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Four Kids in One Faith-Healing Family Died. Authorities Could Do Nothing.
Emma Joyce was sick and vomiting for days until she stopped breathing in her parents’ arms, in a small gray farmhouse in rural Idaho. It was August 2009, and she was 3 years old.
The following summer, Emma Joyce’s little sister got sick. Ava Joan wouldn’t eat or drink anything but a few grapes and some Sprite in a sippy cup. She was breathing hard and fast. And when she vomited, it came out black, the hallmark of internal bleeding. She died in her mother’s arms in July 2010 from a complication of untreated diabetes.
Less than two years later, the girls’ toddler brother died from the same complication of untreated diabetes that killed Ava Joan.
And nine years after that, another sibling died: a 4-year-old boy who’d suffered for weeks with similar symptoms.
The parents told officers that they hadn’t taken the four children who died to the doctor because of their religion, the Followers of Christ, which considers the use of modern medicine a sinful lapse of faith in God. And Idaho exempts parents from faith-healing sects like the Followers from the legal duty to give their children lifesaving medical care.
The sect had at least 15 avoidable deaths among children from 2015 through 2025, according to healthcare professionals who reviewed their records for ProPublica.
Among them were children in five families, including Emma Joyce’s, who had a combined total of two, three or four losses in this period or earlier.
Most of the siblings died of similar ailments, following similar patterns, that experts said could have been resolved with interventions as simple as insulin, antibiotics or a supply of oxygen. Experts were uncertain on only two of the sibling deaths, saying the death records lacked enough information to determine if the children’s lives could have been saved.
Eloise, wrapped in a blanket above, died in 2018 in Caldwell, Idaho, after struggling to breathe for seven hours. She died from meconium aspiration syndrome, a condition that rarely kills babies in modern America. Her parents did not seek medical attention because of the tenets of their religion, and she became her parents’ fourth baby to die since 2007. Obtained by ProPublica via Canyon County SheriffIdaho’s child abuse laws contain such broad religious exemptions that authorities did not intervene — either before or after the deaths.
The exemptions don’t just shield faith-healing parents from criminal prosecution for conduct that otherwise would be charged as neglect. They also keep police and social workers from stepping in to protect a dead child’s surviving siblings from suffering a similar fate, no matter how many........
© ProPublica
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