Idaho seeks death penalty against mother who blamed vaccines for twins’ deaths

Crime National admin October 21, 2026 0 Comments

Idaho seeks death penalty against mother who blamed vaccines for twins’ deaths

Idaho is seeking the death penalty in a case that involves the deaths of two toddlers in Payette.

Payette County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ryon Sirucek filed a notice of intent Friday to seek the death penalty against the children’s mother, Andrea Shaw.

Shaw, 23, was charged with two felony counts of first-degree murder after her twins were found dead in their shared bed in May 2025, according to the Payette Police Department.

The twins, Dallas, a girl, and Tyson, a boy, were 18 months old.

Prosecutors have pointed to an autopsy report that said the children’s symptoms were consistent with being smothering.

Sirucek wrote in his notice that this case involved “aggravated circumstances” that warranted the death penalty.

Those circumstances, he alleged, were that Shaw killed two people at the same time; the murder was “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity”; Shaw “exhibited utter disregard for human life”; and Shaw could continue to be a “threat to society.”

Shaw maintains her innocence, pleading not guilty to the charges in August.

Her case gained national attention after she asserted that the children’s deaths were a result of vaccination reactions. She made these claims in an online podcast by Children’s Health Defense, a group founded by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy resigned as the organization’s chairman and chief legal counsel in December 2024.

Shaw was named in January as the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed by Children’s Health Defense against the American Academy of Pediatrics. The organization claimed that the academy has had a “central role in an enterprise that has defrauded American families” about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule, the Idaho Statesman previously reported.

“When the medical system has been told that vaccines cannot cause serious injury or death, grieving parents become suspects rather than victims,” attorneys for the Children’s Health Defense wrote in the lawsuit

Payette County Prosecutor Mike Duke argued in previous court filings that a forensic pathologist and investigators had ruled out vaccines, heat exposure and carbon monoxide poisoning as the cause of the twins’ death. He said suffocation was “the only conceivable explanation.”

The trial is set to begin Jan. 11.

This story was originally published October 21, 2026 at 10:38 AM with the headline “Idaho seeks death penalty against mother who blamed vaccines for twins’ deaths.”