Just after midnight on Oct. 18, 2025, Dayna Mooney stood outside her son’s hospital room, where he had been for two weeks, and told the doctors that she wanted to take him home — immediately.
The doctors spoke carefully, as if Mooney might be recording them. She was. “Right now, we don’t think it’s safe to discharge him,” one of them said. Mooney’s son, Presten, was too sick, and if she tried to take him home, “there would be a few phone calls that are going to be made,” including to the police and the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, which oversees Child Protective Services. “You’d be taking a kid into what we deem to be a dangerous situation,” the doctors continued.
Two weeks earlier, a judge had issued a court order for Presten, who was 17, to be taken into emergency custody, and a caseworker drove him to Oklahoma Children’s OU Health. Presten had chronic myeloid leukemia, but he had not been seen by the hospital’s oncology team in more than a year. Mooney had been caring for him at home, using alternative treatments guided by an unlicensed practitioner. She didn’t trust the hospital to help her son after having tried conventional treatment there the previous year. The solutions she had found could, she thought, give Presten the life she wanted for him.
Almost immediately, a conservative coalition had assembled around Mooney to champion her as a symbol for both parental rights and medical freedom. Mooney had called Roberta Lewis, a friend from Moms for Liberty, a conservative national organization that advocates parents’ rights in education, to ask if she could organize help. Mooney was at the time the chairwoman of a Moms for Liberty chapter outside Oklahoma City, and Lewis, who was also running for the State House of Representatives, led another. The two women worked frequently with Republican lawmakers, and the organization would be honoring Mooney with a national award for her work “shaping the narrative.”
Lewis began alerting politicians to Mooney’s story and what they would later describe as a case of “medical kidnapping.” Within hours, a Republican candidate for governor whom Mooney knew, Jake Merrick, was in Presten’s hospital room. “I just met with a mom who’s being held prisoner in this hospital,” Merrick said, filming himself outside the building as he left that night. “The state knows how to care for her child better than she does, evidently. That’s their opinion, and it makes my blood boil.”
Within a few days, Mike Mazzei, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor (he is now the Republican nominee), was urging followers on X to join him in donating to a fund-raiser for Mooney. “The heavy hand of government has no business usurping the rights of parents when parents are genuinely acting in the best interests of their children,” he wrote.
J.J. Humphrey, then a candidate for lieutenant governor, posted on Facebook: “Guys this is child-stealing, this is corrupt, this is the stuff we’re fighting.” Daniel McClure, who was running for a district attorney job, took on Mooney’s case as her lawyer.
Among the calls Lewis made was one to her state senator, Shane Jett, the founding chairman of the state’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. Though Oklahoma is a deep-red state, with a Republican trifecta in government, Jett and other politicians were claiming that the state was moving to curtail its residents’ freedoms: restricting their access to raw milk and ivermectin and intervening in the parenting of conservative families by forcing liberal ideals on their schoolchildren. Mooney’s case was proof of everything that Jett had been saying: Mainstream Republicans were transforming Oklahoma into a state in which a mother could be prevented from using a natural treatment to cure her child’s cancer — and one in which a parent could be forced to surrender her child’s care to a government that did not share her values.
Jett regularly visited Mooney and then provided updates on talk shows, news programs and his social media accounts. He told his online followers that Presten’s doctors weren’t listening to his mother and were beholden to “the pharmaceutical industrial complex that’s simply interested in sequestering your children and subjecting them to an incredible toxic cocktail of very lucrative medications.” On the news, he said that what was happening to Mooney was happening to many families, but “they chose the wrong family to run over this time.”
Like his mother, Presten told the politicians who went to the hospital that he didn’t want to be there. Mooney invited Katy Smith, a journalist on Substack, to visit, and Smith reported that Presten was screaming “No more” and that he and Mooney were victims of the state’s war on conservative families. Two of the Child Protective Services supervisors on Mooney’s case were “L.G.B.T.Q.” and “radically left,” Smith wrote, and “the Mooney case remains in hands observably hostile to the family’s values and rights.”
