Ex-Follower raises Oregon newborn rescued after her twin died without care

Oregon ended its spiritual-treatment defense in 2011 after two more child deaths

A deputy medical examiner dispatched to a pistachio-green house in Oregon City on the night of March 5, 2017, found a mother in bed with her dead newborn in her arms. Sarah Mitchell is a member of the Followers of Christ, a sect known for refusing medical treatment. She had received no prenatal care, and three women without medical training had guided her delivery that afternoon, according to an investigation by ProPublica, co-published with The Oregonian, of the Oregon City-based sect and the medical cases that followed.

The family told Eric Tonsfeldt that Ginnifer had seemed healthy for most of the afternoon and then suddenly stopped breathing. They could not explain why the baby appeared so underweight, their answers to many of his questions were vague, and nobody would make eye contact with him. Investigators later discovered that 13 minutes after Ginnifer’s birth, Followers began trading worried texts in a group chat: “Not good breathing,” one wrote. Another asked for prayers: “She’s really bad.” One person in the chat would later advise deleting the messages.

No one called 911 as the gaps between each breath increased. Asked why not, Ginnifer’s father later said, “Because it’s in God’s hands.” He anointed his daughter with olive oil and wept as he prayed that she would be OK. Ginnifer died in his arms at 7 p.m., four hours after she was born.

The investigation found that Ginnifer’s death showed how the most entrenched elements of faith-healing communities resist aggressive enforcement. Sarah Mitchell had chosen to give birth without doctors or nurses even as her own sister was in prison for failing to provide medical care for a premature newborn who died in 2009. Her lack of prenatal care was such that she realized she was carrying twins only when her labor continued after her first baby emerged.

Tonsfeldt gently collected the newborn and examined her in another room. She weighed 3½ pounds, roughly half that of an average full-term infant, and he found no signs of injury or trauma. Still feeling that something was awry, he asked for a cup of coffee and went to the kitchen. One of the baby’s grandfathers approached him and asked whether it would make a difference if Ginnifer had a twin. There was another baby, a girl named Evelyn, alive in a dim bathroom, barely making a sound while women fed her from an eyedropper.

Tonsfeldt told the family to get her to a hospital. When Evelyn’s grandfather made clear they were not going anywhere, Tonsfeldt summoned the police, and officers delivered an ultimatum: take Evelyn to the hospital or they would do it themselves. The family relented, and a patrol car followed to make sure they arrived. Evelyn, born about eight weeks early and weighing less than 4 pounds, with a perilously low glucose level, was admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit in Portland with respiratory distress syndrome. She remained there 11 days, on a breathing machine and a feeding tube. An autopsy would later conclude that the same condition, common in premature babies, had caused her sister’s death.

The Mitchells were charged with murder by neglect and with criminal mistreatment for failing to get Evelyn medical care. Who would care for Evelyn became a question for child welfare workers and a Clackamas County circuit judge, and lawyers for the family argued that she should come home while the investigation played out. A prosecutor told the judge that “These parents let this child’s twin die in their arms without making any effort at all to seek medical care,” and, “And simultaneously they failed to seek medical care on behalf of this child and placed her also at extreme risk of death.” She continued: “We send parents to prison for failing to adequately undertake their duty to their children.”

Evelyn’s relatives, expecting any custody arrangement to be temporary, suggested Marshall and Jennifer Phillips, a couple born and raised in the Followers. But Marshall was no ordinary Follower: raised in the sect, which forbids medical care, he had once carried his own gravely ill son to a hospital, and in the eyes of the state that made him and his wife suitable candidates to care for Evelyn. He took the stand, told the judge that his son was thriving and pledged to make sure Evelyn received medical care; her grandfather had called him the night before to ask whether he would take her in. The state decided Evelyn would stay with the Phillipses. Two days later the couple drove to the hospital to meet her — she was so tiny that Jennifer’s mother bought her outfits from the doll aisle of Fred Meyer.

The legal question behind those proceedings has been unsettled for more than a century. As early as 1901, a father in New York who believed in the “power of God to heal the sick through prayer” was prosecuted for failing to call a doctor for his young daughter, who died of pneumonia. Courts have repeatedly held that adults are free to reject medical care for themselves, in cases involving Christian Scientists who refused treatment and Jehovah’s Witnesses who declined blood transfusions. Whether parents can be compelled to provide care for their children has been left to states, and courts have generally deferred to legislatures.

