Inquest hears doctor warned in 2019 that Elizabeth Struhs was unsafe with her mother, and child safety found no harm in 2013 report

A hospital specialist warned in writing in July 2019 that Elizabeth Struhs could not safely be returned to her mother. About two and a half years later she was dead.

That was the evidence on the first day of a coronial inquest in Brisbane on Monday, Oct. 12. Coroner Ainslie Kirkegaard is examining the adequacy and appropriateness of the responses by child safety, health and other government agencies before Elizabeth's death.

The 2019 warning

Elizabeth, a type 1 diabetic, died on Jan. 7, 2022, at the family home near Toowoomba, west of Brisbane. She died of diabetic ketoacidosis after her father, Jason Struhs, stopped her insulin days earlier. Members of a religious group called the Saints gathered around her to pray and sing.

The first brush with death came in 2019. Elizabeth was admitted to the intensive care unit at Queensland Children's Hospital on 17 July 2019. An experienced medical specialist who helped care for her told the inquest the girl was "extremely unwell" and needed intubation and a ventilator. The specialist cannot be named for legal reasons.

The next day she wrote a nine-page report raising safety concerns and sent it to child safety and police. Counsel assisting Simon Hamlyn-Harris read from it.

"Type 1 diabetes is a life-threatening condition that requires complicated care by the parents," the report said. "If her mother continues to deny the requirement for insulin and the related treatments Elizabeth could not be in Kerrie's care." The word "not" was in bold, Hamlyn-Harris told the court.

The specialist said her concern also rested on the mother's beliefs. Kerrie Struhs would not come to the hospital to see her child. In a phone call she denied her daughter was sick or would ever need medication, the specialist said. Kerrie had no questions about Elizabeth's condition.

Kerrie Struhs was later convicted, in 2021, of failing to provide the necessaries of life over the 2019 incident.

The 2013 report

The inquest also heard that authorities had a warning about the family nearly a decade before Elizabeth died.

In 2013, Elizabeth's older sister Jayde Struhs told her school nurse that her parents "had become involved in an extreme religion based on the Bible." Jayde was 16 and soon left home for Brisbane. Hamlyn-Harris said she was worried about the controlling nature of the religion and what she was required to believe, for herself and her siblings. He said she was "at a point where she wanted to get out."

The inquest heard that Kerrie Struhs had been a member of the Saints for years. She had refused medical or dental treatment for her daughters, believing God would heal them.

The first witness was a manager from the Department of Child Safety, who also cannot be named. She told the coroner that no harm was identified at the time. In her account, the teenager's report did not amount to a "detrimental effect of significant nature" and did not require a child-safety notification.

The manager also said the system has changed since then. Staff now rely more on professional judgement than on prescriptive guidelines. Jayde Struhs attended the start of the inquest. She knew nothing of events at the family home when her sister died.

The convictions

All 14 adult members of the Saints were convicted of Elizabeth's manslaughter. They include her father Jason, her mother Kerrie, her brother Zachary and the group's leader, Brendan Stevens. In 2025 Brisbane's Supreme Court sentenced both parents to 14 years in jail. Stevens received 13 years.

The group did not believe in medicine. It claimed Elizabeth would be healed, or resurrected after death.

What the inquest has to answer

The criminal trials dealt with the people in the room. The inquest is about the agencies outside it.

Two questions are now before the coroner. What did child safety do with the specialist's 2019 report, which reached both the department and police? And did the 2013 threshold, which the manager described as having since changed, leave a warning sign unacted on? The inquest is continuing.