David and Collet Stephan have a beautiful family. On that, at least, there is little debate. In the many photos they have posted online, the devout couple and their children are blond and brightly smiling and often dressed in matching outfits. Collet is pretty with a graceful posture and almond-shaped eyes. David is tall and handsome with a mane and a beard.
The Canadian Rockies surrounding their home in rural Alberta complete the picturesque family portraits.
In the comments under their photos, however, there are hints that something is amiss.
“They are a poor excuse as parents.”
“QUIT SMILING.”
“Baby killers!”
There may be little doubt about the Stephan family’s good looks, but there is a major debate over their beliefs.
On March 5, the Canadian government opened criminal proceedings against David and Collet. The charge: failing to provide their 19-month-old son, Ezekiel, the necessaries of life.
According to prosecutors, David and Collet stubbornly refused to take their sick son to see a doctor, instead giving him home remedies such as smoothies containing hot pepper, ginger root, horseradish, onion and apple cider vinegar. Even after warnings from a family friend who is a nurse, the anti-vaccine couple took him to a naturopath for echinacea instead of to a doctor for an exam. Echinacea is an herb “used for colds, flu, and other infections, based on the idea that it might stimulate the immune system to more effectively fight infection,” according to the National Institutes of Health. “Study results are mixed” on its usefulness, the NIH says.
It was only when Ezekiel suddenly stopped breathing that they rushed him to a hospital.
By then, it was too late.
Ezekiel died from bacterial meningitis and empyema, two conditions routinely cured with antibiotics, a medical examiner told the court last week, according to the Lethbridge Herald.
If convicted, the parents could spend up to five years in prison.
The case has stirred outrage across Canada and the United States. It comes at a time when belief in natural and homeopathic remedies is on the rise in North America. More controversially, anti-vaccine sentiment is also surging, leading to a resurgence of once vanquished diseases like measles and whooping cough.
The toddler’s tragic death raises questions of whether and when parents have a duty to take their children to the hospital, despite their personal or religious beliefs.
Ezekiel Stephan wasn’t old enough to speak for himself when he died. Nonetheless, he has become a lightning rod for a raging debate.
In his death, some see dangerous medical quackery. In his parents’ trial, however, others see a witch hunt.
“Isn’t losing their child punishment enough?” one local wrote in the Lethbridge Herald.
“Children have a right to evidence-based medical care, not just prayer and useless folk remedies,” shot back a commenter.
That debate has dominated the lead up to and duration of the trial.
It wasn’t until a year after Ezekiel’s death that the Stephans were charged.
The couple was shocked.
“There’s nothing in the world that will bring him back,” David told the Calgary Herald. “What good could possibly come out of this?
“What could possibly be worse than the suffering we’ve endured for the past year?”
Several Stephan family members suggested the family was being singled out for its beliefs. David’s father, Anthony Stephan, founded a company called Truehope that sells a natural supplement that claims to fight bipolar disorder.
“Anthony Stephan, a devout member of his Church in Alberta, Canada, was away on business when his wife took her life by asphyxiation after affixing a hose to the exhaust pipe of the family minivan,” the Salt Lake City Weekly reported in 2013. “Stephan’s wife had been diagnosed with bipolar-affective disorder, the same ailment that had afflicted her father, who had also taken his life.”
When two of Anthony’s kids were also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he “felt that traditional medication didn’t save his wife and wouldn’t help his children,” according to the alt-weekly. He and a friend devised a nutritional supplement, TrueHope, that they tested out on the two kids. According to a promotional video, the kids felt an effect and were able to quit their medications.
In 2004, the Canadian government’s health department, called Health Canada, pressed charges against Truehope, claiming the company did not have the scientific evidence to back its claims.
TrueHope won two years later, but the case left the Stephan family feeling persecuted.
“Whatever’s going on here stinks,” Brad Stephan told the Huffington Post shortly after the child neglect charges were filed against his brother and sister-in-law. “I don’t see anybody else getting charged for having meningitis.
“I almost have to wonder if we don’t have an officer somewhere or someone just acting overzealous . . . We just feel this is just really over the top and we’re not understanding why.”
