After his wife died, he joined nurses to push for new staffing rules in hospitals

Tim Lillard at the home he and his late wife, Ann Picha-Lillard, shared in suburban southeast Michigan. Since her death in 2022, Lillard has made it his mission to pass the Safe Patient Care Act, which would create mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios in Michigan hospitals. (Beth Weiler/Michigan Public)

For the past year, police detective Tim Lillard has spent most of his waking hours unofficially investigating his wife's death.

The question was never exactly how Ann Picha-Lillard died on November 19, 2022: from respiratory failure, after an infection put too much strain on her weakened lungs. She was 65.