Oregon’s own record includes a toll that predates any prosecution. For decades, Oregon’s law gave latitude to faith healing and authorities did little to intervene. Between 1989 and 1999, 18 children of the Oregon City-based Followers died, and the sect numbered between 1,500 and 2,000 at its peak. The state medical examiner at the time said most or all of those deaths were preventable and estimated the child death rate in the sect at 26 times that of the general population. Reporting by The Oregonian and other outlets prompted lawmakers to act. In 1999 the Legislature removed spiritual treatment as a defense for second-degree manslaughter and criminal mistreatment, and in 2008 prosecutors filed their first case against Followers parents after a 15-month-old died of untreated bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection. A jury convicted the girl’s father of a single count of criminal mistreatment, a misdemeanor, and acquitted her mother.

Two more children in the sect died without medical attention, and in 2011 the Legislature did away with the spiritual defense for any crime. The Christian Science church, which by then had softened its stance amid a steep decline in membership, supported the change. In a letter to lawmakers, a church official wrote: “Spiritual care should never be practiced at the expense of a child’s life.” Changes in Oregon law, and in prosecutors’ willingness to pursue parents who watched their children die, have made deaths in the Followers an anomaly; since Ginnifer’s death in 2017, one child has died from lack of medical care. In Idaho, where the law protects parents who rely only on faith healing, ProPublica has reported that at least 11 babies and children of Followers died from treatable conditions. The investigation concluded that Evelyn might not have survived if police had not had the law on their side, allowing them to intervene and demand that her parents take her to the hospital.

The Followers of Christ date to the late 1800s, when faith-healing sects were active in the Midwest, and Marshall Phillips’ ancestors were among the sect’s earliest members. The faithful later migrated west, starting congregations in Idaho. In the 1930s, a charismatic Followers preacher named Walter White left Idaho for Oregon City, then a lively hub for the timber and paper industries, and his emotional sermons earned him the moniker “the crying preacher.” Followers believed that God heals and that the devout earn their place in the afterlife through good acts, a doctrine drawn from the Book of James: “And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” Seeking medical care was viewed as an abandonment of faith, and those who visited doctors risked being shunned.

By the 1950s, White had broken ties with other Followers congregations. He later said that Christ had visited him in a dream and told him the world would soon end, and so would baptisms. White died in 1969 at 67; baptisms ended after that, effectively sealing the faithful from the outside world. The congregation never identified a successor and has no pastor to this day, which seems only to have intensified members’ influence on one another. The sect’s practices include other unusual elements: the Bible doesn’t figure in Followers services, which consist mostly of congregants singing hymns.

Marshall Phillips was born into that community in 1975. In many respects his boyhood was conventional — he rode his bike, ate sugary treats, watched TV, listened to 1980s rock bands like Van Halen, and his parents took the children camping and saved up for trips to Disneyland. But his life was circumscribed by his faith. Several times a week he accompanied his parents to functions at the beige meetinghouse set back from busy Molalla Avenue in Oregon City, where, starting at age 7, Followers children are separated by gender and age into their own pews; he understood he would grow up and grow old with the kids seated around him. He was instructed not to befriend children outside the church — Followers considered them “worldly,” the sect’s derisive term for those focused on terrestrial, rather than celestial, concerns. He never visited a pediatrician and was never vaccinated; his mother anointed his forehead with extra virgin olive oil when his head throbbed, and he recovered from chicken pox and whooping cough, which he took as proof of God’s healing powers. His parents, like others in the sect, made exceptions for dental care: they accepted Novocain but refused the ibuprofen the dentist recommended to address lingering pain after a procedure.

Marshall knew from a young age that his future would be determined by the church. He and Jennifer went on their first date in a courtship ritual the Followers call a carload — small groups of teens who drive together to get ice cream or coffee — when she was 14 and he was 18, and they married when Jennifer turned 17, the age girls in the sect typically wed. Her father had died the year before at 37, surrounded by men from the church — members were expected to care for the dying, with men tending to men and women to women; he never went to a doctor, and family members think he died from heart failure. Women typically give birth in their parents’ homes, and Jennifer delivered her first child, Mary, in the living room, attended by her mother, her mother-in-law, aunts and other women, with Marshall there while the rest of the men waited out of sight, smoke from their cigarettes drifting into the living room; the couple had two more children after that, both sons. Marshall works as a consultant for a heating and air conditioning company, and Jennifer cleans houses to supplement their income and homeschooled their kids for a time. As a Follower, Marshall said, he pressured his children to fit in at church, believed the sect’s teachings about earning one’s way to salvation and spent many Sunday afternoons visiting the sick and caring for the dying; he and Jennifer never challenged the institution that shaped their lives.

