Sitting in a pediatric intensive care unit last year, watching a ventilator keep her 17-month-old daughter alive, Emily Marris scoured the contents of her phone for evidence to give to California health and food safety investigators.

She had bought raw goat milk from a farm recommended to her in a Facebook group run by her chiropractor. Marris had hoped the milk, unprocessed and natural, would help with her daughter Brooklyn’s constipation. But doctors now suspected the unpasteurized milk, which hadn’t been heated to kill off pathogens, was the source of the toddler’s severe E. coli infection.

To the regulators who’d reached out to Marris, the case was a top priority. The farm appeared to be defying state law to sell unregulated raw milk to unsuspecting families; soon, another child, a 6-year-old girl who’d drunk milk from the same farm, would wind up in the same San Diego hospital, with the same potentially fatal illness, needing blood transfusions.

Similar cases were popping up across the country as social media influencers and President Donald Trump’s White House kept touting the unproven benefits of raw milk and downplaying its risks. In the past two years alone, hundreds had fallen ill across nine states from drinking raw milk or eating products made with it.

Recognizing that people still want the freedom to buy it, California had struck a balance: It licenses farms that sell raw milk for human consumption, inspects them for sanitation and requires them to regularly test batches for pathogens.

The system hadn’t prevented outbreaks, as ProPublica previously reported. But it aimed to ensure that customers, at the very least, knew what they were getting into; milk legally sold in the state had to be clearly labeled with warnings.

Which is what troubled regulators even more about this particular outbreak.

The milk suspected to have sickened the girls didn’t come from one of the state’s dozen licensed farms. The dairy was totally off the radar, selling unknown quantities of unlabeled gallons.

And inside Marris’ phone was even more alarming information. Months of text messages showed the farm’s owner knew from the start that a toddler was drinking her milk. Then after the farmer learned that Brooklyn had contracted a serious foodborne infection, which doctors attributed to the milk, she continued to advertise on Facebook: “raw goat milk from a clean tested herd.”

After many sleepless nights, Marris screengrabbed the messages and sent them to the investigators, hoping to quell the outbreak before it grew.

Amid a flurry of emails involving at least four state and county agencies, investigators with the California Department of Food and Agriculture took the lead. They needed to confirm that the farm was indeed selling milk for human consumption. In California, doing so without a license is a violation of state law and can lead to fines of up to $10,000 and jail time of up to a year.

On the evening of June 17, 2025, an undercover investigator messaged the farm’s Facebook account:

“Would like to buy like a gallon ”

Someone from the farm replied that they sold goat milk by the gallon, explained that they were temporarily out of jugs and said they would message as soon as their shipment arrived.

Regulators now had a rare opportunity.

They had strong evidence: two cooperating families, direct text admissions and access to hospital records documenting the destruction wrought on two young bodies.

They had a clear reason to act. Raw-milk consumption was a growing hazard, and their state, like others, was teeming with black-market dairies, propped up by consumer demand fueled by misinformation.

They could have pursued penalties under a law enacted to prevent this very conduct, sending a message to other sellers about what the state would not tolerate.

But that’s not what would happen.

Marris was breastfeeding her daughter in her southern California home one afternoon that previous January when a post on Facebook caught her eye.

In a private group of backyard farmers, her chiropractor, Chris Boman, had shared a photo of a refrigerator, filled with gallons of freshly collected milk. In the years Marris had been visiting his office, she’d seen him selling raw milk from his own cow in his clinic’s waiting room.

She had never thought to try it herself, but milk was on her mind lately. She was trying to wean Brooklyn, and so far it wasn’t going well.

Brooklyn was her “miracle baby.” Marris had become pregnant with her — a desperately wanted third child — at age 48. Then she arrived seven weeks premature, her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs confining her to the intensive care unit for her first month.

The traumatic birth sent Marris’ protective instincts into overdrive. Already a self-described “crunchy” mom, she’d detoxified their home in suburban Winchester, a small inland community in Riverside County; stripped it of harmful chemicals and synthetic materials; and limited her family’s intake of ultraprocessed food. A trained birth doula and former teacher, she spent much of her days caring for her kids while her husband ran a sports technology startup company. As she had with her other two children, she was determined to breastfeed Brooklyn for as long as needed.

But when her daughter was barely a year old, Marris started a new medication for her chronic hip pain that could pass through breastmilk. She tried organic infant formula, but the number of additives alarmed her, and store-bought cow milk left Brooklyn severely constipated. Marris considered stopping her medication, but then she couldn’t walk without pain.

Desperate for an alternative, she commented on her chiropractor’s Facebook post, “Would this be a good milk for baby Brookie?”

The group’s members quickly chimed in. “I had to put my baby on raw goats milk,” one mother wrote. “Healed her right up. … Goats milk is easier digested than cow.” While sales of raw milk are prohibited on Facebook’s Marketplace, and such ads are removed when flagged, discussions of raw milk are still allowed, said a Meta spokesperson.

The commenter recommended a farm called Moonlight Ridge, and Marris clicked over to its Facebook page, which was filled with pictures of velvety Nubian goats. The farm milked its animals twice daily, it said, so the dairy was “always the freshest and best quality.” It was only 10 miles away. Marris arranged a visit that afternoon.

There were no signs marking the farm, but Marris turned down a dirt road and spotted its 23-year-old owner, Courtney Baker, with long blond hair and a tan, standing by a metal gate near a white pickup truck. Baker and her husband had become interested in raising goats during the pandemic. They started selling raw milk to help animal rescues and breeders, Baker would later say, and got most of their customers by word of mouth.

Baker greeted Marris and handed over an unlabeled jug of raw goat milk, still warm to the touch.

Marris pointed to her daughter, asleep in the back seat of her SUV, and explained Brooklyn’s digestion struggles. “This is the sweet girl you’re helping,” she recalled telling the farmer.

Once home, Marris filled up a baby bottle and nervously handed it to Brooklyn. Her daughter........

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