Couple charged after refusing to seek medical help for dying child

PHILADELPHIA (AP):

A Philadelphia couple who believe in faith healing over medicine and who were on probation in their son's pneumonia death were charged with murder yesterday after a second young child died under what a prosecutor called "eerily similar" circumstances.

Herbert and Catherine Schaible ignored a court order to seek medical care if their children needed it, prosecutors said yesterday. The requirement was a condition of the probation sentence they received after the death of their toddler son four years ago.

First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann says the Schaibles are entitled to their religious beliefs, until it endangers their children.

"How many kids have to die before it becomes extreme indifference to human life?" McCann asked in announcing the charges. "They killed one kid already."

The Schaibles are members and former teachers at the fundamentalist First Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia. The church's website quotes Bible verses purportedly forbidding Christians from visiting doctors or taking medicine and suggests it's a sin to trust in medicine over faith.