Sitting in a pediatric intensive care unit last year, watching a ventilator keep her 17-month-old daughter alive, Emily Marris scoured the contents of her phone for evidence to give to California health and food safety investigators.
She had bought raw goat milk from a farm recommended to her in a Facebook group run by her chiropractor. Marris had hoped the milk, unprocessed and natural, would help with her daughter Brooklyn’s constipation. But doctors now suspected the unpasteurized milk, which hadn’t been heated to kill off pathogens, was the source of the toddler’s severe E. coli infection.
To the regulators who’d reached out to Marris, the case was a top priority. The farm appeared to be defying state law to sell unregulated raw milk to unsuspecting families; soon, another child, a 6-year-old girl who’d drunk milk from the same farm, would wind up in the same San Diego hospital, with the same potentially fatal illness, needing blood transfusions.
Similar cases were popping up across the country as social media influencers and President Donald Trump’s White House kept touting the unproven benefits of raw milk and downplaying its risks. In the past two years alone, hundreds had fallen ill across nine states from drinking raw milk or eating products made with it.
Recognizing that people still want the freedom to buy it, California had struck a balance: It licenses farms that sell raw milk for human consumption, inspects them for sanitation and requires them to regularly test batches for pathogens.
The system hadn’t prevented outbreaks, as ProPublica previously reported. But it aimed to ensure that customers, at the very least, knew what they were getting into; milk legally sold in the state had to be clearly labeled with warnings.
Which is what troubled regulators even more about this particular outbreak.
The milk suspected to have sickened the girls didn’t come from one of the state’s dozen licensed farms. The dairy was totally off the radar, selling unknown quantities of unlabeled gallons.
And inside Marris’ phone was even more alarming information. Months of text messages showed the farm’s owner knew from the start that a toddler was drinking her milk. Then after the farmer learned that Brooklyn had contracted a serious foodborne infection, which doctors attributed to the milk, she continued to advertise on Facebook: “raw goat milk from a clean tested herd.”
After many sleepless nights, Marris screengrabbed the messages and sent them to the investigators, hoping to quell the outbreak before it grew.
Amid a flurry of emails involving at least four state and county agencies, investigators with the California Department of Food and Agriculture took the lead. They needed to confirm that the farm was indeed selling milk for human consumption. In California, doing so without a license is a violation of state law and can lead to fines of up to $10,000 and jail time of up to a year.
On the evening of June 17, 2025, an undercover investigator messaged the farm’s Facebook account:
“Would like to buy like a gallon 🤗🤗🤗”
Someone from the farm replied that they sold goat milk by the gallon, explained that they were temporarily out of jugs and said they would message as soon as their shipment arrived.
Regulators now had a rare opportunity.
They had strong evidence: two cooperating families, direct text admissions and access to hospital records documenting the destruction wrought on two young bodies.
They had a clear reason to act. Raw-milk consumption was a growing hazard, and their state, like others, was teeming with black-market dairies, propped up by consumer demand fueled by misinformation.
They could have pursued penalties under a law enacted to prevent this very conduct, sending a message to other sellers about what the state would not tolerate.
But that’s not what would happen.
Marris was breastfeeding her daughter in her southern California home one afternoon that previous January when a post on Facebook caught her eye.
In a private group of backyard farmers, her chiropractor, Chris Boman, had shared a photo of a refrigerator, filled with gallons of freshly collected milk. In the years Marris had been visiting his office, she’d seen him selling raw milk from his own cow in his clinic’s waiting room.
She had never thought to try it herself, but milk was on her mind lately. She was trying to wean Brooklyn, and so far it wasn’t going well.
Brooklyn was her “miracle baby.” Marris had become pregnant with her — a desperately wanted third child — at age 48. Then she arrived seven weeks premature, her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs confining her to the intensive care unit for her first month.
The traumatic birth sent Marris’ protective instincts into overdrive. Already a self-described “crunchy” mom, she’d detoxified their home in suburban Winchester, a small inland community in Riverside County; stripped it of harmful chemicals and synthetic materials; and limited her family’s intake of ultraprocessed food. A trained birth doula and former teacher, she spent much of her days caring for her kids while her husband ran a sports technology startup company. As she had with her other two children, she was determined to breastfeed Brooklyn for as long as needed.
But when her daughter was barely a year old, Marris started a new medication for her chronic hip pain that could pass through breastmilk. She tried organic infant formula, but the number of additives alarmed her, and store-bought cow milk left Brooklyn severely constipated. Marris considered stopping her medication, but then she couldn’t walk without pain.
