Another child dies thanks to a mother so deluded she follows the instructions of her religious leader and lets the child starve to death for the crime of not saying the word “amen” at the end of a meal:

Police say the five suspects belonged to a small group of adults and children who operated for a time in East and West Baltimore. Police allege that the victim’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, 21, the first to be charged with murder, and others neglected Javon and allowed the boy to starve to death because they thought he was a demon for not saying amen after he was fed, according to police charging documents.

[...] In court documents charging Ramkissoon, Parker, the homicide detective, recounts eyewitness accounts from a source within the religious group. The source said the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette, “had a problem with baby Javon, who would not comply with mealtime ritual by saying ‘Amen’ after meals,” Parker wrote. “The more the Queen pressed Javon, the more resistant he became.”

The child stopped getting food and water, and he became thin with dark circles under his eyes, according to the document. Javon stopped breathing and was placed in a back room of a house in the 3200 block of Auchentoroly Terrace. At one point everyone was instructed to pray around the boy’s body, the document said.

“The Queen told everyone that ‘God was going to raise Javon from the dead,’” according to Parker’s statement of charges. “That resurrection never took place.”

The kid was two years old. He died in December of 2006. The members of “1 Mind Ministries” have been carting him around in a suitcase from place to place until May of this year when police got a tip and recovered the body. It was still wearing a diaper.

It’s hard to imagine how someone can be so caught up in their beliefs that they watch their own child slowly starve to death. And then, after the child’s suffering has finally ended, to believe that a bunch of people praying will bring him back to life? And when that didn’t work she still didn’t recognize that she had been had and seek out the authorities? Too much faith will make you stupid.

Hat tip to Unscrewing the Inscrutable.