Anthony Stephan insisted that the family is not anti-medicine, despite their criticism of pharmaceutical companies and vaccines.
“We don’t always go to the doctor immediately. If it persists we do, absolutely,” he told the Calgary Herald.
“If there’s any insinuation that they were withholding care from the child, it’s absolutely wrong,” he said, saying medical records showed his family visited doctors.
“This is something that the family missed, no question,” he admitted, adding: “It wasn’t a question of avoidance at all.”
On Facebook, however, David Stephan has claimed that his family has been targeted by Big Pharma and others opposed to his beliefs.
“Since this court case has begun, there has been a great deal of opposition and outright malicious attacks from various organizations, some having pharmaceutical interests and others just having a very strong opposing agenda,” he wrote on March 8, three days into the trial.
He has said his son was on a TrueHope pill called EMPowerplus — “the most powerful daily supplement in the world” — at the time of Ezekiel’s death, but denied that it was intended as a treatment for his illness, which the family believed was a case of croup.
And he has bemoaned being “in the international spotlight” and criticized media for reporting that he and his wife gave the sick toddler “maple syrup.”
“Anyone in their right mind would see how ridiculous this is, and if it wasn’t such a serious matter, it would be laughable,” he wrote on Facebook. “The idea of boosting an immune system with maple syrup, juice and frozen fruit is so illogical that I am left here shaking my head. As all of these items contain high amounts of simple sugars, I would suspect that they would serve to feed viruses and bacteria and actually do the opposite of boosting the immune system.”
David has dubbed the proceedings a “vaccine trial,” claiming the Crown represents the “vaccine agenda.” He says authorities are “looking to create the legal precedent through the court system that when a child falls ill, parents who chose not to vaccinate have a greater onus to seek mainstream medical attention sooner than parents that do vaccinate, and if any harm befalls the non-vaccinated child from an illness that there was a vaccine for, the parents can be held criminally liable.”
He also said his family’s fundraising websites had been taken down repeatedly and that they suffered online abuse.
Indeed, Facebook photos of his family have been slapped with incendiary labels. Someone tagged David as “Babykiller” and Collet as “Murderer.”
Even the kids, alive and dead, have been targeted.
Ezekiel has been tagged “I Was Murdered” while his siblings have been labeled “SaveMe.”
So far in court, prosecutors have tried to avoid this emotional minefield.
“We’re not saying the accused killed Ezekiel,” prosecutor Clayton Giles said near the beginning of the trial, according to the Lethbridge Herald. “They loved him.”
But, he added, the parents didn’t do enough to help their sick toddler, and are responsible for his death.
“They did not take Ezekiel to a doctor when they should have.”
Over the past two weeks, the jury has heard at times excruciating detail about Ezekiel’s demise.
Prosecutors claim the boy was sick for several weeks before being rushed to the hospital, where he was kept on life support for a week before passing away.
The defense insists Ezekiel had shown improvement after being given home remedies, and that it was only when he stopped breathing that he seemed dangerously sick.
On March 12, 2012, Collet called Terrie Meynders, a family friend and registered nurse who had been Collet’s birth attendant, to come look at the boy.
Meynders testified that Ezekiel was asleep when she arrived at the Stephans’ home. She listened to his breathing but couldn’t find anything wrong.
“It did not jump out at me that he was that seriously ill,” she told court, according to the Lethbridge Herald.
She did suggest, however, that he could have viral meningitis, and told Collet to seek medical help.
“I think you should take him to see a doctor,” Meynders testified, according to CBC.
Shortly afterwards, Collet called a local naturopath and asked about treatments for viral meningitis.
“You need to tell the lady to take the child to emergency right away,” the naturopathic doctor, Tracey Tannis, told an employee on the phone with Collet.
“I think you should see a medical doctor,” the employee, Lexie Vataman, relayed to Collet, according to court testimony.
Vataman also prescribed Ezekiel with an echinacea mixture, however.
By the time the Stephans drove to the naturopath to pick up the tincture a day or two later, however, Ezekiel’s body was so stiff from his illness that he couldn’t sit in his car seat, according to an interview — played in court — the couple gave to Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Instead, the couple put a mattress in the back of their vehicle to take him to the naturopath.
