The deputy medical examiner thought the family was being evasive. Eric Tonsfeldt had been dispatched to the pistachio-green house in Oregon City on the night of March 5, 2017. Inside he found Sarah Mitchell in bed, her dead newborn in her arms.
Mitchell is a member of the Followers of Christ, a sect known for refusing medical treatment. She had received no prenatal care. Three women without medical training guided her delivery that afternoon.
Tonsfeldt listened as the family insisted that the baby, whom they had named Ginnifer, had seemed healthy for most of the afternoon, then suddenly stopped breathing. They couldn’t explain why the baby appeared so underweight. Their answers to many of Tonsfeldt’s questions were vague. Nobody would make eye contact with him.
Later, investigators would discover that 13 minutes after Ginnifer’s birth, Followers began exchanging a series of worried texts. “Not good breathing,” one wrote in a group chat. Another requested prayers: “She’s really bad.” (One person in the chat would later advise deleting the messages.)
No one had called 911 as the gaps between each breath increased. When 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.
Tonsfeldt gently collected the newborn and examined her in another room. She weighed 3½ pounds, roughly half that of an average full-term infant. He found no signs of injury or trauma.
The medical examiner still felt that something was awry. To play for time, he asked if someone would make him a cup of coffee and headed to the kitchen. As Tonsfeldt waited, one of the baby’s grandfathers approached him and blurted out an unexpected question: Would it make a difference if Ginnifer had a twin?
There was another baby, a girl named Evelyn. She was alive.
In the dim light of a bathroom, Tonsfeldt found women huddled over a tiny newborn, who was barely making a sound. They were feeding her from an eyedropper.
He told the family to get her to a hospital. After Evelyn’s grandfather made it clear they weren’t going anywhere, Tonsfeldt summoned the police, who delivered an ultimatum: Take Evelyn to the hospital or they’d do it themselves.
Evelyn’s family relented. A patrol car followed to make sure they got there. She was admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit in Portland with respiratory distress syndrome. With the help of a breathing machine and a feeding tube, Evelyn began to stabilize. An autopsy would later conclude the same condition, common in premature babies, had caused her sister’s death.
The Mitchells were charged with murder by neglect, as well as criminal mistreatment for failing to get Evelyn medical care. That left authorities with another challenge: Who would care for Evelyn?
Her family assumed any custody arrangement would be temporary and suggested Marshall and Jennifer Phillips, a couple born and raised in the Followers. But Marshall was no ordinary Follower. Once, when his young son became gravely ill, he brought him to a hospital. In the eyes of the state, that made Marshall and his wife suitable candidates to look after Evelyn.
Evelyn’s family didn’t know then that Marshall’s choice to save his son had set him on a yearslong journey, one that would eventually lead him away from the only life he’d ever known. And that he would take Evelyn with him.
For more than a century, states have wrestled with how to address the deaths of children whose parents refuse them medical care for religious reasons. 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 from pneumonia. Since then, courts have repeatedly held — in cases where Christian Scientists refused treatment or Jehovah’s Witnesses declined blood transfusions — that adults are free to reject medical care for themselves.
Whether they can be compelled to provide medical care for their children is another matter, one that’s been left to states to decide. Courts have generally deferred to legislatures on this question.
Video: This Secretive Religious Sect Doesn’t Believe in Medical Care
Marshall Phillips was raised in the Followers of Christ, which forbids medical care. When his son fell gravely ill, he took him to the hospital. That choice set him on a yearslong journey, one that would eventually lead him away from the only life he’d ever known.
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. (The sect numbered between 1,500 and 2,000 at its peak.) Most or all of those deaths were preventable, according to the state medical examiner at the time, who estimated that the child death rate in the sect was 26 times that of the general population.
The revelation of those deaths, in The Oregonian and other news outlets, prompted state lawmakers to act. In 1999, they removed spiritual treatment as a defense for second-degree manslaughter and criminal mistreatment. In 2008, prosecutors filed their first case against Followers parents after a 15-month-old died from 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 during this period, prompting the Legislature in 2011 to do away with the spiritual defense for any crime. Among those supporting the change: the Christian Science church, which by then had softened its stance amid a steep decline in membership. In a letter to lawmakers that year, a church official wrote: “Spiritual care should never be practiced at the expense of a child’s life.”
