After "faith-healing" death of 8-year-old girl, 14 Christians found guilty of manslaughter
An Australian judge issued a bombshell verdict against the adult members of a cult-like Christian group
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All 14 members of an extremist Christian sect in Australia have been found guilty of manslaughter after denying insulin to a little girl who needed it.
The backstory is horrifying:
On January 7, 2022, eight-year-old Elizabeth Struhs was found dead in her Queensland home. She had type 1 diabetes and needed daily insulin shots… but the people closest to her, including her own parents, refused to give her that medication.
Instead, they all prayed for her to get better. (It never crossed their mind that they could just attribute the discovery of insulin meds to God.)
For six agonizing days, members of the group chose “faith-healing” over proven medicine, believing that’s what God truly wanted, and the little girl eventually paid the price for their religious negligence.
Even more damning? It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
In 2019, her parents also withheld insulin from her. Elizabeth fell into a coma and had to be taken to a hospital. When she was admitted, she weighed only 29 pounds. She spent a month recovering.
Jason Richard Struhs and Kerrie Elizabeth Struhs were eventually sentenced to six months and 18 months in prison, respectively, for that incident. Jason, who expressed remorse, served no actual time behind bars. Kerrie was released after only five months but remained on parole.
A few weeks after Kerrie returned home, Elizabeth was dead.
Last summer marked the beginning of the trial for the 14 people involved in the decision to withhold life-saving medication from Elizabeth. All of them, including Elizabeth’s parents, were the adult members of a religious group known as The Saints—a tight-knit group that only has 23 members in total, spread over three families.
Jason and the group’s alleged leader Brendan Stevens were charged with murder because they allegedly withheld the insulin despite knowing how dangerous that would be. The others, including Kerrie, were charged with manslaughter because the prosecution said they didn’t give Elizabeth insulin or at least told Kerrie not to give it to her.
Crown Prosecutor Caroline Marco said it was alleged the group adhered to a belief "that God heals and that medication is to be rejected unless it is in the nature of no more than first aid, such as applying a bandaid".
Not a single one of the 14 suspects wanted any legal representation. They offered no evidence in their defense. There was no jury. It was just them against the government, with a judge making the final decision. On the other side, the prosecution called 60 witnesses to seek justice for Elizabeth.
And now the verdict is in.
The judge decided all 14 members were guilty of manslaughter. (Jason Struhs and Brendan Stevens were not found guilty of murder but they were found guilty of manslaughter.)
All of them will be sentenced next month, though it’s not clear from the reporting what punishments they might face.
In his 469-page ruling, Justice Martin Burns had very little sympathy for the way these people allowed a child to die on account of their faith. Just look at how he discussed Elizabeth’s mother:
As with her husband, the complete abdication on Mrs Struhs’ part of the legal duty she owed to her daughter constituted such an egregious departure from the standard of care a reasonable member of the community would observe in the same circumstances as to amount to a crime against the State that is deserving of punishment. Again, like her husband, when her conduct was viewed objectively, it must be seen as having involved grave moral guilt and disregard for human life.
He’s absolutely right about all of that. It’s a relief, really, to see a judge state the obvious instead of giving deference to the group’s religious beliefs.
What about the argument that the father and leader knew their actions would result in the daughter’s death? Burns said there was at least some reason to believe that was not the case, which is why the murder charges didn’t stick. This is what he wrote about Elizabeth’s father:
On the evidence before me, there remained a reasonable possibility that, in the cloistered atmosphere of the Church which enveloped Mr Struhs, and which only intensified once he made the decision to cease the administration of insulin, he was so consumed by a particular belief promoted without pause by all its members, that he never came to the full realisation Elizabeth would probably die, believing instead God would not allow that to happen.
I don’t personally believe he or Stevens were that oblivious to the consequences of their actions, but that’s irrelevant. They were absolutely complicit.
A lot of the details in this story are remarkably similar to a different faith-healing cult from Oregon: the Followers of Christ Church. Its members killed several of their children over the past two decades, by neglecting their treatable diseases, leading the Oregon legislature to eventually remove faith-healing as an exemption to homicide charges.
The simple fact is that children shouldn’t be sentenced to death because their parents are brainwashed by Jesus.
“Faith-healing” is nothing more than a myth promoted by certain kinds of Christians. It’s one thing if people pray to heal themselves—which would be useless but legal. But when they deprive a baby or child of medical treatment because of their own delusions, and their ignorance leads to the child’s death, they deserve to be branded as killers.
If there’s one silver lining to this story, it’s that Jayde Struhs, the older sister of Elizabeth, has been a force of sanity in the midst of all this chaos, even speaking against her family during the trial.
Jayde left the cult at 16, after coming out as a lesbian, and has been sharing her story with the media ever since.
After the verdicts were announced, she expressed some relief… and some criticism:
She said while it was a "good outcome", the "system failed to protect Elizabeth in the first place".
"We are only here today because more wasn't done sooner to protect her or remove her from an incredibly unsafe situation in her own home," Jayde said.
Elizabeth would have been much safer with her than the adults who decided prayer trumped medicine.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
I hope the judge gives every one of them the maximum sentence. I looked it up, it's 25 years. She was a CHILD. The only question I have is why the fuck were they allowed to keep her in their care after the first prison term?
There is no horror that cannot be, and has not been, justified in the name of religion. Religious belief NEVER trumps science, and no discovery of science has ever pointed to the truth of any religious doctrine. I hope everyone of those people does the full bit, and are shown to a very rough time in prison for what they did to that little girl.