Elizabeth Struhs' own parents denied her life-saving insulin, believing God would cure her. Then she died.

Jul 09, 2024

On January 7, 2022, eight-year-old Elizabeth Struhs was found dead in her Queensland, Australia 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 medication to God.

For six agonizing days, they 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 withheld insulin from her as well. Elizabeth fell into a coma and had to be taken to a hospital. When she was admitted, she only weighed 29 pounds. She spent a month recovering.

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Jason Richard Struhs and Kerrie Elizabeth Struhs were eventually sentenced to six months and 18 months in jail, 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.

Today marks the first day of the trial for the 14 people involved in the decision to deny Elizabeth life-saving medication. All of them, including Elizabeth’s parents, are 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 are charged with murder because they allegedly withheld the insulin despite knowing how dangerous that would be. The others, including Kerrie, are charged with manslaughter because the prosecution says they knowingly didn’t give Elizabeth insulin or 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".

All 14 suspects chose not to have any legal representation and there will be no jury. It’ll be them against the government, with a judge making the final decision.

A lot of the details are remarkably similar to a different faith-healing cult in 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 murderers.

If there’s one silver lining to this story, it’s that Jayde Struhs, the 25-year-old sister of Elizabeth, has been on a quest to take custody of her five younger siblings. In 2022, she had nothing positive to say about The Saints to the Australian show A Current Affair: “They’re extreme. They’re small. Controlled.”

She left the cult at 16, after coming out as a lesbian, and has been sharing her story with the media ever since. Despite her young age, those kids would be much safer with her than the adults who decided prayer trumped medicine.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)