Family facing manslaughter charges in assisted suicide case highlights 'inherent dangers,' nurse says

A criminal case involving the assisted suicide of a 91-year-old woman is testing the boundaries of a Colorado state law allowing people to end their lives if they are terminally ill and follow specific legal requirements. 

Two people are now facing manslaughter charges — the woman's daughter, Kim Roller, and her son-in-law, David Norton, who are alleged to have helped the woman die after she was found dead with a bag over her head that was connected by a tube to a 20-pound green nitrogen gas tank. 

Colorado's requirements for assisted suicide stipulate that a person must be terminally ill with an estimated six months or less to live, a doctor must provide medication to end life, and any others who participate in the process cannot gain financially from the patient's death. 

"This case highlights the inherent dangers of normalizing assisted suicide, particularly when the boundaries between legal medical practice and unlawful conduct become unclear,” Kallie Fell, a perinatal nurse and the executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, told The Christian Post.

In February 2024, officers with the Louisville Police Department discovered Mildred “Milsy” Roller’s body in her room at The Lodge at Balfour, an independent living facility for older adults. The officers also found a suicide note with the date Feb. 5, 2024, crossed out and replaced with Feb. 18, 2024. 

Officers later determined that Roller’s daughter, Kim Roller, and son-in-law (Kim Roller's brother-in-law), helped the elderly woman die by suicide. Kim Roller reportedly purchased the 20-pound industrial nitrogen canister, and Norton purchased and later helped install the gas flow regulator to the tank. 

Earlier this year, a grand jury in Boulder returned indictments against the pair who are facing manslaughter charges. Under Colorado Criminal Code § 18-3-104, a person commits manslaughter if they intentionally cause or aid another to end their life.

Prosecutors claim that despite the elderly woman having had a previous failed suicide attempt days before she died, they argue that the defendants carried out the assisted suicide to benefit financially, as they stood to inherit $655,540 that was in the 91-year-old's savings account, and her facility was costing $6,980 per month. 

Speaking about the case in a March 25 interview with ABC News' Denver affiliate, Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty said authorities decided to file criminal charges because the requirements of Colorado’s End-of-Life Options Act were not met. 

"We looked at it really carefully, but ultimately it's guided by the rule of law," Dougherty claimed. 

"Here in Colorado, the takeaway should not be family shying away from using this option. The takeaway should be following the law when they do so," he added. 

In her assessment, Fell told CP, “When a 91-year-old woman dies under such circumstances, it raises serious concerns about coercion, oversight, and whether existing laws can truly protect vulnerable individuals. Rather than expanding access to assisted death, this tragedy underscores the need for greater safeguards, accountability, and a renewed commitment to caring for those at the end of life.”

In 2016, Colorado voters approved Proposition 106, which enacted the End of Life Options Act, allowing certain terminally ill adults with less than six months to live to request and self-administer drugs to kill themselves. The measure allowed physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to patients under certain circumstances. 

The act was updated in 2024 to include SB24-068, reducing the waiting period from 15 days to seven days and allowing physicians to waive the waiting period for patients who meet other qualifications and appear unlikely to survive more than 48 hours.

"Under the law in Colorado, there is really a specific list of things and requirements that people have to do in order to satisfy the medical aid and dying law," Dougherty told the ABC affiliate. 

An investigation also allegedly revealed that Kim Roller had attended a Final Exit Network workshop weeks before her mother's death, which is where authorities believe she got the idea to use nitrogen to help Mildred Roller end her life. 

Final Exit Network is a nonprofit organization that conducts workshops throughout the country and provides information to help terminally ill patients end their lives. In a statement earlier this year, the organization denied that it had any involvement in Milred Roller’s death.

"We want to be clear: Final Exit Network has not been charged with any crime, and the individuals indicted in this case were not Exit Guide Program clients and did not receive Exit Guide services from FEN. The agreement referenced by the District Attorney reflects FEN’s longstanding commitment to operating ethically, responsibly, and within legal limits," the statement said in part. 

According to the Boulder district attorney, "Final Exit was providing seminars all across the country and here in Colorado. And those seminars, as of now, are different in the state of Colorado." 

Some of the changes Final Exit Network agreed to make include no more nitrogen demonstrations and step-by-step instructions following the investigation into Milred Roller’s death, according to Dougherty. 

While Fell acknowledged that the facts of this particular situation will ultimately be determined in a court of law, she noted that the case “underscores broader concerns the Center for Bioethics and Culture has raised about so-called ‘medical aid-in-dying’ laws.”

She said doctors “should never be in the business of harming their patients,” adding that the “intentional ending of life is fundamentally incompatible with the ethical foundation of medicine, which is rooted in healing, care and the protection of life.” 

“Second, laws permitting physician-assisted suicide place society’s most vulnerable populations at increased risk of being steered — whether by external pressure or internalized feelings of burden — toward ending their lives,” Fell continued. “Cases like this raise serious questions about how well existing safeguards actually protect those at risk.” 

She noted that proponents of laws permitting assisted suicide often argue that the practice will be limited to terminally ill patients, but places like Belgium and Canada have moved to include non-terminal conditions, such as mental health issues and depression. 

“This pattern highlights the inherent difficulty in containing the scope of these laws once the underlying principle is accepted,” Fell stated. 

“This Colorado case may be the first of its kind in terms of criminal prosecution, but it illustrates the real-world complexities and risks that arise when the line between care and killing is blurred,” she concluded. “It should prompt serious reflection on laws that erode a physician's responsibility to ‘do no harm’ and treat vulnerable populations as candidates for assisted death rather than individuals in need of care and protection."