Changes in Oregon law — and prosecutors’ willingness to pursue parents who watched their children die — spurred a slow but perceptible shift: Deaths of children in the Followers have become an anomaly. Ginnifer Mitchell’s death in 2017 came amid that yearslong decline. Since then, one child has died due to lack of medical care.
During this same time frame in Idaho, where the laws protect parents who rely only on faith healing, reporting by ProPublica found at least 11 babies and children of Followers died from treatable conditions.
Still, Ginnifer’s death shows how the most entrenched elements of faith-healing communities resist aggressive enforcement. Sarah Mitchell chose to give birth without doctors or nurses, even as her sister was in prison for failing to provide medical care for her premature newborn, who died in 2009. And Sarah’s lack of prenatal care was such that she realized she was carrying twins only when her labor continued after her first baby emerged.
Evelyn might not have survived if police didn’t have the law on their side, allowing them to intervene and demand that her parents take her to the hospital.
The stories of Evelyn and Marshall Phillips — still the subject of legal proceedings today — offer a rare view into the closed community and reveal both the power and the limits of the state’s efforts to compel parents to seek medical care for their children.
Marshall’s ancestors were among the earliest members of the Followers, whose history dates to the late 1800s, when faith-healing sects were active in the Midwest. 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. White’s emotional sermons earned him the moniker “the crying preacher.”
Followers believed the devout earned their place in the afterlife through good acts. They also believed that God heals. The doctrine stems from a passage in the Book of James, which proclaims “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. Those who visited doctors risked being shunned.
By the 1950s, White broke 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 age 67. Baptisms ended after that, effectively sealing the faithful from the outside world. The Followers never identified White’s successor. To this day, the congregation has no pastor. The lack of a spiritual leader seems only to have intensified members’ influence on one another.
The sect’s practices include other unusual elements: The Bible doesn’t figure in their services, which consist mostly of congregants singing hymns.
In many respects, Followers lead conventional lives. As a boy born in 1975, Marshall rode his bike, ate sugary treats, watched TV and listened to 1980s rock bands like Van Halen. His parents took him and his siblings camping and saved up for trips to Disneyland.
But his life was also 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. Starting at age 7, Followers’ children are separated by gender and age into their own pews. Marshall understood that he would grow up, and grow old, with the kids seated around him. He was instructed not to befriend kids outside the church. Followers considered them “worldly,” the sect’s derisive term for those focused on terrestrial, rather than celestial, concerns.
Like his peers, Marshall never visited a pediatrician. He was never vaccinated. His mom anointed his forehead with extra virgin olive oil when his head throbbed. He endured chicken pox and whooping cough and eventually recovered from both — proof, he believed, of God’s healing powers.
His parents, like others in the sect, made exceptions for dental care. They accepted the use of 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 figured he’d work for a Follower. He’d marry one, too. Marshall 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. She was 14 and he was 18. They married when Jennifer turned 17, the age girls in the Followers typically wed.
Jennifer’s father had died the year before, surrounded by men from the church. Members were expected to care for the dying, with men tending to men and women to women. Her father never went to the doctor, and family members think he died from heart failure. He was 37.
Women typically give birth in their parents’ homes, and Jennifer was no exception. She delivered her first child, Mary, in the living room, attended by her mother, her mother-in-law, aunts and other women. Marshall was there, too. The rest of the men waited out of sight, smoke from their cigarettes drifting into the living room. She had two more children after that, both sons.
Today, at 50, Marshall looks like the epitome of a suburban dad. With his receding hairline, beard and broad physique, you could picture him browsing the aisles of The Home Depot. He possesses a gentle quality and doesn’t shy away from even harsh self-reflection.
The Followers abide by what they view as traditional gender roles, with men leading their households. Many male Followers work as contractors, electricians and plumbers; Marshall works as a consultant for a heating and air conditioning company. Women mostly focus on the home and their children. 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. He believed the sect’s teachings about earning one’s way to salvation, and he spent many Sunday afternoons visiting the sick and caring for the dying. He and his wife never challenged the institution that shaped their lives.
