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Nursing homes, it seems, have become the choice for criminals who need a job, and it’s no wonder.

KHOU-TV

Navarro's family took these pictures while she was in the nursing home.

Texas law allows felons — even those with long criminal records --  to work in nursing homes.

Surprised? So was one Houston family who learned the hard way.

“She was always sweet; she was gentle,” Raul Navarro said.

Maria Navarro was 98 when her family made the difficult decision to place her in a nursing home.

“We put her there because she needed 24-hour care, and we figured what better place than a hospital because they have everything there,” her son said.

One day her son Raul took this picture of Maria in her nursing home bed. The next day:

“These two photos show how we found her,” he said.

He took photos of her beaten face.

“All she kept saying was, ‘don’t hit me any more please, please, please stop hitting me,’” Mr. Navarro said.

She’d been beaten up. It’s when Navarro learned that state law allows some convicted criminals to work inside nursing homes.

“Medicaid fraud, money laundering, aggravated sexual assault — there’s a whole list of them like that,” Care for Elders spokeswoman Dianne Long said.

After hearing horror stories, Long started pressing lawmakers to expand the list of crimes that would disqualify applicants from becoming nursing home workers and in-home care providers.

“They’ve seen attendants of their family members or their friends that have been running drugs out of their house,” Long said. “Or have written checks out of their account.”

By law, right now caregivers can not be hired if they’ve committed murder, kidnapping, sexual assaul, arson or robbery.

The expanded list would include indecent exposure, improper photography, online solicitation of a minor, Medicaid fraud and cruelty to animals.

A few months after the attack, Maria Navarro passed away. For her son, the struggle for better care lives on.

“We don’t know what set this person to beat her up, and if some of these people have been criminally inclined in the past then who knows what it’s going to take to trigger them?” he said.

The bill has already passed the Senate and is on to the Texas House. So far no one has formally come out opposition to it, although some worry that people convicted of crimes early in life would be barred from caring for the elderly in the future, even if they’d turned their lives around.