“You should be terrified,” Tom Renz, an attorney and right-wing personality, said on his podcast. “One of the greatest risks to a MAHA parent is medical kidnapping.” Another state senator and Freedom Caucus member, Randy Grellner, texted the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt: “Is the state now the final authority in our lives and parents are dispensable?” The governor wrote back: “I sure hope not. Let’s change the law.”
Presten had been in the hospital for about a week when Jett proposed a plan to get him out. They would wait for a Friday night, when it would be difficult to obtain an emergency order before the weekend. That evening, Jett and Lewis met Mooney at the hospital, where Mooney informed the doctors that she would be taking Presten and placing him in the care of a private licensed physician Lewis helped find — an orthopedic surgeon.
Lewis stood by Mooney’s side as she told the doctors on duty that it was “well within my rights to find second opinions and other providers.”
“I am his mother,” she said.
When the doctors informed her that they would call the police, Lewis popped her head into Presten’s room, where Jett was seated by his bed, and told him Mooney could use his help. Jett went out into the hallway, introduced himself and told the doctors that Mooney “has rights as a human being” and could exercise them to leave the hospital with her son.
“Are you kidnapping her, Doctor?” Jett asked.
“No,” one of the doctors said.
“Are you holding her against her will?”
The doctor said he wasn’t.
“We need you to justify why you are sequestering and kidnapping this family,” Jett said. The doctors excused themselves to call their superiors and then returned to say that Mooney and Presten could leave. It was against medical advice, they said, but the hospital wouldn’t stop them.
“Oh, you talked to your attorneys! Good!” Jett recalls saying. It was now around 2 a.m. Mooney pushed Presten’s wheelchair to her car, helped him in and drove him home.
Presten’s medical problems began when he was very young. He had a terrible seizure when he was 2 and was soon diagnosed with epilepsy. He had recently received a series of vaccinations, which at the time did not strike Mooney as significant. When Mooney asked the doctors, “Why is this happening?” she says they could not tell her. After Presten’s diagnosis, Mooney took him to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, which has one of the country’s leading pediatric epilepsy clinics. Its prognosis, as Mooney remembers it, was that Presten would live a life of extremely limited capability, which turned out to be wrong.
Though Presten was later diagnosed with autism and had developmental challenges — a state-ordered psychological evaluation last winter put his I.Q. at 66 — he stopped having seizures and grew up to be a talkative and affectionate kid. He also was encyclopedic on subjects like the Oklahoma City Thunder and attended public school with support.
When Presten was 3, Mooney started dating a mechanic named James Mooney, who legally adopted Presten and stayed home with him (Presten’s biological father was no longer in his life). In 2019, after six years of marriage, the couple divorced. A year later, the world shut down. To Dayna Mooney, the pandemic did not advertise the competency of the nation’s medical leadership. She came to feel she’d been right to suspect that people in white coats didn’t understand things as well as they said they did. She also suddenly had a lot of time at home to educate herself.
She found online autism support groups, where the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense, was often mentioned. Mooney started to feel awful that Presten was vaccinated. “I go through this period of mom guilt,” she says. “Like, did I do something? Could I have done something differently? Should we have done something differently?” But, she thought, “you have to bring yourself out of those things somehow, some way.” She decided to stop allowing Presten to receive vaccines.
She also read Children’s Health Defense articles that cited research on dyes in food, which, the group reported, exacerbate behavioral issues in children with A.D.H.D. Presten was on several medications for behavioral challenges, but to Mooney, they didn’t seem to be working. He bit things during hourslong meltdowns; his bed frame was grooved with bite marks. Mooney began to read labels very carefully at the grocery store, looking for dyes, preservatives and other additives; after about six months on a new diet, Mooney found, her son was becoming angry less frequently. With his nurse practitioner, she began to wean him off his medications.
