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In Queensland, Australia, a formal public hearing is taking place to determine if government officials could have done more to prevent the needless death of a little girl who died because of her parents’ religious beliefs.
The inquest, as it’s called, examines the death of Elizabeth Struhs. On January 7, 2022, the eight-year-old Elizabeth was found dead in her 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 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 to her.
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.
In 2025, all 14 adult members of their extremist Christian sect were found guilty of manslaughter and later sentenced to anywhere from 7 to 14 years in prison.
And now, the Queensland coroner, Ainslie Kirkegaard, has opened a probe into the situation to determine if any of the government workers who had contact with the family over the years could have done more to prevent Elizabeth’s death.
It’s not a trial; it’s more of an information-gathering process for the future. The inquest began a week ago and will continue for another week; over 30 witnesses are scheduled to testify and all of them will maintain their anonymity throughout the process.
What we’ve learned so far is that the people with the power to step in never did in part because they didn’t want to trample on anyone’s religious rights. For example, one witness noted that were reported concerns about Kerrie Struhs in 2013 that said she was involved with a “controlling” religion “based on the Bible,” which led to her children being isolated. That led the witness to fill out a “Child Concerns Report”… but the fact that the kids weren’t being harmed meant it wasn’t elevated to a more serious “Child Safety Notification,” which would have alerted her superiors. Even in hindsight, though, that witness noted, “I would still conclude this was a Child Concerns Report.”
But after the 2019 incident, other witnesses said they were ready to elevate the issue. They were unfortunately stymied by investigators who said there was no reason to step in because they felt Jason, the father, would provide his daughter with adequate medical treatment. After all, he promised to inject Elizabeth with insulin even if his wife wouldn’t. That ended in 2021 when he joined the extremist Christian group that his wife was already part of.
We’ve also learned this week that doctors were concerned enough about the mother that they recommended she be forced to take a mental health assessment… but that, too, was overruled by officers involved in child safety. They said Jason would be able to take care of everything even if the mother couldn’t.
It was a pattern with those officials:
… the court heard from a police officer who had attended the meeting. He told the court he’d served as a child safety liaison for 10 years.
“I learned early on … you couldn’t change child safety’s mind once they had made their decision,” the officer told the court.
“I was never going to change their mind regardless of what I said.”
The officer said the attitude was not confined to a single child safety officer.
You can’t blame them for prioritizing family reunification, but they had a blind spot, it seems, when it came to the family’s religion.
We’ve also learned that correctional officers tasked with figuring out if Kerrie was a threat to Elizabeth after 2019 had no clue about the details of that case, so they concluded that she wasn’t a serious risk to anyone.
A senior correctional services officer told the court Kerrie should have been flagged for the “serious offenders unit” due to causing “serious child harm”.
That would have led to additional oversight over her case, the officer said.
…
The parole intake officer conducted an “immediate risk assessment” of Kerrie at the meeting.
The court was shown the file, which include the question: “Has the offender described any issues that may pose an immediate risk to themselves, others or impact on their immediate management?”
The officer marked this “no”.
Apparently, the lack of access to older information was due to an administrative error.
Still, what we’ve learned so far is that people who had the power to step in and save Elizabeth didn’t do it or couldn’t do it. That’s due to both bureaucratic bullshit and because they didn’t realize how much of a problem her faith was. They didn’t know Jason was just as brainwashed as the mother. They didn’t think parents would let their kid die because of their faith.
You have to wonder if they would have taken more drastic measures if religion wasn’t involved.
Instead, the desire to send Elizabeth back home overrode all the red flags officials saw. Even when doctors said the mother was not safe, the system found a way to keep Elizabeth with her parents, not realizing that was essentially a death sentence.
One possible outcome in all of this, I hope, is that medical authorities realize they should listen to their doctors a hell of a lot more than people under the influence of extremist faiths that reject medical intervention.
A lot of the details in Elizabeth’s 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. A recent ProPublica report found that many of those deaths were preventable.
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. And medical professionals should be allowed to intervene on behalf of the child when they discover those beliefs.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
Immediately remove the other children from these religious psychopaths! How horrifying!
She could've been saved through science, technology and modern medicine.
Unfortunately, it's far too late now. Blind superstition took away what might have been.