Saturday, July 04, 2009

Newborn Died While Group Prayed

By Hailey Heinz
Copyright © 2009 Albuquerque Journal
Journal Staff Writer

The parents say their infant’s death was the will of God.
Albuquerque police are calling it a “suspicious” death, and the District Attorney’s Office must decide if a crime was committed.
A woman attending a church conference in Albuquerque with her husband didn’t call for medical treatment while giving birth to twins in a hotel room, even as one of the newborns struggled to breathe, according to a search warrant affidavit.
That child died while church members gathered in prayer. The other child survived, but the parents declined to take the infant to be checked at a hospital.
According to a search warrant affidavit, Samuel and Tammy Kaufman told police at the scene they did not believe in man’s medicine, only God, and that their child’s death was God’s will.
The case could set up a classic clash between child welfare laws and religious beliefs.
According to the affidavit, Tammy Kaufman was pregnant with twins and planned to have them at home. She went into labor suddenly on June 25 at the Sandia Courtyard Hotel and Convention Center at Eubank and Lomas, where the couple was attending a church conference.
According to the search warrant affidavit, the Kaufmans did not seek medical help and only called for rescue personnel to “collect the body” after one of the twins died.
After rescue personnel arrived, the Kaufmans told them the twins were both born alive in the early hours of June 26, but that one of them was “in distress and was struggling to breathe.”
Someone in the hotel room where the children were born then called other members of the church group and told them to pray. About 30 minutes later, the other twin also started having trouble breathing, according to the affidavit.
Church group members gathered and started to pray, according to the affidavit, and the second twin’s condition eventually improved, while the first twin stopped making noise, stopped breathing and died.
The search warrant is to collect medical evidence. It does not give a hometown for the Kaufmans.
After the child’s death, the Kaufmans called rescue personnel to collect the body. A detective on scene advised them to take the living infant to a hospital for an evaluation, but the Kaufmans would not let go of the newborn for treatment, saying they did not believe in man, only God, according to the affidavit.
The Kaufmans could not be reached for comment Friday, and it is unclear what church they belonged to. A group identified as the Church of God had a conference scheduled at Sandia on the day the children were born.
The child’s body has been sent to the Office of the Medical Investigator, and investigators are awaiting the results of an autopsy, according to the affidavit.
District Attorney spokesman Pat Davis said the DA’s Office is aware of the case but has not been formally presented with the police report.
A recent case in Minnesota garnered national attention when the parents of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser initially refused court-ordered chemotherapy for the boy’s Hodgkins lymphoma. The condition has a 90 percent cure rate in children if treated with chemotherapy and radiation, but doctors said Hauser had a 5 percent chance of survival without those treatments.
Hauser’s parents cited religious beliefs and side effects of the chemotherapy in opting for natural healing practices. The boy and his mother initially fled Minnesota, but then returned and agreed to the treatments.