Kendra Glass, Mooney’s former sister-in-law, who remained close with the family, initially agreed with a lot of what Mooney was doing with Moms for Liberty and went to her for advice about her own children’s education. But when Mooney warned her that the state could vaccinate children at school without parental consent, Glass thought that didn’t seem probable. She was alarmed by what seemed like Mooney’s slide toward conspiratorial thinking — “like the woke left, but on the right,” Glass says. Mooney’s mother remembers her saying that doctors were being paid for each Covid diagnosis, and Glass recalls that Mooney once showed her a photo of Presten’s bloody nose and claimed that the blood contained parasitic worms. Mooney texted a family group chat two years before Presten’s diagnosis: “Cancer is a Parasite, ivermectin will kill it!”
Mooney started to watch videos by health influencers who warned their audiences that a government that allows possible carcinogens to be added to children’s snack foods was also capable of faking a pandemic in order to control its population. Mooney knew, she told me, that “there’s so much stuff that’s just made up out there” and that she had to be mindful of taking advice from people online, but she trusted herself to parse it all. She worked for an oncology practice, talking to insurance companies and helping patients with billing. She knew how the health care system worked.
In January 2024, Presten started suffering from extreme exhaustion. “I was like, ‘Buddy, what is wrong?’” she says. “Like, he’d come home and just go to sleep, and he’d sleep and sleep and sleep.” His nurse practitioner ordered bloodwork, and when it came back, she told Mooney to take Presten straight to Oklahoma Children’s. There, Presten was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, which accounts for less than 3 percent of childhood leukemia diagnoses. The American Cancer Society puts the five-year survival rate for children at more than 92 percent with proper treatment.
Mooney was devastated by the diagnosis. “I broke down,” she says. Doctors told her that Presten could live a long life, Mooney says, but that he would have to be on the recommended medication for many years, a protocol that upset Mooney. Presten, she told me, “is such a fighter,” and she felt that doctors gave him a prognosis that may not apply to him. “You’re not God,” she told me, referring to his doctors.
A few days after Presten’s diagnosis, Mooney texted her mother, Danya Monroe: “ZERO trust in anything from the FDA, they have contributed to the depopulation of many people for a buck.” “The point of government is control,” she texted the next month. “People have to start thinking about ways to get away from government and becoming self-sufficient, drs aren’t truly healing people, they’re masking peoples problems with endless meds.” And later that day: “The government has made it where people have to depend on what they provide. It’s all by design, but had the country been ran as it was intended, people would be healing with other things, more natural things.”
Presten was at the hospital for days, and Mooney was always by his side. “I’d never leave my child,” she told me. “I needed him to know that it was going to be OK no matter what it was. We were going to get through this. We’ve gone through everything else.” After Presten was discharged, Mooney picked up his prescription, a pill called imatinib, an oral targeted therapy that she was to administer regularly. That winter, she periodically celebrated in a family group chat that Presten’s labs were normalizing. Several months after the diagnosis, though, Presten’s condition began worsening: In late July 2024, his white blood cell count had again risen out of normal range, and his oncologist sought insurance approval to switch him to a medication called dasatinib.
Mooney told me that the doctors couldn’t explain why Presten wasn’t going into remission, just as doctors hadn’t been able to explain why he had epilepsy. She recalls thinking to herself: We’re doing everything you asked us to do. There has to be something else. Mooney took Presten to an appointment in August and then had a September telehealth visit, during which the oncologist told her that the new medication had been approved by insurance. It was the last appointment that Mooney made for her son.
In October 2024, Mooney sent her mother a post on X about a paper summarizing research on ivermectin’s effectiveness against cancer. Her mother remembers Presten telling her that it tasted like “toothpaste made of apples.” Though Mooney often discussed ivermectin with her mother, because she felt “absolutely helpless” when Presten didn’t respond to imatinib, she denies that she ever gave it to her son. In November, when a nurse called to make an appointment, Mooney told the hospital that the family had moved out of state, though they hadn’t. “No med refills needed at this time,” the nurse noted in Presten’s MyChart.