The couple saw no reason to visit the doctor or take their kids to one. That changed in the summer of 2013. They watched as their energetic preteen son, Nick, suddenly turned lethargic. Walking even a few feet left him out of breath, and he was soon confined to the couch.
His symptoms worsened over a matter of hours. As his extended family gathered to offer support, one relative wondered whether he had diabetes. Millions of Americans manage the condition with medication, but for a Follower, it could amount to a death sentence.
Marshall remembered that his cousin Bo had suffered from the disease more than a decade earlier. Bo Phillips developed flu-like symptoms and within days lapsed into a coma. He died in his parents’ bed at 11 — Nick’s age. A sheriff’s detective arrived to find Bo in a diaper, his body gaunt from dehydration. His fever was so high that his body registered a triple-digit temperature three hours after his death. He never went to a doctor.
As Marshall pondered what to do about Nick, he knew his relatives expected him to rely only on his faith in God. For a Follower, going to the hospital was unthinkable.
He knew that Followers had been prosecuted for failing to seek medical attention. He panicked at the thought that he — or worse, his wife — could go to prison if he chose not to take Nick to the hospital. Marshall felt trapped between his faith and the law.
He could see his son was struggling to breathe. The boy lay on the couch, barely conscious.
Marshall decided to act. “I’m taking him to the hospital,” he announced. In the same breath, he apologized.
Some family members expressed disapproval as he carried Nick to the door. One urged him not to turn away from God. 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, his unresponsive boy in his arms. Medical staff whisked him into the back, where a team quickly assessed Nick’s condition.
He had acute onset Type 1 diabetes. His blood was turning acidic, his organs shutting down. The Phillipses had arrived just in time. Without treatment, the doctors later said, he was hours from death.
That Marshall dwelled on his own fate as his son lay dying would leave him with a searing shame. “I wish I could be the great dad who jumped up and saw that his kid was sick and ran into the hospital,” he would say years later. “But I was weighing out the consequences. That’s the truth. And I’m not happy to say that.”
Marshall quickly grasped the implications of his decision. Relatives who had poured into the house to pray for Nick as he lay near death stopped coming around as he recovered. When the Phillipses tried to make holiday plans, some relatives didn’t reply. Nick’s closest friend stopped talking to him.
Marshall descended into depression. He turned to the Bible, scouring passages for proof that God forbade medical care. He found only references that showed how doctors were held in high esteem, such as Luke, whom Scripture refers to as a “beloved physician.”
On his commute to work, Marshall started listening to sermons of preachers from other denominations. He was moved by their messages of grace, forgiveness and redemption, concepts he’d never heard much about at church.
Over time, Marshall came to believe that God did heal — and he could use doctors to do it. He also came to believe that by saving his son, he had freed himself. And eventually that choice placed him at the center of another family’s tragedy.
When Evelyn arrived at the hospital a few hours after her birth in 2017, she was small even for a premature baby. She had been born about eight weeks early and weighed less than 4 pounds. Her glucose level was perilously low. She needed a feeding tube and a machine to help her breathe and remained in the neonatal intensive care unit for 11 days.
As criminal authorities investigated her parents, Evelyn’s fate rested with child welfare workers and a Clackamas County circuit judge. At a hearing to decide who would take care of Evelyn, lawyers for the Mitchells argued that Evelyn should come home with them while the investigation played out.
For child welfare officials and prosecutors, the proposal was out of the question. “These parents let this child’s twin die in their arms without making any effort at all to seek medical care,” one prosecutor told the judge. “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.”
On the stand, Marshall testified about his decision to take Nick to the hospital. He told the judge that his son was thriving and pledged to make sure Evelyn received medical care. (Evelyn’s grandfather had called him the night before to ask whether he’d be willing to take her in.)
Evelyn would stay with the Phillipses for now, the state decided.
Two days later, the couple drove to the hospital to meet Evelyn. She was so tiny that Jennifer’s mother bought her outfits from the doll aisle of Fred Meyer.
