Avir at Mineola: Felon Employed Despite Bar on Hiring - TX
The first section showed a deferred adjudication, dated December 16, 1996. The second section showed something else entirely. It showed a conviction.
The conviction carried four years of confinement. The sentence expiration date was August 9, 2002. The worker, identified in inspection records only as Employee A, had been on staff at the facility. Residents were affected.
Texas law is specific on this point. The State Health and Safety Code, Chapter 250, Section 250.006, lists the offenses that bar a person from employment in a healthcare facility. Aggravated assault under Section 22.02 of the Penal Code is on that list. The revision effective September 6, 2024, left no ambiguity. A person with such a conviction may not be employed in a facility. Not "should not be." May not be.
The administrator at Avir at Mineola had a different read.
During an interview on April 24, 2026, at 11:22 in the morning, he said he did not think Employee A was barred from working there. He explained his reasoning: he has family who worked in law enforcement, and his understanding was that a person has to have a conviction and serve their time before they can receive deferred adjudication. He said he believed she was still eligible to work in the facility.
The record showed a conviction. It showed four years of confinement. It showed a sentence expiration date of August 9, 2002, and a status starting date of September 23, 1998. The administrator's theory about the sequence of events, whatever its source, did not match the document his own HR director was reading from during the inspection.
Deferred adjudication is a specific legal mechanism. The HR director described it herself during the interview: a special form of judge-ordered community supervision that permits a defendant to accept responsibility for a crime without an actual conviction being placed on the record. That description fits the first court section in Employee A's record. The second court section, the one listing a conviction, confinement, and a sentence expiration date, is something different. Both entries appear in the same criminal history record. The administrator appeared to be aware of only one of them, or to have concluded that the first entry rendered the second irrelevant.
It did not.
The facility's own written policy, last revised in April 2021, commits the organization to conducting employee background checks and to not knowingly employing any individual found guilty of abuse, neglect, exploitation, misappropriation of property, or mistreatment by a court of law. The policy does not speak directly to violent felonies unrelated to resident mistreatment, but the state law does. The state law covers aggravated assault. The state law applies regardless of what the facility's internal policy says or doesn't say.
What the inspection does not answer is how long Employee A had been working at the facility. It does not say who conducted the background check when she was hired, what that check returned, or whether anyone at the facility reviewed the results before she began working around residents. It does not say whether the criminal history record was ever pulled before the complaint inspection on April 24, 2026, or whether the HR director located it only because inspectors asked.
The inspection report identifies this as a complaint inspection. Someone filed a complaint. The nature of that complaint, beyond what it prompted inspectors to find, is not described in the records available.
What the records do describe is a facility administrator who, confronted with documentation of a felony conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, explained that his personal understanding of criminal law, informed by relatives in law enforcement, led him to conclude the employee was eligible for her position. He was still defending the hire at 11:22 in the morning on the day inspectors were sitting across from his HR director and reading the conviction entry out loud.
The HR director read both sections. She described the deferred adjudication entry, and then she described the conviction entry. The conviction entry listed the offense citation as 22.02(A)(2). That is the precise subsection of the Texas Penal Code that the Health and Safety Code names as a bar to employment. The citation number in the criminal record and the citation number in the statute are the same number.
Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon is not a minor entry in a background check. It is not a dismissed charge or an arrest without disposition. The record shows a conviction, a period of confinement measured in years, and a sentence that ran into 2002. Employee A would have been carrying that record into every background check run on her since.
The inspection was classified as a complaint investigation. The level of harm was identified as minimal harm or potential for actual harm. Some residents were affected. The inspection report does not describe any specific incident involving Employee A and a resident, any allegation that she harmed anyone in her time at the facility, or any complaint that named her conduct directly. What it describes is her presence in a facility where residents live, and a conviction that Texas law says should have prevented that presence.
The administrator's confidence on the morning of April 24 was notable. He did not say he had been unaware of the conviction. He did not say he would look into it or that he was surprised by what the HR director was reading. He said he did not think she was barred. He offered an explanation for why he believed that. The explanation was wrong, and the document that made it wrong was already in the room.
Nursing homes in Texas are required to obtain criminal history record information before employing staff. The mechanism exists precisely so that facilities know what is in a prospective employee's record before that person begins working around a vulnerable population. A conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, entered in 1996 and carrying a sentence that expired in 2002, does not disappear from a criminal history record. It is there to be found.
At Avir at Mineola, it was found. By inspectors. During a complaint investigation. In April 2026.
The administrator, as of that morning, still thought everything was fine.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Avir At Mineola from 2026-04-24 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Download the official CMS inspection PDF from Medicare.gov
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 19, 2026 · Our methodology
Avir at Mineola in Mineola, TX was cited for violations during a health inspection on April 24, 2026.
The first section showed a deferred adjudication, dated December 16, 1996.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.