“The goal for us is the best quality of life he can have, and not have to worry about all these medications,” Mooney told me. She spent several months caring for Presten at home. She gave him smoothies and electrolytes. “I do know my son,” she told me. “We’ve been doing this for a long, long time.” She had also decided to home-school him that fall. Mooney taught him about how the government worked, as well as life skills like cooking and gardening.
As the months passed, a lot of people in Presten’s life began to wonder whether they were being lied to. Monroe and other relatives say Mooney claimed that Presten was in remission. (Mooney denies this.) Monroe found that her daughter was distancing herself — not texting back, giving excuses as to why she couldn’t see Presten. At one point, Monroe told me, she called her daughter and said: “We need to talk. I have some questions about Presten.” But Mooney hung up. (Mooney says she was withdrawing from her mother after many years of conflict.)
James was also finding it harder to see Presten — when he tried to arrange visits, he says, Mooney usually declined on Presten’s behalf, explaining that their son was too tired or had other plans. James later told me that he wished he made more of an effort to find out if Presten was OK — to get access to his MyChart, for example. (Mooney denies that she prevented James from seeing Presten.)
In the spring of 2025, Mooney sent a Facebook message to Gwendolyn Posey, who had a clinic near the Oklahoma City airport and specialized in “functional genomic medicine.” Posey was a naturopath, a practitioner who seeks to treat the root cause of illnesses using natural remedies. Oklahoma does not license naturopaths, and Posey hadn’t attended an accredited naturopathic college and was ineligible to belong to the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians.
Mooney met Posey in her office, where Posey had a big wooden desk and a shelf with books on genomics and food as medicine. Mooney told Posey she wanted “to get to the root cause of all of these issues” — Presten’s autism, his leukemia. Posey explained that finding underlying causes was her specialty. She did not necessarily find it useful to talk about illness in terms of diagnoses; “leukemia” described a problem, like a high white blood cell count, but not what caused the problem. “What if instead of calling it ‘leukemia,’ because I don’t need to call it ‘leukemia,’ what if I said, ‘Why is his bone marrow creating malformed white blood cells?’” Posey told me. Though Posey frequently worked with children with autism or epilepsy, as well as adults with cancer, Presten was the first pediatric cancer case she advised on. (Posey says Mooney was never an official paying client.)
During that meeting, Posey thought Presten looked “horrid.” “He was emaciated and pale and half-dead,” she says. She ordered a genetics test from a direct-to-consumer company, and the report concluded that some of Presten’s gene variants made it hard for his body to filter out toxins. (Presten’s specific variants are present in about half the global population.) Posey suggested that Mooney order supplements like folinic-acid tablets and a lotion containing an antioxidant called glutathione. She also said Presten shouldn’t eat too many foods with oxalates in them, like spinach. “When the body is overwhelmed with calcium oxalate crystals, what does it do with them?” Posey told me. “Puts it in the bone marrow! That’s where it gets stored. Now all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, my gosh, that’s why! And now the bone marrow is putting out white blood cells that are deformed. And all of a sudden it sort of makes sense.” Posey assured Mooney that she hadn’t done anything wrong if she put spinach in his smoothies that year — she just didn’t have all the information.
Eventually, Posey observed that Presten “looked fantastic.” “His autism was completely gone,” she says. “Obviously we hit something that was working really, really well.” Mooney, who calls Posey “Dr. Posey,” told me that her insights explained so much about her son. People without medical degrees can still “have wonderful information,” she says.
Last September, Mooney threw Presten a small party for his 17th birthday at a bowling alley. She took photos of the celebration and would later stress that her son was well enough to handle a bowling ball. “You would never, ever think that by looking at him, that there was anything,” she told me. “There’s nothing emergent wrong with him, right? He’s eating fine. We’re drinking fine. We’re going to the bathroom fine. There’s no signs of distress.”