That changed in the summer of 2013. The Phillipses watched as their energetic preteen son, Nick, suddenly turned lethargic; walking even a few feet left him out of breath, and his symptoms worsened over a matter of hours. As extended family gathered, one relative wondered whether he had diabetes — a condition millions of Americans manage with medication, but one that for a Follower could amount to a death sentence. Marshall remembered his cousin Bo, who had suffered from the disease more than a decade earlier. Bo Phillips developed flu-like symptoms and within days lapsed into a coma, dying in his parents’ bed at 11 — Nick’s age. A sheriff’s detective found Bo in a diaper, his body gaunt from dehydration, his fever so high that his body registered a triple-digit temperature three hours after his death. He never went to a doctor. Marshall knew Followers had been prosecuted for failing to seek medical attention, and he panicked at the thought that he — or worse, his wife — could go to prison. He felt trapped between his faith and the law, and he could see his son struggling to breathe, barely conscious on the couch. “I’m taking him to the hospital,” Marshall announced — apologizing in the same breath. Some family members expressed disapproval as he carried Nick to the door; one urged him not to turn away from God, and another whispered the name of a hospital where he should take the boy. Marshall and Jennifer, who agreed with his decision, sped north on Interstate 5 to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in North Portland. “Can you help my son?” he begged as he rushed into the emergency department with his unresponsive boy in his arms. Doctors found acute onset Type 1 diabetes — Nick’s blood was turning acidic and his organs shutting down. Without treatment, doctors later said, he was hours from death.

Marshall did not treat that decision as a simple one. Years later he said, “I wish I could be the great dad who jumped up and saw that his kid was sick and ran into the hospital,” adding, “But I was weighing out the consequences. That’s the truth. And I’m not happy to say that.” Relatives who had poured into the house to pray over Nick stopped coming around as he recovered; when the Phillipses tried to make holiday plans, some relatives didn’t reply, and Nick’s closest friend stopped talking to him. Marshall fell into depression. He turned to the Bible, scouring passages for proof that God forbade medical care, and found only references showing that doctors were held in high esteem — among them Luke, whom Scripture refers to as a “beloved physician.” On his commute he began listening to sermons by preachers from other denominations, moved by their messages of grace, forgiveness and redemption. Over time he came to believe that God did heal and that he could use doctors to do it — and that by saving his son, he had freed himself.

The Phillipses began attending an evangelical Christian church, picking a large out-of-the-way congregation where they figured they could go unnoticed; like other mainstream evangelical congregations, it encouraged members to visit doctors. Even then Marshall didn’t sever the family’s ties with the Followers — he couldn’t face walking away from his parents and the people he had known his entire life. The Phillipses weren’t the only ones questioning their faith. Around the same time, a loose network of men in the sect had been quietly meeting to pray and discuss the Bible; starting in 2018, an estimated 150 to 200 people left, an exodus spurred mostly by a desire to engage with scripture and, in many cases, disillusionment with the rejection of medicine.

Like generations born into the sect after White’s death, Marshall had never been baptized, and doing so would offend the Followers. In the fall of 2018 he decided he could no longer ignore his desire to experience the rite, and Jennifer agreed. On a Sunday afternoon that October they joined dozens of others on the muddy banks of the Willamette River, wading into the water as a friend held a sleeping Evelyn, then 19 months old. By then the state had made the Phillipses’ guardianship permanent. The baptism spelled the end of their time in the Followers: Marshall texted his family before the ceremony, and soon afterward his mother texted to say goodbye.

The Mitchells pleaded guilty in the summer of 2018 to criminally negligent homicide for Ginnifer’s death and criminal mistreatment for failing to get Evelyn medical help. The agreement called for six years and six months in prison, the harshest sentence ever handed down to parents in the sect. Their lawyer told the judge that the Mitchells grieved the loss of Ginnifer and loved Evelyn, and that “Travis and Sarah are utterly sincere, decent and caring human beings.” Prosecutors required the couple to sign a statement reading, “We should have sought adequate medical care for our children,” and, “everyone in the church should always seek adequate medical care for our children.” The district attorney instructed the Followers to post the message at their Oregon City meetinghouse. It was torn down later that day. The Mitchells and their lawyer did not respond to requests to be interviewed for the account.