A few days later, on March 14, 2012, Ezekiel suddenly crashed.
“All of a sudden his breathing wasn’t normal,” Collet Stephan told RCMP.
They called 911 and performed CPR on the toddler as they drove to meet an ambulance, but the boy repeatedly stopped breathing.
“He was blue by the time we met up with the ambulance,” Collet said in the recorded interview.
Ezekiel was eventually airlifted to Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary. By the time he arrived, however, there was little they could do. Doctors testified in court that he had suffered cardiac arrest and was likely already brain dead, according to the Lethbridge Herald.
Five days later, Ezekiel was taken off life support.
The trial is expected to conclude next week.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Michael E. Miller
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14 Responses
This is just another scare tactic story. I read it with a grain of salt. Research & you will realize another whole side to this mostly made up story. However, in case you had no idea…
Forty-nine doses of 14 vaccines are recommended between birth and age 6. Between birth and age 18, 69 dosages of 16 vaccinations are encouraged. Each vaccination contains a toxic cocktail which would be illegal to give someone in oral form, but is considered perfectly legal to inject directly into a child or adult.
Vaccines have been linked with every illness imaginable. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to deny causation by vaccination, billions of dollars have been awarded by the vaccine courts for vaccine-injured children. Vaccine injuries include autoimmune disorders, autism, diabetes, attention-deficit disorder, Guillain-Barre syndrome, and death.
String them up and let them rot in prison,ask them,they would do it all over again. these anti vacers are ovdai avodah zara it makes so sense yet they worship their cause like a cult
Throw away the key.
Whatever you postion is on vaccines, lies don’t help.
This is the real story.
About four years ago, a young boy — 18 months — got sick. He had a slight cough and fever, that came and went for about a month. Some days he seemed sick; some days he was playing and acting fairly normal. The parents had a friend, who was a nurse, come in to check him over (they could not get into see a doctor because it’s hard to get appointments in some areas of Canada, due to socialized medicine, and this wasn’t an emergency). The nurse said she didn’t see anything serious.
They knew to look for things like high fevers, stiff neck, screaming for meningitis, but the boy never had any of these symptoms.
Then, one night in March, he suddenly spiked a higher fever and was having trouble breathing. They immediately called emergency services. They lived fairly far out in the country, so they decided to drive towards town and have the ambulance meet them.
Unfortunately, the ambulance that was dispatched was not the closest one, so it took longer to meet them than it should have. When it did arrive, it wasn’t equipped with the correct intubation equipment — which the child needed to save his life. He was taken to the hospital and placed on life support, but after five days was declared brain-dead.
So, this family did what any normal family would do. Their kid seemed to be a little sick, but had no serious symptoms. The most concerning thing was that he seemed to keep relapsing, and not recovering fully. That’s something to call the doctor about (which they did), but it’s not an emergency.
Until it was an emergency — unpredictably. At that point, they did call for help. Just like any normal parent would.
It’s easy to say, in hindsight, “He clearly was really sick, there were red flags, why didn’t they take him in sooner?” But there really weren’t. We only see red flags because we know the unfortunate outcome.
Finally, we don’t know that the boy actually died of meningitis. There was bacteria in his system that could have been meningitis on the autopsy, but he showed no classic signs of it. It’s just being assumed that that’s what it was.
To #2 & #3 So is that how you speak about the godel Rav Shmuel Kamenetzky ?
“It’s easy to say, in hindsight, “He clearly was really sick, there were red flags, why didn’t they take him in sooner?”
Errr – a kid too stiff to sit in his car seat – on his way to the naturopath a “day or two” after a call, to collect “medicine”? You anti-vaxers will clutch at any thread you can. But…. even not having vaxed, had they taken him to an MD, he would have been on antibiotics. Look at all the stuff they kept giving him – they knew he was very ill. But they still did not rush to the quack who provided the “tincture”. How stupid & irresponsible do these parents have to be before their child dies? Well, now we know.