But he didn’t look fine to everyone. That month, Monroe, who was not invited to the party, saw a photo on Facebook of Presten bowling, and “it scared me,” she says. He looked pale and terrifyingly thin. “All I could think was, She’s going to let him die.” Monroe sought advice from a pastor, who told her to listen to her heart and to listen to God. That night, she called Child Protective Services.
The next morning, on Sept. 29, a C.P.S. caseworker went to Mooney’s home. According to Mooney, the caseworker explained that she was investigating an allegation of medical neglect, and Mooney told her that Presten was being cared for by a licensed medical provider, naming Posey. Mooney did not allow the caseworker to enter her home but got Presten from the backyard, where he was mowing the lawn, and he waved to the caseworker before going back outside.
Posey agreed to meet with Mooney and the C.P.S. caseworker at her office that Friday, Oct. 3. But the meeting ended before it began: The caseworker had corresponded with Presten’s former oncologist and arrived at Posey’s office with an emergency order to take Presten to Oklahoma Children’s. Posey rode with Presten in the caseworker’s car. “The medical system has weaponized healing in order to monopolize the market and hush the competition,” she texted Mooney, who was following in her own car. Mooney later told me that she felt that C.P.S. had violated protocol by not meeting with Posey and taking her input seriously.
Glass, Mooney’s sister-in-law, arrived at the emergency room. When the doctors were out of earshot, Glass says, Mooney turned to her and said, “If anyone asks if I was giving him ivermectin, tell them no.” (Mooney denies saying this.)
Emergency room doctors took blood and vitals from Presten and reported that he had a fever; that his white blood cell count was 462,120, up to a hundred times higher than a normal count; and that his hemoglobin was so low that he needed a blood transfusion. He was in stable condition, not yet in what’s known as “blast crisis,” or late-stage chronic myeloid leukemia, which has a very poor prognosis. Untreated, however, his condition would inevitably progress to that stage. An oncologist advised Mooney that Presten was “at imminent risk of death or irreversible organ damage.”
On Saturday, Oct. 4, Mooney gave consent for Presten to take dasatinib, the medication he had been prescribed more than a year earlier. Presten’s oncologist told Mooney that she would be happy to continue Mooney’s supplemental plan for Presten, alongside his recommended medication regimen, and agreed to find “a lifestyle medicine physician” to add to Presten’s care team.
As Mooney marshaled her friends on the political right — Jett took to social media to say that Mooney had been following a “robust healthcare plan for her son” before C.P.S. intervened — James visited the hospital and saw Presten for the first time in almost a year. When he looked at Presten, he told Mooney, “He looks like he’s about to die.”
Three days after Presten was admitted, Judge Charles Gass ruled that Presten’s condition did not qualify as an emergency and returned him to Mooney’s custody, according to family members present at the hearing. Mooney’s defenders staged a rally outside the court to “support a mother as she goes before the judge to defend her parental rights to direct the health of her son,” as a flier described. Presten, however, remained in the hospital: Doctors didn’t think he was well enough for discharge, and Mooney thought that leaving would result in another C.P.S. call. (The Oklahoma Department of Human Services and Oklahoma Children’s did not comment for this article.)
Around this time, Mooney got a text from Grellner, the state senator and Freedom Caucus member, who had a primary care practice. He had recently been appointed to lead the state’s new Make Oklahoma Healthy Again campaign. He gave ivermectin to Covid patients “10,000 times,” he told me. When he saw Presten’s story on the news, he texted Mooney: “I’m available if you want to talk. I’d be delighted to give you an opinion.” He later told me that he wanted to know for himself: “Is this lady telling the truth or is she leading us down a road?”