Desperate for an alternative, she commented on her chiropractor’s Facebook post, “Would this be a good milk for baby Brookie?”
The group’s members quickly chimed in. “I had to put my baby on raw goats milk,” one mother wrote. “Healed her right up. … Goats milk is easier digested than cow.” While sales of raw milk are prohibited on Facebook’s Marketplace, and such ads are removed when flagged, discussions of raw milk are still allowed, said a Meta spokesperson.
The commenter recommended a farm called Moonlight Ridge, and Marris clicked over to its Facebook page, which was filled with pictures of velvety Nubian goats. The farm milked its animals twice daily, it said, so the dairy was “always the freshest and best quality.” It was only 10 miles away. Marris arranged a visit that afternoon.
There were no signs marking the farm, but Marris turned down a dirt road and spotted its 23-year-old owner, Courtney Baker, with long blond hair and a tan, standing by a metal gate near a white pickup truck. Baker and her husband had become interested in raising goats during the pandemic. They started selling raw milk to help animal rescues and breeders, Baker would later say, and got most of their customers by word of mouth.
Baker greeted Marris and handed over an unlabeled jug of raw goat milk, still warm to the touch.
Marris pointed to her daughter, asleep in the back seat of her SUV, and explained Brooklyn’s digestion struggles. “This is the sweet girl you’re helping,” she recalled telling the farmer.
Once home, Marris filled up a baby bottle and nervously handed it to Brooklyn. Her daughter didn’t hesitate.
“She is gobbling it down! 💜” Marris texted Baker.
“Yay!! I’m glad she likes it!” Baker responded, then later that day asked, “How’s her tummy handling the milk?”
By the next morning, Brooklyn’s problems seemed to ease. “She has had two great and more normal poops!!!!” Marris texted Baker.
Marris believed she had done her due diligence. She had researched raw milk, whose benefits were readily promoted by the local farmers and wellness influencers she followed. Shortly after that first pickup, she and her husband, Josh, visited Moonlight Ridge to inspect the herd. The goats appeared well-kept. And when they asked Baker about her safety practices, they recalled, the farmer repeatedly assured them her herd and milk were “clean and tested.” Marris trusted Baker and thought the farmer was doing everything possible to keep the milk safe.
For six months, Marris gave Brooklyn raw milk without incident.
Then, on June 2, it all began to unravel. On the way home from swim lessons, Brooklyn vomited all over the back seat.
That same day, another couple, navy veterans Iris and David Galindo, drove to Moonlight Ridge to pick up their first order of goat milk.
They had also been looking for alternatives for their 6-year-old daughter, Victoria, whose doctor recommended limiting dairy products from cows. They began to consider goat milk, which Iris drank as a child in Guatemala. She contacted Baker, who had tutored their son in math years earlier and was now advertising raw goat milk in a local Facebook group. “There was trust there,” Galindo said.
As Baker handed over an unlabeled jug that day, the Galindos said they made it explicitly clear the milk was for their young daughter.
That evening, Victoria drank her first cup.
The days after Brooklyn first threw up were a hellish blur: vomit that turned bilious yellow, then a tarry blackish-green, then bloodwork that so alarmed emergency room doctors that they called for transport to a pediatric intensive care unit 70 miles away.
Stunned and helpless, Marris and her husband waited as doctors at Rady Children’s Hospital fastened a web of wires to their barely conscious daughter: a tube down her trachea to help her breathe, dialysis lines into her blood vessels to support her failing kidneys.
Brooklyn had developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a rare condition in which microscopic blood clots clog small vessels and destroy vital organs. Infectious disease doctors suspected it had been caused by a strain of E. coli and had Marris walk them through Brooklyn’s recent diet.
When she mentioned the raw milk, she said, they looked at her uneasily and told her that was the likely culprit. E. coli can thrive in animal intestines. As few as 10 cells, hidden in an infinitesimal fleck of feces, can contaminate raw milk and trigger a fatal infection.
Marris was terrified for her daughter and furious with herself. She had searched online for the benefits of raw milk and gotten the confirmation she needed from raw-milk proponents.
She wasn’t aware of the medical consensus that raw milk has no proven nutritional benefits compared with its pasteurized counterpart, or that it carries over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness. “I’m the one that gave it to her,” she thought. “Just how stupid could I be?”
