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At the death of Edgar Lopez in August 2014, this 13-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds. For two days, his condition had deteriorated rapidly and he was unable to keep food and had trouble breathing. His eyes were fixed and his skin was cold to the touch, his father, Delfino Lopez Solis, told the jurors while he was crumbling sobbing in court earlier this month.
Lopez's parents were reluctant to 911. They were told that the insulin their son was supposed to take for his type 1 diabetes was a poison, Solis said. Timothy Morrow, an herbalist based in Torrance, California, had instead recommended rubbing lavender oil on the boy's spine and prescribing a herbal medicine that he believed would heal Lopez for life.
"He told us that if we took the child to the hospital, he would be killed there," Solis said through an interpreter, according to KABC.
Instead, Lopez went into cardiac arrest and died the next day. The Los Angeles Medical Examiner then determined that he could have survived if he had received proper medical care.
On Monday, Morrow, whom prosecutors accused of contributing to the boy's death, did not dispute the challenge of a head of child mistreatment. He had previously been convicted of unlicensed medicine practice at a trial that ended last week and was sentenced Monday to four months in jail and 48 months probation for both counts. Charging charges, said Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer in a statement. . The case, Feuer writes, "highlights the serious health and safety risks of obtaining medical advice from a license-less person and the appropriate training that goes with it".
As part of his sentence, Morrow, 84, was warned that he could be charged with murder if his practice resulted in the death of another person in the future. He was also ordered to cover the funeral expenses of Lopez and pay a fine of $ 5,000.
On his website, Morrow describes himself as a master herbalist and claims that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 48, but that he was cured by taking herbs and modifying her diet. He sells a variety of dietary supplements, laxatives and protein powders, including a product called Pancreas Reg, which he reportedly told Lopez's mother as "God's insulin" and claims to improve blood sugar. A disclaimer warns customers that these claims have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and that the tablets contain prickly pear leaves, red elm bark. , banana leaf extract and other herbs are not intended to treat, cure or cure. prevent any disease.
During the February trial, Morrow's lawyer, Sanford Perliss, attempted to use this warning to prove that his client was not responsible for Lopez's death and that the responsibility lay with the boy's family. He argued that Lopez's mother had been interested in treating her son with herbal medicines before meeting Morrow and said that she had testified that she frequently used traditional remedies while growing up in Mexico.
"No one was holding a gun on Edgar's mother," Perliss said in his closing statement, according to the Daily Breeze. "No one stole the insulin from this house so Edgar's mother could no longer use it. Edgar's mother wanted to do what the mother did." Edgar wanted to do it. "
But Solis claimed that Morrow had "brainwashed the family," telling him that the for-profit American health system had everything to gain by making sure people remained sick. In her own testimony, Maria Madrigal, Lopez 's mother, told through an interpreter that the herbalist had seemed to her "like a god" and that she had witnessed several of her seminars on herbal medicine and had been so upset that she had agreed to recruit new clients for him, eventually gaining a total of $ 753 in commissions.
"I had doubts at first, but I kept going to class," she said, according to KABC. "He has something that convinces you."
She then explained that her son's diabetes symptoms seemed to have dissipated for a short time before returning two months before his death. The boy's pediatrician had warned her, but she chose to seek Morrow's advice instead of giving her the prescribed insulin shots. Morrow assured her that everything was fine and that it was not necessary to listen to the doctors, she said, telling her that her son was going through a "crisis of healing "that would eventually cure his diabetes.
Instead, the state of the seventh year worsened. Solis testified that Morrow went to the family's home three times during the two days preceding the boy's death in August 2014, and told them that Lopez needed herbs and of a reflexology – a massage technique consisting of applying pressure on the feet – to release toxins from his body, according to KABC. When the 13-year-old seemed to stop breathing, Morrow would have advised him to open the windows so that air and light could enter.
In his testimony, Daniel Lopez recalled learning that the laborious breathing and inability to move of his younger brother were part of the "healing crisis" that followed his course. When he looked online, he saw the same advice from other herbalists, he told the jury. But then Edgar stopped responding to him and his breathing became more and more superficial. The family again called Morrow, and the herbalist finally told them that they could call 911. Edgar died at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center the next day.
Morrow did not testify at the trial, but a video broadcast by prosecutors showed that when he was questioned by the police, he denied telling Madrigal not to give insulin to his son. He also claimed that he could not have called an ambulance because it would violate the family's privacy. He did not know at all why the boy was dead, he said, adding, "They said that he had a heart attack – he did not do it when I l? ;have seen."
According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors from the Los Angeles County Attorney's Office had considered bringing charges of a crime against Morrow, but had preferred to refer the case to the city's attorney. Last Friday, before Morrow invoked his call unchallenged, a jury failed to agree unanimously on whether he was there. guilty of the offense of pedophilia. Lopez's parents were not charged with the death of their son.
At the start of the trial, jurors were shown several videos in which Morrow claimed that a tumor was a "gift from God" and that "insulin is very toxic to the system". As part of his sentence, he was sentenced to remove YouTube. videos where he advocates the use of herbs instead of seeking medical treatment and records any similar statement on his website. Since Tuesday morning, however, his YouTube channel has remained a repository of medical opinion denied and otherwise questionable, including that vaccines and vaccines are an "absolute poison" for children. (Last week, in the midst of an increase in the number of measles cases reported in the United States, YouTube said it would stop showing ads on anti-vaccine videos, but did not show up. would not remove these videos from the site.)
Morrow's most popular video, which states that all diseases can be traced back to a clogged colon, has been viewed nearly 59,000 times.
In another video, he claims that a tumor absorbs waste that the body can not eliminate through the proper channels "and places them in a capsule to prevent them from getting into your bloodstream and do you kill ". If you have a brain tumor, he says, you just need to clean your colon properly and the tumor will eventually move and be eliminated.
"The reason you know you do not have to have surgery to remove a tumor is because you did not have to have surgery to put it there," he says.
At least one other person listened to Morrow's questionable medical opinion, KABC reported. After watching the TV report on the lawsuit, a widower was introduced in mid-February and told the police that his wife had refused to treat his cancer with conventional medical methods before his death because Morrow told him had advised not to do it. But the judge in charge of the case felt that the trial was too advanced for another mourning witness to testify.
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