Child, father found dead in Marina
A 9yearold boy and his father were found dead in their Marina apartment Wednesday evening in what police are investigating as a murdersuicide.
The San Francisco medical examiner’s office on Friday identified the son as Pierce O’Loughlin and the father as 49yearold Stephen O’Loughlin.
The tragedy was preceded by a bitter custody battle between the boy’s parents, animated by the father’s opposition to vaccinations, court records show.
Stephen O’Loughlin had agreed to begin vaccinations on Tuesday, the day before the deaths. A trial on the matter had been scheduled for Tuesday, but court records state the proceedings were delayed until March.
Lorie Nachlis, an attorney for Pierce’s mother, Lesley Hu, said vaccination was only one of the issues at play.
“I think it is undeniable that Pierce’s father suffered from untreated mental illness, which resulted in his taking the life of his son and his own life,” Nachlis said in a statement. “I believe that he did this horrid act in order to exercise the ultimate control over Lesley.”
Nachlis wrote, “Yes, the parents disagreed about vaccinations, but they disagreed about other issues affecting the child’s wellbeing. In fact, they disagreed about whether Pierce was a healthy child or a sick child. Was his stuffy nose a product of allergies or something bigger? Pierce wasn’t killed because of a disagreement over a stuffy nose and he wasn’t killed because of a disagreement regarding vaccinations. He was killed for much more complex reasons.”
Nachlis said the March hearing would have determined control of all future medical decisions.
The victims were discovered just after 6 p.m. Wednesday, after officers performed a wellbeing check at the apartment on the 3800 block of Scott Street. The weapon used was a gun, police records state.
Two people familiar with the investigation said the boy’s mother asked police to check on the apartment, after
hearing that Pierce hadn’t shown up for school that day at Convent & Stuart Hall in San Francisco.
Sarah Leffert, chief advancement officer for the Catholic private school, said the community was “devastated by these events” and praying for the family.
Hu filed for sole legal custody of the boy in July, nearly four years after the couple divorced in November 2016. The parents had shared both physical and legal custody over Pierce’s medical decisions since the divorce, meaning that both had to approve “vaccinations of any kind,” court records show.
In her filings, Hu cited what she described as O’Loughlin’s increasingly troubling adherence to the “antivaxxer” movement — the scientifically baseless theory that vaccines cause autism or other illnesses.
The Bay Area has emerged as a hotbed for vaccine opposition over the last several years, with a significant percentage of parents refusing to have their children immunized. In 2016, California repealed the personalbelief exemption that parents could claim to keep their children from being vaccinated — a law that prompted many to seek medical exemptions from doctors instead.
O’Loughlin had refused to allow Pierce to receive vaccinations since he was very young, Hu wrote in court documents, arguing that the decision jeopardized Pierce’s health and potentially his enrollment in school.
“(O’Loughlin’s) stance on vaccinations has taken on a cultlike tone,” Hu wrote in a Sept. 14 court filing.
O’Loughlin had become so preoccupied with the child’s health that he was prone to videotape Pierce’s breathing, multiple times a day, “to document a stuffy nose,” Hu claimed.
Hu suggested O’Loughlin’s views stemmed from his involvement in a newage, selfhelp group. From 2012 to 2016, she said, O’Loughlin spent thousands of dollars on sessions with the organization, and “became convinced that the government was out to get us and was trying to mindcontrol us,” Hu wrote.
In his own court filings, O’Loughlin argued that his aversion to Pierce’s vaccinations was rooted in concern for his son’s health. Pierce, O’Loughlin said, was “vaccineinjured” and had suffered serious side effects like vomiting and drastic weight loss when he was vaccinated as a young child.
“This is not an ‘antivax’ parent seeking to prevent his child from being vaccinated,” O’Loughlin’s attorneys wrote in a Jan. 5 court filing. “For the average child, the risktobenefit ratio for vaccines is in favor of vaccinations. For a certain subset of society, however, that is not the case. Pierce is one of those people.”
Hu denied that Pierce had ever been diagnosed by his physicians as vaccineinjured, and stressed that Hu’s current doctors had highly recommended that Pierce be brought up to date with his vaccinations and flu shot.
Attorneys who represented O’Loughlin at various stages of the divorce and custody proceedings did not respond to requests for comment.
In her Friday statement, Nachlis said that as O’Loughlin “was seeing that he was losing his control, he punished Lesley with the ultimate act of violence: Killing her child. She will suffer, as intended, for the rest of her life.”
Nachlis said she’s been working in family law for 40 years, and “I have had cases that have caused me to fear that a parent might do the unthinkable, but this was not one of them.”