A year later, in the summer of 2018, Sarah and Travis Mitchell pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide for Ginnifer’s death and criminal mistreatment for failing to get Evelyn medical help. The agreement called for the couple to spend six years and six months in prison — the harshest sentence ever handed down to parents in the sect.
The couple’s lawyer told the judge that the Mitchells grieved the loss of Ginnifer and loved Evelyn. “Travis and Sarah are utterly sincere, decent and caring human beings,” he told the judge. (The Mitchells and their lawyer did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)
As part of their plea bargain, prosecutors insisted the Mitchells sign a statement. “We should have sought adequate medical care for our children,” it read, “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.
The message was torn down later that day.
The Phillipses had begun attending services at an evangelical Christian church. The couple worried Followers would find out they were drifting away, so they picked a large out-of-the-way congregation where they figured it would be easy to go unnoticed. The church, like other mainstream evangelical congregations, encouraged its members to visit doctors.
Even then, Marshall didn’t sever the family’s ties with the Followers. He couldn’t face the prospect of walking away from his parents and people he’d known his entire life.
The Phillipses weren’t the only Followers questioning their faith. Around the same time, a loose network of men had been quietly meeting to pray and discuss the Bible. Starting in 2018, an estimated 150 to 200 people left the sect, an exodus spurred mostly by a desire to engage with the Bible. Many who walked away had also become disillusioned with the Followers’ rejection of medicine.
Like generations born into the sect after White’s death, Marshall had never been baptized. Doing so would offend the Followers.
But in the fall of 2018, he decided he could no longer ignore his desire to experience the rite. He saw it as a public expression of the spiritual shift he’d undergone. Jennifer did too.
One Sunday afternoon that October, the couple joined dozens of others on the muddy banks of the Willamette River. They waded into the water as a friend held a sleeping Evelyn, then 19 months old. By this point the state had made the Phillipses’ guardianship permanent.
The baptism spelled the end of Marshall and Jennifer Phillips’ time in the Followers. Before the ceremony, Marshall had texted his family to let them know it was happening.
Soon after, his mother texted him to say goodbye.
Earlier this year, Evelyn climbed into the back seat of the Phillipses’ car, a bouquet of tangerine-colored roses that she picked out resting on her lap.
It was March 5, her ninth birthday. Every year on this day, the couple drives Evelyn to the Followers cemetery to visit her twin sister’s grave.
Evelyn admired the stuffed bear she had charmed Marshall into buying. She especially liked the polka dot ribbon twirled around its neck. “I think if Ginny was here,” she said, “she would have liked this for her birthday.”
Marshall pulled up to the cemetery gate. The sect owns this land at the end of a rural two-lane road about 10 miles from downtown Oregon City. Generations of Followers are buried here. Among them: Evelyn’s great-great grandfather, Walter White, the sect’s founding pastor.
Ginnifer’s grave lies near a stand of evergreens. Evelyn knelt down. “I miss you, Ginny,” she said, placing the stuffed bear on the tombstone.
Nearby lay the grave of Hayden Edwards. He died two days after his 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.
Marshall walked the neat rows, passing a fresh grave, one that showed the limitations of Oregon’s laws. The state had stepped in several years ago when parents had refused to get medical treatment for their teenage son, who was experiencing renal failure. After prosecutors intervened, the parents agreed to a plea deal and made sure he got care. But when the son turned 18 this year, he declined further treatment. He died within days.
Marshall paused when he came to his own father’s headstone. It had “Dad” etched into the granite. He learned of his father’s death last year from a friend who heard the news from someone else. One of Marshall’s relatives called to let him know he wasn’t welcome at the funeral.
The day after the visit to the cemetery, guests filled the Phillipses’ home for Evelyn’s birthday party. Three-tiered display stands held homemade carrot cupcakes topped with swirls of cream cheese frosting — treats Evelyn had requested. Evelyn, ebullient, pinballed (and later roller-skated, using one birthday gift) between friends, parents and grandparents. Her long hair spilled out from under a pink helmet. The family had invited Evelyn’s birth parents, who joined them in the living room to watch her open gifts piled high on a table.
