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All 14 members of an extremist Christian sect in Australia have been found guilty of manslaughter after denying insulin to a little girl who needed it.

The backstory is horrifying:

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

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

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

Last summer marked the beginning of the trial for the 14 people involved in the decision to withhold life-saving medication from Elizabeth. All of them, including Elizabeth’s parents, were 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 were charged with murder because they allegedly withheld the insulin despite knowing how dangerous that would be. The others, including Kerrie, were charged with manslaughter because the prosecution said they didn’t give Elizabeth insulin or at least told Kerrie not to give it to her.



Not a single one of the 14 suspects wanted any legal representation. They offered no evidence in their defense. There was no jury. It was just them against the government, with a judge making the final decision. On the other side, the prosecution called 60 witnesses to seek justice for Elizabeth.

And now the verdict is in.

The judge decided all 14 members were guilty of manslaughter. (Jason Struhs and Brendan Stevens were not found guilty of murder but they were found guilty of manslaughter.)



All of them will be sentenced next month, though it’s not clear from the reporting what punishments they might face.
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