have felony murder on the books, where it's a lot easier to for someone to be charged, even.
[SPEAKER_00]: So felony murder means that if you committed any felony such as theft of morphine and someone dies during the commission of the crime, you can still be charged with murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's important to work in those states first and then you build federal momentum or momentum for the federal level at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I wish you the best of luck with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so important and I can't imagine that people would be against it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's it's shocking to me to think that people wouldn't understand it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, unless they's been through it, they probably don't get why it needs to be there in the first place.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and listen, I have a friend I was on the phone with her this morning and explained that I was interviewing you because I've been talking to her for a while and they have just decided to put their mother and in hospice and how painful it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: for you know it's her mother so for her to watch her mother go through this pain and she doesn't know what to do she does not she doesn't feel qualified to make certain decisions she doesn't you know she doesn't understand this end of life what it looks like like you know how a hospice person would and
[SPEAKER_01]: She's in pain herself because I think she doesn't know what to do and it's terrible watching her mother in pain.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what would your suggestion be for people that are going to experience the soon, thinking of getting hospice involved, knowing a loved one is coming to the end of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you suggest that someone does?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that a, it's really important to understand that these medications serve a really critical purpose that are that is not one that is going to hasten your loved ones death when used appropriately and correctly and that hospice in most instances is a really wonderful service for people to be able to pass comfortably in their own homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I would suggest for people, though, because my story, of course, is terrifying, and it could happen to anyone, is documentation is everything, not just for law enforcement on the line, if it comes to that, but also for yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that when hospice is instructing you on how to use the comfort kit, just ask, hey, can I record this for my records and myself?
[SPEAKER_00]: States require, in fact, maybe all for a video recording, both parties consent, but I'm sure that most would consent.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, okay, I want to be able to record this in document.
[SPEAKER_00]: You deputizing me, you're training me on this for your own reference, so you know what to do because there's a lot of panic that can take over when your loved one starts to experience distress at end of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, we can a documentation of like, you know, I would keep a record of, you know, what the medication management uses just for yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, you know, ensuring that you're keeping in close contact and in lockstep with the hospice company that you're with and.
[SPEAKER_00]: making sure you have the same ideas about where your loved ones at and the process that you're in agreement on the correct comfort measures and that you don't potentially run into conflicts there and also the understanding that you can change hospice companies at any time.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the service is not working for you and your family, we were in an unfortunate situation in which we, you know, when those tensions started to arise as my mom was actively dying, there was no time for that and we didn't really know what was going on, but for most people, you can get an idea of things that might be an issue early on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then make sure you're on the same page and then just document everything you if you do have conflicts, it is worth documenting and this is where one party recording laws can also be important so for audio recording many states you need to check your state laws only require the consent of one party and that party can be you so if you're finding that there's conflict or something seems really off about this standard of care that your loved one is receiving.
[SPEAKER_00]: you can document these things because you don't know if they're going to come in handy if God forbid you're accused or if you decide to pursue legal action or anything at a later date you go at you have that record available to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it also just helps kind of keep you calm and grounded to know that you have reference points as you move through this process because it's incredibly distressing and disorienting thing to endure.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know my my mom dying I felt like
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, your brain sort of dissolving, you're running on very little sleep, you're racked with grief, but if you can at least have the presence of mine to track everything, to record what's going on, it can provide you a lot of peace of mind moving forward, especially if there's conflicts with someone and they might God forbid implicate you and wrongdoing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two more questions that I'm sure our listeners will want to know, do you have any contact with your family now?
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not.
[SPEAKER_00]: I reached out to my cousins in hopes of them talking to family, but my cousins also did not respond.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was after the case was dismissed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I am hoping to eventually write a letter when more coverage comes out about my, my story because I don't think my family believes much of anything that I say I don't think that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't have a lot of trust in me from the start.
[SPEAKER_00]: From the moment I moved to New York as they called it, Sodom and Gomorrah, you know, very religious evangelical family.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, sort of diverged in some ways about, you know, who I am and how I live.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's so, some distrust anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: But having, you know, being able to get the story out more, I think there will come a time where I have the presence of mine that I can sit down and at least write them a letter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm expressing everything, but no, I may not ever have contact with them ever again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so sorry that you're going to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That makes me really sad for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: But thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just because they don't agree with your life.
[SPEAKER_01]: The choices you've made doesn't make you a murder or obviously.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, obviously.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you could speak to your mom and tell her what her life and her death meant to you changed in you like what what would your what would that be?
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be about her life and not her death.
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom is the reason I am fighting now for other caregivers and for justice in her name because that was how she raised me.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how daunting those odds seem, no matter how terrifying it is to put myself out there and make the news of what happened even bigger and face that scrutiny, my mom was one of those people who
[SPEAKER_00]: always fought for the right thing no matter what it cost her.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was true.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was a child and growing up through custody battles with my father, that was the person she was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I and deeply deeply dedicated to living up to the type of person she was in her life and after her death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that is the greatest way I can remember and honor her legacy is to continue that in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you need to write a book.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to get you a book publisher because this is a great story.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're thinking about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot to teach people to about how they can defend themselves in this situation and just resilience through this kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rachel, it has been an honor.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what is next besides getting this proposal of Martha's law, you're now, you've now gotten the death certificate I can imagine and you're going to close the estate and move on and try and start over.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm assuming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the next steps are getting marshes law passed and also just continuing to raise awareness of the need for that that reform for end of life and how hospice is managed and help educate the public a bit more on what they can do when they're
[SPEAKER_00]: up against power asymmetries like this because one of the reasons this was resolved in six months was because I knew my rights throughout.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew what to document.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew what to record.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew how to move through these systems and most people do not have that privilege.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that there is a lot, especially in the stand age, that people could stand to learn about what to do when they're up against something that's potentially life-shattering.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's sort of the secondary mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: After Marsha's law, it's helping people know how they can navigate.
[SPEAKER_00]: These huge systems, whether it's corporate or government, once they have been accused of something that they did not do.
[SPEAKER_00]: and how they can move out of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm working to build out that message and speaking to attorneys and doing research now and flushing that out for other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can continue to hopefully help folks navigate not just end of life with their loved ones, but also these impossible and terrifying situations should they find themselves caught in the criminal legal system or some other system that threatens to up in their life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rachel, you've been through so much and you have such an incredible story.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really do help hope that it gets the coverage that it deserves because your story needs to be told for sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: If people are interested in contacting you or following you, where should they find you?
[SPEAKER_00]: So right now, I am very easily reachable on social media, both my TikTok and my Instagram is distinguished here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do read messages on there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am currently in the process of getting my website set up and that will have a contact form too.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's going to be Rachel eWaters.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that should be live by the time this podcast is published.
[SPEAKER_00]: So RachellyWaters.com will have a contact link for people as well if they want to reach me there or via social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can also see a little bit of my my story on social media and learn a little bit more about who my mom was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a lot of photos and videos and stories of her there too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rachel, there's something about you that is bigger than this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I feel like this is going to be your mission and I feel like people are going to hear your voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't like, I'm not intuitive like that usually, but like you're just such a good communicator and I feel like you've been through this for a reason and I hope that it helps people.
[SPEAKER_01]: So good luck to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm hoping to.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that if it was going to happen to anybody, I was the best person for it to happen
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Bye-bye.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for listening to Ms.
[SPEAKER_01]: Understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Rachel, you could tell.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Understood with Rachel, you could tell.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have ideas for the show or want to reach out email us at info, Ms.
[SPEAKER_01]: Understood podcast at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's spelled m-is-s-s-understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.