The jury finds the woman of Dalles guilty of abuse after the child dies of hunger under his care

A Multnomah County jury found a guilty woman of two first -degree criminal abuse charges after a child’s health collapsed.

Jamie Strahm, 40, from The Dalles, took care of the child after she began dating her father in 2014. The child at that time was less than 4 years old, and Strahm quickly assumed the main caregiver role, according to the Office of the Multnomah County District Prosecutor.

Strahm was convicted on Friday for “retaining the necessary and adequate food of the victim” and “retaining the necessary and adequate medical care of the same victim,” said the district prosecutor’s office.

The child’s biological mother did not know the abuse of her son at the time she occurred, said the spokesman for the District Prosecutor’s Office, Pat dooris, in an email.

The boy experienced a “inexplicable” brain injury in 2015 while under the care of Strahm and had to be hospitalized for several weeks, prosecutors said.

At the time the child left the hospital, he needed a food tube to eat and weighed 45 pounds, placing the child in the 85th percentile by weight at that age, according to the district prosecutor’s office. The authorities said that by 2018, the child weighed only 40 pounds, the 13th percentile for his age.

Strahm kept the child intubated for years and said that otherwise he could not eat, said the district prosecutor’s office.

The Oregon Human Services Department, eventually suspicion of abuse, as shown in the judicial records. In 2016, DHS opened an investigation into Strahm after receiving a tip that kept the child in his room all day and continued giving him food through a power tube instead of teaching him to eat, according to records.

After April 2018, Strahm stopped taking the child to many of his planned medical monitoring appointments, prosecutors claimed. Finally, in October 2019, Strahm took the child to an appointment with a dietitian.

Alarmed by the appearance “extremely thin and fragile of the child, the dietitian agreed to enter the hospital the next day, according to the judicial records.

The district prosecutor’s office said doctors discovered that the child also suffered from reflection syndrome, a metabolic alteration that occurs when a hungry person begins to eat food again.

Medical professionals also made another discovery: the child could eat without a tube, contrary to what Strahm had claimed for years, prosecutors said.

The hospital forbade Strahm from the building and worked to restore the child’s weight; He was arrested by the Human Services Department shortly after, according to judicial records.

But the charges against Strahm did not reach much later.

The judicial records show that in 2020 the child began to open about “abuse and torture” he endured, and the Portland Police Office finally sent the case to the Office of the District Prosecutor of the Multnomah County District the following year, according to judicial records.

Prosecutors registered non -sealed medical records, digging up more than 6,200 pages of documents, as shown by the judicial records. On August 15, 2022, the child and his biological mother were called to testify before a large jury, according to the records.

Approximately a year, a large jury accused Strahm for criminal charges.

The child’s father was not accused.

The Strahm sentence date is scheduled for March 28.

The spokesman for the District Prosecutor’s Office, Pat Dooris, said in an email that the child who was previously in the care of Strahm now lives with his biological mother.

– Tatum Todd is a last -minute news reporter who covers public safety, crime and community news. Communicate with them at [email protected] or 503-221-4313.