Evelyn’s ninth birthday falls on the date her twin died. Every March 5, the Phillipses drive her — this year with a bouquet of tangerine-colored roses she picked out on her lap — to the Followers cemetery, land the sect owns at the end of a rural two-lane road about 10 miles from downtown Oregon City, to visit Ginnifer’s grave. Generations of Followers are buried there, among them Evelyn’s great-great-grandfather, Walter White, the sect’s founding pastor. At this year’s birthday Evelyn knelt beside a stand of evergreens, set a stuffed bear she had asked Marshall to buy — she especially liked the polka dot ribbon twirled around its neck — on the tombstone and said, “I miss you, Ginny.” She had told Marshall, “I think if Ginny was here, she would have liked this for her birthday.” Nearby lies Hayden Edwards, who died two days after birth in 2023; his parents were convicted of criminal mistreatment for failing to seek medical care for him, the most recent faith-healing prosecution in Oregon. Another new grave marks the limits of Oregon’s law: after state intervention, a teenage son with renal failure was cared for under a plea deal, and when he turned 18 this year he declined further treatment and died within days.

Marshall paused when he came to his own father’s headstone, “Dad” etched into the granite. He had learned of his father’s death last year from a friend who heard the news from someone else, and one of his relatives called to let him know he wasn’t welcome at the funeral.

The day after the cemetery visit, guests filled the Phillipses’ home for Evelyn’s birthday party, where homemade carrot cupcakes topped with cream cheese frosting stood on tiered display stands — treats Evelyn had requested. Her birth parents joined the family in the living room, smiling broadly as she tore the wrapping from packages and pulling out their phones to record her delight. When she called out “Daddy!” at one point, both Marshall and Travis Mitchell turned toward her. Evelyn first got to know the Mitchells while they were in prison, and she knows why they were there; she is their only child. The couple spends time with her twice a month, taking her on adventures to the Oregon Zoo, roller skating and the park. A card from them read, “Not a day goes by where you aren’t missed, loved and thought of,” and, “We thank God every day that we get to be a part of your life,” signed “All our love, Dad & Mom.” Travis later ducked into the other room to look for Marshall and thank him for the evening; his wife had already slipped out of the house. These days, brief exchanges with Travis are as close as Marshall comes to interacting with other Followers.

Evelyn, whom Marshall is raising as an outsider to the Followers, was baptized in June — a step that could further alienate her from the sect. Four months later, legal proceedings around her custody continued. The Mitchells filed a motion in October effectively seeking to terminate Marshall and Jennifer’s permanent guardianship, acknowledged that Evelyn opposed the move, and withdrew the filing in November; they are now seeking expanded visitation time with Evelyn. The Mitchells also criticized the Phillipses for allowing Evelyn to participate in the article. Marshall wants Evelyn to determine her own future — to marry when she is ready, not at 17 — and talks with her about college, something he would not have broached with his own children as a Follower. Today he regrets how rigid he was, during his years in the sect, with his older children, and Evelyn has brought out a paternal tenderness in him.

Some months ago Jennifer took Evelyn to the pediatrician for a checkup, where Evelyn swapped her school uniform for an oversized hospital gown that brushed the floor when she stood. A medical assistant said, “She’s up to date with vaccines,” and, “We do offer the HPV at age 9. Do you want to do that today?” Jennifer, who had not visited a doctor until her mid-40s, hadn’t heard of the HPV vaccine, which can prevent most cancers caused by the human papillomavirus; she and Marshall weren’t vaccinated as children, nor were their other children. But she trusted Evelyn’s pediatrician — if vaccines were recommended, she wanted Evelyn to have them. A physician assistant examined Evelyn — ears, eyes, reflexes — and all signs pointed to a healthy girl. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to listen to your lungs.” Evelyn, whose lungs once nearly failed her, took a deep breath.

The Phillipses still live in Oregon City, home to most members of the sect, and the Followers still gather every Thursday evening and Sunday morning without them. Marshall sees extended family around town; some ignore him, others offer an obligatory nod, and rarely does anyone stop to talk. One former Follower told detectives in 2023 that some younger parents are quietly taking their children to the doctor.

ProPublica and The Oregonian reported the story using records from the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office and the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, including detectives’ interviews with the Mitchells, their parents and other members; photographs taken during the execution of search warrants; investigative summaries by detectives and records obtained by investigators; Oregon City police reports and body-worn camera footage; 911 audio recordings; recordings of the March 16, 2017 hearing that set Evelyn’s initial custody status and the July 9, 2018 hearing at which the Mitchells were sentenced; Clackamas County Circuit Court records; Evelyn’s medical records from OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, which Marshall Phillips obtained at The Oregonian/OregonLive’s request; Oregon State Archives legislative records; and archives of the Followers of Christ. Reporter Noelle Crombie observed many of the interactions described and relied on official records and the memories of those directly involved for the rest.