I first read this article in the local newspaper and it drove me to tears. What happened was sick and too heinous to be true. And I asked Miz Scarlet if she saw this article and she said No. It did not come up anywhere and that scared me because rebirthing is quite a big thing in the States. How is it that this piece of news failed to make it to national papers? This is an account of how this girl was smothered to death during a rebirthing session.
IN A T-shirt and jeans, Candace was told to remove her shoes and lie on the floor on a blue flannel sheet in Connell Watkins' home in Evergreen, Colorado.
As she curled up into a foetal position, the sheet was wrapped tightly around her, its four corners twisted together above her head and held tightly.
She was then ordered to fight her way out of the man-made prison as her adoptive mother, Jeane Newmaker, held the corners of the sheet together.
Watkins and three assistants, together weighing 345 kg, placed cushions around her and pressed into her tiny form to simulate birth contractions. Candace weighed just 31 kg.
After 10 minutes, the little girl said she was tired and could not breathe and push her way out.
Eleven minutes and 35 seconds into the session, she cried: 'I'm gonna die. Please, please, I can't breathe.'
After 21 minutes, she wept: 'I'm throwing up.'
But Watkins and her assistants kept pressing in on her, calling her a 'quitter' and a 'twerp'.
'You want to die? OK, then die,' said one assistant. 'You've got to push hard if you want to be born,' jeered another.
After half-an-hour, only a faint whimpering was audible. She had said she was dying 11 times.
But one of the assistants, Julie Ponder, ordered: 'She needs more pressure. She really needs to fight if she wants air.'
Ten minutes later, Ms Newmaker asked her daughter: 'Baby, do you want to be born?' From the motionless bundle in the middle of the room came a barely audible: 'No', the last word she uttered.
And still it continued for another 30 minutes, by when the mother, feeling 'rejected', had been ordered out and watched on a TV monitor next door. Candace's face was ghostly white and flecked with vomit, her skin clammy, lips and fingers blue.
When she was finally unwrapped, Ms Newmaker tried to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the lifeless body.
An ambulance was called and at nine the next morning, Candace was pronounced brain-dead.