[chris]

An 11-year-old girl whose parents relied on prayer instead of medicine died of untreated diabetes at the family's home in Weston, Wisconsin, on Easter Sunday 2008, in a case that later reached the state's highest court, according to court records and news accounts.

Madeline Kara Neumann died on March 23, 2008, of diabetic ketoacidosis, a complication of undiagnosed juvenile diabetes, an autopsy determined. In the days before her death she grew too weak to walk, speak or eat, and her skin turned a bluish-gray color, according to trial testimony. Her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, were devout Pentecostals who believed faith alone would cure her and did not seek medical care.

The recording included with this post is not the family's own call for an ambulance but a relative's effort to get help to the girl. An aunt in California, Ariel Gomez, telephoned authorities in Marathon County three times that afternoon asking for a welfare check. Gomez told a dispatcher that her niece was "severely, severely sick" and that the girl's mother was "very religious" and refusing to take her to a hospital, according to the recordings and news reports.

Before deputies reached the house, a 911 call came from the Neumann home reporting that the girl had stopped breathing, prosecutors said. Paramedics found her with no pulse, and she was pronounced dead at 3:30 p.m.

Prosecutors charged both parents with second-degree reckless homicide and tried them in separate trials. A jury convicted Dale Neumann on May 22, 2009, and a second jury convicted Leilani Neumann on August 1, 2009, court records show.

In October 2009 a Marathon County judge sentenced each parent to 10 years of probation and ordered them to serve six months in jail spread over six years, with the jail terms stayed while they appealed.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed both convictions on July 3, 2013, ruling 6 to 1 that the parents could be held criminally responsible for choosing prayer over medical treatment for their daughter.