Rachel Waters says the moment that changed her life began before dawn, as she slept on an inflatable mattress on the floor of her mother’s room in a Georgia memory care facility.
At around 4:30am, she woke to a horrific sound coming from her mother, Marsha, who was 74, weighed 80 pounds, and was nearing the end of life with advanced Alzheimer’s and multiple myeloma.
“like torture.”
Rachel says Marsha was struggling to breathe. In response, she reached for a prescribed morphine comfort kit that had been stored in a drawer for months, phoned the emergency hotline, followed the guidance she was given, and applied one measured dose to the inside of her mother’s cracked lips.
Marsha died 38 minutes later. Before long, police vehicles arrived outside the family home.
“All I could think was: did someone accuse me of killing my mum?”
Rachel describes the experience this way:
“It was like an out-of-body experience. The worst nightmare times ten.”
What should have marked the end of years of pain instead became the start of another ordeal. Rachel, an only child, had spent years watching her mother decline from Alzheimer’s and cancer. She kept up daily texts, made repeated trips to Georgia, and eventually began flying in from New York every other week to oversee Marsha’s care.
Marsha died on July 12, 2023, but the aftermath did not end that day. Investigators took her body to a crime lab, carried out a search warrant, and seized electronics. Then Rachel says the case appeared to stall. For months, there were no charges, no clear explanation, no death certificate, and no practical way to close out her mother’s estate or even stop routine bills.
When charges were finally filed, Rachel says she learned of them through an anonymous Instagram comment left on a tribute post for her mother. The accusations were felony murder and malice murder, both capital offenses in Georgia and both carrying the possibility of the death penalty.
“I lost ten pounds in nine days,”
Rachel says the shock quickly took a physical toll.
“I couldn’t eat. Every time I tried to put food in my mouth, I felt like I’d throw up. I couldn’t sleep. I realised everything I had built, my career, my savings, my life as I knew it, was gone. Overnight.”
The morphine at the center of the case was not obtained illegally and, according to Rachel, was not used recklessly. She says it came from a standard hospice comfort kit, which included medication meant for emergencies such as respiratory distress at the end of life. That morning, she says she called the hospice emergency hotline, explained Marsha’s symptoms, and was told exactly how much to give. Her husband, she says, heard the instructions on speakerphone.
“I was committed with every fibre of my being to honouring my mum’s wishes,”
She says her mother’s goal had been a natural death without avoidable suffering.
“She wanted a natural death, but without unnecessary suffering. And I feel like I failed her even at that, she died gasping for breath anyway.”
‘If this happened to me, it will happen to someone else’
Rachel works as a science and medical copywriter and has a background in federal investigations. She says she kept detailed records throughout her mother’s decline, including phone logs, medical documents she had to fight to access, and video showing Marsha’s condition in her final days, including blackened fingers and toes, dried-out eyes, and the absence of food or fluids for days. Her husband, an Alzheimer’s researcher, also witnessed those final events. Rachel says he was never contacted by law enforcement.
Her attorney, Georgia defense lawyer Brian Steel, submitted a full package of evidence to both the state medical examiner and the district attorney, including Marsha’s morphine prescription and her medical history. Following that review, the medical examiner changed the cause of death from homicide to undetermined.
The district attorney’s office then dropped the charges.
“When the manner of death can no longer be confirmed to be acute morphine toxicity, we can no longer pursue those charges,” said Acting Columbia County District Attorney Natalie Paine in a statement in August 2025, as reported in The Augusta Press.
Rachel says the prosecutor was forthright about the problems with the case.
“She acted very transparently,”
“I think she realised pretty quickly there were massive gaps.”
Rachel was at home in New York, in bed, when she got the call that the prosecution was over. She cried, but says the feeling was not simple relief.
“There was relief. But there was also horror, because I realised if this could happen to me, someone with every single piece of evidence of innocence, what happens to the person caring for a loved one at home who doesn’t have those records? Who doesn’t have a husband or hospice nurse friends who were witnesses? What happens to them?”
‘I still can’t find work’
Although the charges were dropped in August 2025, Rachel says the consequences have not disappeared. In Georgia, records are restricted rather than sealed, meaning they can still appear in background checks. She says online searches of her name still surface headlines identifying her as a murder suspect, leaving her effectively shut out of employment.
“Whenever I meet new people, they often ask what I do for work,”
She says even casual conversation has become difficult.
“And I have to decide whether to lie, which isn’t natural for me, or explain that I’m now an unpaid hospice reform advocate because I was charged with murdering my mum. I can’t have a normal conversation. I’ve lost the luxury of anonymity.”
Rachel says the legal fight consumed nearly half a million dollars and drained her savings, retirement funds, and her husband’s retirement as well. She now relies on a GoFundMe for basic expenses while campaigning for what she calls Marsha’s Law. The proposed measure would require hospice providers to document comfort kit prescriptions, record which caregivers were trained to administer them, and provide that documentation to law enforcement if an investigation begins.
“There is no law that required the hospice company to show that I had a valid prescription,”
“No law requiring them to show I was the person expected to give it. Families are handed these kits every single day across America, and there is no law to help protect them if they are wrongly accused.”
By spring 2026, Rachel had turned her case into a public campaign, appearing in interviews and advocacy pieces to push for clearer protections for families caring for dying relatives at home or in hospice. She says the point is not to stop legitimate investigations, but to make sure caregiving records are preserved and reviewed before a grieving relative is treated like a criminal. In her view, the gap is simple: families may be trained, instructed, and acting under hospice guidance, yet still have no standardized paper trail to protect them when a death becomes a police matter.
For Rachel, the push for reform is about making sure her mother’s final chapter leads to change.
“I just want everything my mom and I suffered to mean something.”
Information about Marsha’s Law can be found at
marshaslaw.org