Autistic boy killed during exorcism - News and Comment

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) has been following the latest case of an exorcism-related death at the Faith Temple Church of the Apostolic Faith in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On Friday, August 22, 2003, eight-year-old Terrance Cottrell, Jr., who suffers from autism, was wrapped in sheets and held down by church members during a prayer service held to exorcise the evil spirits they blamed for his condition.

According to the New York Times, "[h]is shirt was drenched in sweat when the church members who were holding him down, saying they wanted to rid him of demons, finally noticed that he was dead. He had urinated on himself, and his small, brown face had a bluish cast."

According to the medical examiner, there was extensive bruising on the back of the little boy's neck and it appeared that he died of mechanical asphyxiation from pressure placed on his chest. Pat Cooper, the boy's mother, told investigators that she held down one of Terrance's feet, while other women held down other parts of his body. Ray Anthony Hemphill, the preacher who led the spiritual healing service, held the boy's head and body down. Cooper said Hemphill's knee was pressed into the boy's chest at one point, but Hemphill, who weighs nearly 150 pounds, said that he at times lay on top of the boy, chest to chest. About two hours into the praying and the struggling, Hemphill got up but Terrance was still.

Some in Cottrell's Milwaukee community are outraged by the relatively lenient charges Hemphill faces. Though the county medical examiner ruled the boy's death a homicide, Hemphill has been charged only with felony child abuse, and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and five years of court supervision if convicted. No one else was charged.

Prosecutors claim that they could not lay more serious charges without proving that Hemphill was aware that his actions could harm the victim. "That is a subjective test," Milwaukee assistant district attorney Mark Williams told the Times. "What matters from a legal sense is what was in his mind when he was doing what he was doing. And in his mind, he was trying to help this child. This wasn't a normal situation."

"How can a child be dead and these people get charged with child abuse?" asked Mary Luckett, Cottrell's grandmother. "I can't even understand what these people are thinking. I don't care if it was a church. I don't care what they were trying to do."

This tragic exorcism death received a few days' coverage in the week following Cottrell's death, yet the mainstream media have failed to report that such deaths are nothing new. In the past eight years, there have been at least four other exorcism-related deaths in the United States, two of the victims children:

1995, San Francisco, California: Members of Jesus-Amen Ministries pummeled Kyung-A Ha to death as they tried to drive out her demons.

1996, Glendale, California: A fifty-three-year-old Korean woman died from "blunt force trauma" suffered during an exorcism. Her minister husband and two other males, one a Deacon at Glendale Korean Methodist Church, beat her with their fists and feet for several hours, trying to drive "the devil" out of her. She had consented to the exorcism.

1997, Bronx, New York: A five-year-old girl died after her mother and grandmother forced her to drink a lethal cocktail containing ammonia, vinegar, and olive oil and then bound and gagged her with duct tape. The two women claimed that they were merely trying to poison a demon that had infested the little girl several days earlier.

1998, Sayville, New York: Charity Miranda, seventeen, was suffocated with a plastic bag by her mother and her sister in an effort to destroy a demon inside her. The death came following hours of attempts to rid her of demons.

And now the tragic case of Terrance Cottrell, who died horribly because of a church whose congregation failed to exorcise itself of irrational beliefs.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group