Evelyn first got to know them while they were in prison, and she knows why they were there. The couple spends time with her twice a month, taking her on adventures to the Oregon Zoo, roller skating and the park. She is their only child.
At the party, the Mitchells kept their focus on Evelyn, smiling broadly as she tore the wrapping from packages. They pulled out their phones to record her delight.
“Daddy!” Evelyn exclaimed at one point, marveling over one of her gifts.
Marshall and Travis both swiveled toward her in response.
The Phillipses’ friends filtered back into the kitchen. The Mitchells stayed behind. Their birthday card lay at one end of a table in the living room. “Not a day goes by where you aren’t missed, loved and thought of,” it read. “We thank God every day that we get to be a part of your life.” They signed it: “All our love, Dad & Mom.”
Travis ducked into the other room to look for Marshall. He thanked 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.
The Phillipses still live in Oregon City, home to most members of the sect. Marshall sees them, including his extended family, around town. Some ignore him. Others offer an obligatory nod. Rarely do they stop to talk. The Followers continue to gather every Thursday evening and Sunday morning without him.
Still, there are hints of change, albeit invisible ones. One former Follower told detectives in 2023 that some younger parents are quietly taking their children to the doctor.
For now at least, Evelyn is an outsider to the Followers. Marshall raised her that way. In June, she took a step that could further alienate her from the sect: She was baptized.
Four months after that, in October, tensions flared between Evelyn’s two sets of parents. The Mitchells filed a motion in court effectively seeking to terminate Marshall and Jennifer’s permanent guardianship — they acknowledged that Evelyn opposed the move — then withdrew the filing in November. (The Mitchells also criticized the Phillipses for allowing Evelyn to participate in this article.) The Mitchells are now seeking expanded visitation time with Evelyn.
Marshall wants Evelyn to determine her own future — to marry when she’s ready, not at 17. He talks to her about college, a possibility he wouldn’t have broached with his children as a Follower. Today he regrets how rigid he was, during his years in the sect, with his older children. Evelyn has brought out a paternal tenderness in him.
Some months ago, Jennifer took Evelyn to the pediatrician for a checkup. Evelyn swapped her school uniform for an oversized hospital gown that brushed the floor when she stood.
A cheery medical assistant stepped into the room. “She’s up to date with vaccines,” the woman announced. “We do offer the HPV at age 9. Do you want to do that today?”
Jennifer and Marshall weren’t vaccinated as kids, nor were their other children. Jennifer, who visited a doctor for the first time in her mid-40s, hadn’t heard about the HPV vaccine, which can prevent most cancers caused by the human papillomavirus. But she trusted Evelyn’s pediatrician. If vaccines were recommended, she wanted Evelyn to have them.
A physician assistant looked in Evelyn’s ears and shone a light in her eyes. She tapped her knees to check her reflexes. All signs pointed to a healthy girl.
“Now,” she said, “I’m going to listen to your lungs.” She placed a stethoscope on the girl’s chest, the sound of the ventilation system humming in the quiet room. Evelyn, whose lungs once nearly failed her, took a deep breath.
How We Reported This Story
Reporter Noelle Crombie relied on records from the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office and the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, including detectives’ interviews with Sarah and Travis Mitchell, their parents and other members of the Followers of Christ; photographs taken during the execution of search warrants; investigative summaries by detectives and records obtained by investigators; Oregon City Police Department reports; recordings of the March 16, 2017, circuit court hearing where Evelyn’s initial custody status was determined and the July 9, 2018, hearing in Clackamas County Circuit Court where the Mitchells were sentenced; Clackamas County Circuit Court records; Clackamas County Department of Communications 911 audio recordings; Oregon City Police Department body-worn camera footage; Evelyn’s medical records from the OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, which her legal guardian Marshall Phillips obtained at The Oregonian/OregonLive’s request; historical legislative records in the Oregon State Archives; and archival records from the Followers of Christ. Crombie observed many of the interactions she describes in the story. For others, she relied on official records and the memories of those who were directly involved.
