Faith-Healer Sought Medical Care While Recommending Against Same for Teen
Faith-Healer Sought Medical Care While Recommending Against Same for Teen » Knoxville News Sentinel
He was the “spiritual father” of a 15-year-old girl, terminally ill with cancer, who had convinced the girl’s mother to rely on faith instead of medicine to try to heal her.
But when it came to his own cancer and pneumonia, Ariel Ben Sherman was treated in a hospital in South Carolina, records show.
“It’s sad and ironic,” Loudon County Deputy District Attorney General Frank Harvey said.
Harvey said Sherman and Jacqueline Crank, the mother of Jessica Crank, rejected medical treatment for the girl’s rare cancer and turned to prayer instead. Jessica died in September 2002.
Sherman’s death certificate showed he died at age 78 on Nov. 28 in a South Carolina hospital of respiratory arrest while being treated for small-cell cancer.
“He (Sherman) lived by a different standard,” Harvey said.
Sherman’s death ends one part of a convoluted legal case that has wound its way through the judicial system.