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.
Idaho’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 of them die.
It is a sharp contrast to neighboring Oregon, which in 1999 began to roll back its own exemptions. Not only did the possibility of prosecution in Oregon prove a powerful incentive for parents to seek medical care when their child’s life was at risk, the change in law also gave the state legal leverage to order medical care for surviving and future children — which happened in one Oregon case, days before Emma Joyce died in Idaho.
According to backers of Oregon’s law, the goal isn’t to punish parents for allowing the avoidable death of a child; the goal is to prevent more deaths.
“If you don’t do anything, kids are going to die,” said John Foote, a former district attorney in Oregon who prosecuted several parents in his local Followers of Christ congregation after their children died from treatable ailments. Keeping more children from dying is “the whole point,” he said.
The graves of Emma Joyce and her sister and brothers are clustered near one another at Peaceful Valley Cemetery, a hilltop graveyard that belongs to the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect with at least four churches in Idaho. All four children’s headstones are made from the same light gray stone, bear the words “beloved daughter” or “beloved son” in the same font and design, and have their mother’s and father’s names etched into the back.
Throughout the cemetery are more of the same: siblings buried in child-sized plots with matching headstones.
In addition to the plots belonging to Emma Joyce’s family, there are two newborn siblings who died from treatable birth complications, four infant siblings who died from various causes, and three brothers whose death records prompted doctors to speculate that an immune deficiency ran in the family.
Two babies in a single Followers family succumbed to meconium aspiration, despite how rare it is for a newborn to inhale the tarry stool known as meconium and then die from it. A study of more than 160,000 full-term births found less than 2% of newborns had meconium aspiration syndrome, and only 1.2% of those died, because healthcare providers know how to manage and treat it.
When a child dies unexpectedly in Idaho or elsewhere in the U.S., it almost always triggers close scrutiny from police and social workers. That investigation might find the parents committed a crime, such as beating or starving them, but it can also identify other risks to surviving siblings, such as a health condition that would otherwise go unnoticed — something that doctors who reviewed records for ProPublica suspected in several deaths within faith-healing families.
Surviving siblings aren’t automatically shunted into foster care in such cases, but social workers do visit the home and lay eyes on the children to make sure they are safe and healthy. If they’re not, prosecutors can seek a court order for medical care or other needs.
A parent whose substantiated abuse or neglect leads to a death is permanently registered as high risk in child protection records.
Earlier this year, in response to the death of a newborn whose parents were flagged as high risk, Idaho lawmakers passed Benji’s Law. When such a parent has a new baby, the state now must do an expedited safety check to make sure the new baby isn’t in danger.
Surviving children may be temporarily removed from their parents’ custody. Idaho authorities in 2024, for example, took in eight children after the death of a medically fragile teenage boy in a home where police said they found “deplorable, unsafe” living conditions. Idaho also took a newborn from a mother’s custody this year when the mother was indicted in the deaths of her twin toddlers; she pleaded not guilty to murder charges and is scheduled to go to trial in January.
But it’s a different story when Idaho police or social workers find that the child’s death was a consequence of choosing faith over medicine.
According to Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, the law’s exclusion of faith-healing practice from the definition of “neglect” means child protection laws for neglect don’t apply, so unless there is evidence of a crime, his deputies can’t take action and don’t notify child welfare agencies.
A deputy attorney general said something similar in 2016, when she testified before a Children at Risk-Faith Healing legislative work group.
“If you were saying that your child broke their femur and you were praying to resolve this medical issue, the Department of Health and Welfare cannot say that you are a neglectful parent because you are not seeking medical treatment,” Mary Jo Beig told the legislators.
The department doesn’t track how many of the reports it receives about medical neglect are related to faith healing. Among all 318 investigations it conducted over the past seven years into reports of medical neglect by itself, the department said it found actual neglect in 28. Most of the time, the agency said, it worked with the family to address root causes so that children could safely remain in their homes; in 10 of the 28 cases, though, kids had to be placed in state custody.
There is one way to mandate medical care without a parent’s blessing: an obscure law that says a doctor can try to persuade a judge that without treatment, the child’s life “would be greatly endangered.” There was a case in recent years where school staff noticed a student from a faith-healing family having up to 13 seizures a day, which ultimately led to a doctor going to court to say the girl needed emergency medical attention.
But use of the emergency care statute is unusual. The law says a judge must still consider any spiritual treatment the child is receiving before ordering lifesaving treatment. And, as Beig pointedly told legislators in the 2016 hearing, “someone needs to know about the child” and notice the ailment before they die from it.
That rarely happens with Idaho’s insular faith-healing communities. Many families homeschool. Few socialize outside the sect. Some families don’t even register their child’s birth with the state until much later, when they need a birth certificate to navigate through society.
Ultimately, because doctors seldom see children in faith-healing families, they typically don’t get a chance to discover ticking medical time bombs — much less witness moments of extreme medical distress when they’d have the strongest legal grounds for advocating compulsory care.
Rather, the first doctor to see the child’s grave illness is often the pathologist who performs their autopsy.
None of the parents of children in this story responded to inquiries from a reporter. ProPublica is not identifying them or using the children’s full names out of respect for the families’ privacy.
Nathan Kangas, an unordained elder in one of Idaho’s Followers churches, said few people are willing to speak because of past news coverage that they felt mischaracterized them. He said parents in his roughly 500-member church keep their children away from the doctor to teach them to avoid the curse of turning to medicine as adults.
Donahue, the Canyon County sheriff and one of the most vocal opponents of Idaho’s concessions to parents who practice faith healing, said he believes they want their children to survive. Other law enforcement officers and former members of the sect echoed that, saying members of the faith are good parents, except when it comes to medical care for their families.
“There’s no doubt in my mind, they love their kids just like you or I would love our kids,” Donahue said. But their church has erased the impulse most parents would have to call 911 for an ambulance or to rush their child to an emergency room, he said.
“They’re indoctrinated, they’re conditioned,” he said.
The social media posts of a mother from the Idaho Followers who lost three boys hint at her grief. A family photo from 2022 shows a baby with the family’s three other children. The next family photo in 2024 shows the same three older children, but with a different baby — one who, like the baby before, is now dead. There’s no updated family photo to document the addition of another baby boy in mid-2025, who died at 2 months old from an untreated infection.
The mother shared a meme that references a Bible verse from the story of Job, whose loyalty God tested by allowing Satan to destroy all the blessings in his life, including his 10 children.
Among those who reacted to the mother’s social media posts was another grieving parent: the mother of Emma Joyce and her three dead siblings.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica
