Parents indicted in child’s death after alleged faith-healing
Monday, March 31, 2008 10:54 AM PDT
OREGON CITY (AP) — The parents of an Oregon City toddler have been indicted on charges of manslaughter and criminal mistreatment, after their daughter died of what officials are calling medical neglect.
Carl and Raylene Worthington were indicted on Friday. They are members of the Followers of Christ Church, whose members have a history of treating gravely ill children solely via prayer, instead of with medical attention. After several children whose parents were members of the church died in the 1990s, lawmakers passed new rules striking down legal shields for faith-healing parents.
Since then, there have been no troublesome reports of children’s deaths associated with the church, until the case of Ava Worthington, who died March 2 of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection.
The state medical examiner’s office has said that she could have been treated with antibiotics. Since the new laws took effect in 1999, said child abuse Detective Jeff Green of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, ‘‘We haven’t seen any cases of significant medical neglect . . . until now.’’
Before the law changed, church members who got in traffic accidents would take injured children home, rather than to the hospital, leaving police frustrated but powerless to intervene, Green said. In the two years after the law passed, detectives responded to two cases of sick or injured Followers of Christ children.
