Faith healers charged, After their 2-year-old son died of untreated pneumonia in 2009, faith-healing advocates Herbert and Catherine Schaible promised a judge they would not let another sick child go without medical care.
But now they've lost an 8-month-old in what a prosecutor called "eerily similar" circumstances. And instead of another involuntary-manslaughter charge, they're now charged with third-degree murder.
"We believe in divine healing, that Jesus shed blood for our healing and that he died on the cross to break the devil's power," Herbert Schaible, 44, told Philadelphia homicide detectives after their ninth child, Brandon, died in April. Medicine, he said, "is against our religious beliefs."
The Schaibles were ordered held without bail Friday, two days after their arrest, although defense lawyers argued that they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community.
"He is incarcerated because of his faith," said lawyer Bobby Hoof, who described client Herbert Schaible's mind-set as resolute.
The only people theoretically at risk are the couple's seven surviving children, who are now in foster care, the lawyers said.
About a dozen children die each year in the United States when parents turn to faith healing instead of medicine, typically from highly treatable problems, said Shawn Francis Peters, a University of Wisconsin lecturer who has studied the subject.
At the Schaibles' sentencing in February 2011 in their son Kent's death, they agreed to follow terms of the 10-year probation, which included an order to get their children regular checkups and sick visits as needed. Catherine Schaible, 43, let her husband speak for her and never addressed the judge.
"It's very clear that the law says that religious freedom is trumped by the safety of a child," Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Engel Temin explained.
But a transcript of a later probation hearing that year shows probation officers were confused by their mandate to oversee the required medical care and felt powerless to carry it out.
"I think that we all on the jury thought that it would not happen again, that whatever social and legal institutions needed to be involved in their situation would just take over," Vincent Bertolini, 51, a former college professor who served as jury foreman at the Schaibles' first trial, said Friday. That jury convicted the couple of involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment.
The Schaibles belong to a small, insular circle of believers. Both are third-generation members and former teachers at their fundamentalist Christian church, the First Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Faith healers charged
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