Grellner drove an hour east from his medical office to meet with Mooney in a downtown office building in Oklahoma City. He looked at Presten’s medical records, talked to Mooney for three hours and determined that C.P.S. was wrong to take Presten. “I worry about kids that are toxic, meaning they’ve got a fever, they’re delirious, they’re not able to bathe themselves or void,” Grellner says. “The problem is if the kid is eating, functioning, mowing the lawn. That is not enough evidence to take them, incarcerate them, kidnap them from their family.” He told Mooney: “You are right.” Even if the state was making her doubt herself, he said, she should be sure that she was right.
In the early hours of Saturday Oct. 18, with Lewis and Jett’s help, Mooney took her son out of the hospital. That night, Moms for Liberty presented a national award to Mooney at a conference in Orlando, Fla. The Tulsa chapter’s chairwoman accepted the statue on Mooney’s behalf and told the crowd about the case. “This is what it looks like to fight for parental rights,” she said, “to take on the state, the legal system and big pharma, all while trying to provide life-sustaining care for your child.” Two days later, Mooney drove Presten to Tulsa to meet the new doctor she’d chosen for him, an orthopedic surgeon who would temporarily oversee his care. She also made an appointment with a chiropractor who runs a clinic that offers therapies for cancer and Lyme disease.
Before accepting Presten as a patient, the orthopedic surgeon, Robert Marsh, texted a friend that he wanted to pray about it. He ultimately accepted the job, providing Mooney with a letter assuming “medical care and oversight” for Presten and recommending that Presten be discharged. Mooney was now able to tell the hospital that she was taking Presten into the care of a licensed medical provider. But after meeting Presten in Tulsa, Marsh wrote a letter rescinding care, saying “there clearly have been misunderstandings/misleading statements regarding his care and my care,” including the impression he was given that Presten had a 20 percent survival rate on the recommended treatment plan, rather than 90 percent. (Mooney told me that the higher survival rate is “what they tell you in the literature — but that’s not always accurate, and if you don’t take in someone’s genetic condition, then that’s a different percentage.”) Marsh now recommended that Presten be taken to the hospital.
On Oct. 7, the speaker of the Oklahoma House agreed to provide Representative Jay Steagall, who attended the rally for Mooney outside her court hearing, access to some of the Department of Human Services’ case records. After looking at the files, Steagall stopped talking about the case publicly, and he made a call to State Senator Paul Rosino, whose district includes Mooney’s city, asking, according to Rosino, for his help getting other legislators to do the same. (Steagall did not comment for this article.) Rosino, the chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, also read some of the case files. He found what they contained “astonishing,” he told me. Mooney was his constituent, but so, too, was Presten, he says. The records gave him no doubt that Presten “is who I need to protect at all costs.”
“I would venture to guess that most Oklahomans see through all of this and know that it’s not true,” Rosino said on a local news station, referring to accusations of “medical kidnapping.” But, he continued, “these kinds of talking points are what incite people.”
During a court hearing on Oct. 24, Judge Gass issued a different ruling from his previous one. He said Presten was in imminent danger: Presten was eventually placed in the care of his father, who gave him his medication as prescribed. The police sent a charge of child neglect to the district attorney’s office, which has not yet pursued a criminal case against Mooney. At an appointment in December, Presten’s white blood cell count was within the normal range, and he would go on to gain about 60 pounds. “If you saw what this medication did,” James told me, “you wouldn’t have anything against this medication.”
When I asked Mooney’s supporters about certain details involving Presten’s care — about Posey’s not having a license or the specifics of Presten’s prognosis — some said they hadn’t known, but most argued that none of it mattered: Mooney had the right to make medical choices for her son. Merrick, the candidate for governor, told me that regardless of whether Presten might have died had he not gone to the hospital, he could also have died while undergoing treatment in the hospital. “I’m going to be on the side of protecting that parental authority until the very end,” he says.
