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A 23-year-old mother charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of her twin toddlers was set to be arraigned later today, after an Idaho grand jury indicted her late Monday, the Payette Police Department said in a press release.
Police arrested Andrea Shaw on Tuesday afternoon, more than a year after her two children — fraternal twins Dallas and Tyson Shaw — were found dead at their home in Payette on May 1, 2025, eight days after receiving their 18-month vaccines.
The Payette Police Department said the arrest follows “a lengthy and thorough investigation” and said it would have no further comment regarding evidence in the case. “Future information will be presented through the judicial process,” officials said.
Shaw alleges that her twins’ deaths were caused by the vaccines they received at a routine doctor’s appointment. She is one of five plaintiffs — along with two other mothers, two physicians and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) — in a lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
The lawsuit accuses the AAP of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.
Attorney Rick Jaffe, counsel of record for Shaw on two civil matters related to the deaths of her children, including the AAP lawsuit, said he believes “the criminal investigation and now the indictment is the natural consequence of the institutional vaccine program that refuses to admit vaccination carries any risk to infants.”
Jaffe, who is not involved in the criminal investigation, added, “Andrea’s indictment makes all the more urgent that the public health authorities acknowledge and address the harm that vaccination is causing to some infants, rather than just shifting the blame to the parent.”
Nurse Angela Wulbrecht, an advocate for people injured by vaccines and who has been supporting the Shaws, told The Defender she was “ shocked and heartbroken” to learn of Shaw’s arrest.
“Over the past year, I have had the privilege of walking alongside Andrea and her family after the unimaginable loss of her twin babies,” Wulbrecht said. “I have witnessed a mother’s profound grief, unwavering love for her children, and determination to seek answers.”
Andrea gave birth to a new baby, born three weeks prematurely, on June 25, Shaw’s attorney Joseph Filicetti told the local KTVB7 news station. Her husband is caring for the newborn while she is incarcerated.
Shaw told physician of family history of adverse vaccine reaction
The details of the Shaw twins’ story are laid out in court documents that are part of the lawsuit against the AAP. Andrea and her husband Nathaniel also shared their story in May 2025 with CHD.TV.
According to Andrea, she and her mother-in-law say they warned the twins’ pediatrician that there was a family history of adverse reactions to the flu shot.
However, the pediatrician dismissed these concerns. Nurses administered the flu vaccine along with hepatitis A and DTaP shots on April 23, 2025. The twins had previously received most routine childhood vaccinations, including their 1-year shots.
Within hours, Andrea said the toddlers became lethargic and ill. The next morning, their lips were blue, and they struggled to move. Andrea took the twins to the emergency room and told the doctor they had received three vaccines the day before.
The treating physician in the emergency room diagnosed them as suffering from “post-immunization reaction, initial encounter.”
The babies remained symptomatic over the days that followed. A week later, on the morning of May 1, Andrea found both children unresponsive. Police and paramedics were called, and investigators immediately focused on the parents. Andrea and Nathaniel told CHD.TV that the police immediately treated them as suspects.
“They said that it wasn’t medical and that they figured asphyxiation, and that I had supposedly had a postpartum overwhelming blackout and done it to my children,” Andrea said. The family filed a report with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.
Rather than investigating Andrea’s vaccine concerns, the Payette Police Department opened an investigation into her.
Jaffe said that even though both of the children had a documented response to the vaccine that persisted for days before they died, that information could not be evaluated by the existing system.
“When the governing dogma holds that vaccines cannot cause serious harm, the only explanation left standing is the mother and homicide.”
He added:
“More than a year passed before any charges were issued. That is not the profile of an obvious homicide, because you have a medical intervention causing significant side effects in both children, documented by medical personnel within a day of the intervention.
“It reflects a cause and manner of death that were anything but clear, and the record shows the system resolved that uncertainty, from the first day, against the parent rather than against the shots she questioned before they were ever given.”
Medical industry ignores vaccines as possible cause of SIDS
When infants under age 1 die suddenly, and a cause can’t be determined, the deaths are typically classified as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). SIDS is the third leading cause of infant mortality in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Public health researchers developed a “triple-risk model” for explaining SIDS. That model says SIDS occurs when a baby has an unknown medical condition, it is going through an important period of development where the body changes quickly, and it encounters an outside stressor, such as sleeping on its stomach.
But even as the medical industry claims to remain puzzled about the cause of SIDS, numerous studies have reported a plausible association between vaccines and SIDS in peer-reviewed literature for decades.
Researchers theorize, for example, that some children with underdeveloped liver enzyme pathways may not be able to process excipients — inactive ingredients used as preservatives or to enhance a vaccine’s efficacy — which can lead to illness or death.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has also recognized links between vaccines and infant deaths. Last year the program compensated two families whose babies died. The program determined the deaths were vaccine-induced.
Due to concerns over the link between vaccines and SIDS, some states recently introduced legislation to require that medical examiners document recent immunizations on the death certificates of children who died from unknown causes.
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How common is it to bring criminal charges against parents in infant deaths?
In recent years, some parents have been criminally charged when their infants die after sleeping on their stomachs.
Last year, two different sets of Pennsylvania parents were charged with felonies for placing their babies in unsafe sleeping positions. Attorney Daniel Nevins told Spotlight PA that such charges are rare and that the burden of proof on the prosecutors will be high.
But some parents have been convicted. In 2014, Virginia resident Candice Christa Semidey, age 25, was charged with murder after she swaddled her baby and put it to sleep on its stomach, The Washington Post reported. In that case, police did not think that she intended for the baby to die.
She pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and child neglect. She was ordered to serve three years of probation to avoid a five-year prison term.
Some charges have also been brought against parents in the deaths of infants sleeping with Boppy pillows. There have also been several cases of parents charged for sleeping in the same bed as their child.
Related articles in The Defender
- Twin Babies Die a Week After Receiving 3 Vaccines, Police Interrogate Parents
- Police: Investigation Still ‘Active’ 8 Months After Idaho Twins Died Following Vaccinations
- SIDS and the Vaccine Connection: Decades of Suppression
- Breaking: Children’s Health Defense Hits AAP With RICO Suit Over Fraudulent Vaccine Safety Claims
- 11-Week-Old ‘Anna’ Died Hours After Her ‘Routine’ Vaccines. Nearly 12 Years Later, a Court Ruled the Vaccines Killed Her
