WaPo: A mom refused to take her unvaccinated toddler to the hospital for a fever. Armed police officers tore down the door.

WaPo: A mom refused to take her unvaccinated toddler to the hospital for a fever. Armed police officers tore down the door. by Antonia Noori Farzan:

The scene looks like something from a middle-of-the-night drug raid. Guns drawn, police officers in tactical vests surround a beige ranch house in a subdivision. With a single decisive kick, one busts down the door. “Come out with your hands up!” an officer yells, as a flashlight’s blinding beams begin sweeping the room.

But police in Chandler, Ariz., weren’t seeking out a trove of illegal narcotics when they showed up at the modest home in the Phoenix suburbs on Feb. 25. Instead, they were searching for a 2-year-old who had come down with a dangerously high fever. The boy’s mother, Sarah Beck, had allegedly ignored doctors’ orders and refused to take him to the emergency room, fearing that she would get in trouble because he wasn’t vaccinated. When officials showed up to do a welfare check hours later, the child’s father refused to let them in, saying that everything was fine and the fever had passed. Eventually, police decided to take matters into their own hands.

“They treated us like criminals, busting in our door,” Brooks Bryce, the toddler’s father, told KPNX last month. “I mean, I don’t know what kind of trauma that did to my kids.”