When I met Jett in March, he repeatedly ducked out of the office to vote yes on bills to expand sales of raw milk and remove “obscene” materials from school libraries. He has extended an open invite to Presten to join him on the Senate floor. Jett maintained that Presten entered Oklahoma Children’s as “a healthy little boy to the extent possible, and then we watched him deteriorate in health” — because, he continued, “your IV becomes a cash transaction, and whatever that body can endure, whatever they can justify, they can push it through.”
Mooney, who can see Presten only in supervised visits, has since sought to get him back, posting on Facebook and tagging Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump, among others, that she had lost custody for exploring “precision medicine — individualized care based on genetics and metabolism.” In April, a Department of Human Services employee wrote in a document submitted to the court that the agency did have “concerns that Ms. Mooney still does not understand what led for her son to be so unwell.”
This spring, before attending a court date for her custody case, Mooney sat alone waiting to go into the courtroom. Periodically, a C.P.S. caseworker would check on her, saying: Are you sure you’re OK being alone? Don’t you think we should get someone approved to come in with you? Mooney told her she was fine and meant it. She wanted to be left alone.
Only one friend, a local activist, waited for her outside the building. After the hearing, we met for lunch. Mooney missed her son. Her lawyer, she said, told her that a C.P.S. caseworker said Mooney believed that Presten “does not have cancer.” She felt completely misunderstood. “I never said that,” she told me. She just wanted to treat the root cause of his illness. “Who doesn’t want to get to the deepest part of a problem for their child so they can stop suffering?” Mooney said. McClure, her lawyer, who won his race for district attorney, declined to comment for this article.
Over the next few months, Mooney told me that Presten was “doing great.” His labs were generally good, and he was still adhering to the Oklahoma Children’s treatment plan, which at Mooney’s urging included leucovorin, a folinic-acid medication (leucovorin has been promoted by the Trump administration as a treatment for autism). “It’s actually helping him more than people realize,” she said. Mooney attended his medical appointments with either a caseworker or James, and she was concerned that Presten had stopped applying the antioxidant lotion that Posey had recommended. Still, Presten seemed happy, and Mooney was happy for him. “The focus has always been him,” she told me.
When I met with Presten in August, he had been living with James and his wife, Heather Mooney, for several months. The family had just returned from Presten’s Make-A-Wish trip to Florida, during which they visited theme parks in the Orlando area. It was Presten’s first vacation outside his home state, and he loved bonding with another Make-A-Wish family over a shared interest in fishing.
Presten was about to start a new vocational program through the local public school, learning landscaping. The program had a fleet of riding lawn mowers, which has become an interest of his, and he looked forward to hanging out with his friends. James works as an R.V. mechanic, and Presten decided he wanted to eventually become a boat mechanic. The two were embarking on a project to fix the broken motor in the family’s boat.
Presten held hands with James and Heather as we spoke about his life with Mooney. In retrospect, when he reflected on the years since his diagnosis, he said it was a lonely and isolated time. It no longer made sense to him why his mother pulled him from school and why she stopped taking him to the oncologists at Oklahoma Children’s. He thought he shouldn’t have been allowed to stop taking his medication, even if he’d wanted to stop. “I was too young,” he said. Now he felt that his oncologists had always been trying to help him. “The doctors — they saved my life.” Presten wore a new T-shirt that said, “I’m proof that God answers prayers,” and he said he believed what the shirt said.
James expects to retain sole guardianship of Presten. In the near term, he is wary of Mooney spending time alone with their son, whom he sees as impressionable, but he hopes for a future in which Mooney can more freely see Presten. Both mother and son loved each other, he said. “She’s always been his biggest advocate — that’s true,” he said.
James sometimes finds himself thinking about the politicians who supported Mooney. They were running expensive campaigns for high office. They were elected. They were big deals. “If I had people like that telling me I’m right,” James said, “I’d bet I’d be susceptible to believing it.”
Elizabeth Barber is a writer based in Iowa.
Haruka Sakaguchi is a photographer in New York known for her documentary work focusing on generational memory.
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