This case doesn’t prove anything. Yes, a child that isn’t vaccinated obviously has a chance of getting different illnesses that could put his life at risk, and the anti-vaccination crowd understands that good and well. Their argument is that those risks which are a relatively small don’t make the detrimental affects of vaccination worth while.
The heading on this, labeling these parents as “anti-vac” is pure incitement against a growing number of people who are not accepting allopathic medicine’s brainwash of the public that vaccines and medicine are perfectly safe. This is not the issue, about which I could write volumes.
The issue is that the fact that they don’t believe in vaccinating doesn’t have much at all to do with this sad story.
I implore YWN to change the title, as it is only fueling incitement and bad sentiments about people who don’t toe the Western medical line and doesn’t add anything to the story. These people were interested in healing using means other than toxic medicines. Since when is giving toxic medicine to a child preferable? Required? This issue is primary; their attitude toward vaccinating is not relevant.
#4, I presume you are close to the family to know this. It only shows that a short news piece is not always factual.
Thank you “think and don’t sink” for a balanced account of this sad story. It would have been better if you didn’t claim that “socialized medicine” is the cause of hard-to-get appointments. How many people without money or access to charity have died because they couldn’t get medical help? How many have been denied vital treatment because their insurance won’t cover it?
Step Aside: One serious issue, all those illnesses that were a thing of the past, due to those vaccines, i.e. polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc. are coming back because some parents don’t vaccinate.
We all know that the vaccines adversely effect a very small percent of children and I understand the fear that parents have over it. However, not vaccinating has a far greater risk to everyone.
The majority of food has the ingredients listed to enable parents to know what they are feeding their children, as do most drugs. So, why are the ingredients of vaccinations are not routinely disclosed?
The answer is simple, if parents knew exactly what substances vaccines contained, they would be less likely to have their children vaccinated, and this is why the contents are never disclosed to parents. To see exactly what is in vaccinations, Research before you contaminate the bloodstream of your precious loved ones.
Phenol is one of the ingredients in the holy flu vaccine. This is supposed to help stimulate an immune response. It was used by Nazis to exterminate Jews during WW2. It is also used in weed killers to help kill weeds. Reproductive systems, liver, kidneys and even the skin don’t play well with phenol.
This is only one from the real standout ingredients. Why on earth would anyone want to take this shot? How bad does everyone think the flu is? The flu is a good thing for the body to endure. Stop trying to stop every little thing from affecting you. There is no reason on earth to get this shot other than to appease a few coworkers or family members. Clearly, if you are forced by a company, that’s a different story. But otherwise, pay attention folks. KNOW what the heck you are putting into your body!
Yasher Koach Yeshiva World – it’s v’nahapachu! you posted “step aside”‘s comment even though it doesn’t match your usual “main stream” views on vaccines. Everything “Step Aside” posted is verifiable on government sites and certainly on the NVIC site, as well as MANY others.
For eric55 and others of the same set mind: It is clear to the individual who is courageous enough to think for him or herself critically that injecting infectious material cultured on animal organs mixed with recognized toxic substances into healthy babies and especially pregnant women is in fact absolutely denying the infinite ability of the Rofeh Ne’eman v’Rachaman to keep us healthy when we follow the logical “laws” of staying healthy. This is especially so in the face of many people waking up and rejecting this draconian means of keeping our children “disease free” while recognizing that our children are suffering and dying from diseases that were unheard of before the govt mandates of vaccination. There are also huge numbers of nonvaccinated families who can be looked at for their all around vibrant health and functioning. If the govt REALLY cared about the health of the “individual” – would they mandate vaccines which are actually approved with the knowledge that there will be deaths and debilitation (as is clearly printed on product inserts). The info is all there for the asking. You can listen to the likes of Paul Offit (vaccinologist and vaccine patent holder) on YouTube and then listen to Dr. Russel Blaylock or Dr. Sherry Tenpenny…You need a fraction of seichel if you have any sense of emes to see who is speaking the truth.
Another witch hunt! The medical system kills people all the time, and people don’t stop and ask what’s going on. But if G-D forbid your anti vaccines, or natural minded your looked at with a microscope and when that imperfection is found, your pounced upon like a tiger jumping from the bush.