From her daughter’s bedside, on June 5, Marris texted Baker. “They think Brookie got a strain of e-coli possibly from a bad batch of the milk … I just wanted to let you know in case you want to alert anyone that had milk from the week before this.”
“I am so incredibly sorry to hear she is going through this!!” Baker quickly responded. “None of my milk testing results have showed anything abnormal.”
Later that day, though, Marris learned while texting with Baker that the farmer hadn’t tested for E. coli; it seemed like she didn’t know how to. “All the tests I’m finding looks like it mainly comes from meat,” Baker wrote.
Marris was taken aback. How did Baker not know how to test for a common foodborne pathogen like E. coli? Still, Marris remained polite. “Please don’t beat yourself up either. You are a sweet kind person and I don’t want you or me to go there.”
Two days after Brooklyn arrived at the hospital, on June 6, doctors took her off the ventilator, but she struggled to wake up. For hours, as she continued on dialysis, her eyes drifted back into her head, her body occasionally convulsed and her breathing grew heavy and rapid.
That evening, her blood grew so acidic that it disrupted the electrical signals of her heart, which struggled to pump enough blood and oxygen to her brain. For hours, the medical team tried to stabilize her spiking pulse. Her parents didn’t know if she would survive the night.
As they awaited an update, a stool sample confirmed that Brooklyn had contracted E. coli O157:H7, one of the most dangerous strains. When Marris texted Baker about the diagnosis, the farmer detailed her equipment-cleaning process and said she would send a sample to a lab in Colorado.
After a couple of days, Brooklyn finally turned a corner. But in suburban Murietta, not far from the Marris family home, Victoria was just starting to decline.
She’d grown lethargic over the past week, with bouts of bloody diarrhea. After two unhelpful urgent care visits, the Galindos drove her to Rady on June 13. Bloodwork revealed she had the same disorder as Brooklyn, brought on by the same E. coli strain; she was rushed into intensive care. “My world just dropped,” Iris Galindo said.
On June 14, after Marris learned that another child had fallen sick after drinking raw milk, she texted Baker again: “Maybe hold off on selling any until we know if there is a common thread.”
Baker didn’t reply.
The next day, however, Marris saw that Baker had recently responded to someone in the Facebook group looking for raw goat milk: “I have raw goat milk from a clean tested herd in wine country … We milk 2x a day so it is always super fresh.”
Marris was aghast, squeezing the sides of her phone to capture what was on the screen.
“Out of respect, I’m giving you a heads up,” she texted Baker. “I wasn’t going to EVER post anything, but I’m appalled that you’re advertising the milk as tested and safe when you haven’t been able to test for that deadly strain of e-coli.”
Marris then typed up a detailed description of what had happened to her daughter.
“My 17 month old almost died this week,” she wrote. “I NEVER WANTED TO have to call her out on this, but it’s prudent that she take a break, make sure she tests for THIS SPECIFIC strain and ensure the milk is safe before resuming sales.”
She hit the post button, heaved a sigh of relief and watched the responses roll in.
“Praying for your sweet baby.”
“Omg I almost bought milk from her a couple weeks ago.”
“Thank you for protecting the rest of us.”
And then her phone buzzed. Baker had finally replied.
At first, she apologized for the slow response, explaining that she’d also been hospitalized with an unrelated illness. She said that, despite her Facebook comment, she had stopped selling milk while she waited for test results.
And then she asked Marris to take down her post. “As much as I hate and feel bad for what happened to Brooke [sic] I really really do,” she said, “I really don’t appreciate my name being thrown out there like that.”
Reluctantly, Marris deleted what she wrote.
She’d already spoken with state regulators about the outbreak and handed over her text messages.
Surely, she believed, they would do something.
On June 20, three regulators paid an unannounced visit to Moonlight Ridge, according to internal records from the investigation obtained by ProPublica.
The farm was located within a larger horse ranch, and they didn’t see anyone at the entrance. They walked along the fenceline until they spotted Baker’s husband, who asked if they were there because of the goat milk. Baker showed up 20 minutes later.
She told them something she hadn’t said to the parents or the undercover investigator: The milk was for pets only and advertised as such on Facebook.
“Of course, she insisted that she only sells the goat milk for pet food,” Jill Soares, a regional supervisor with the Food and Agriculture Department, later wrote in an email to the team.
Although California requires licenses to sell raw milk for human consumption, unlicensed farms can sell it as long as they label it as pet food. Sellers have seized on the loophole to avoid scrutiny and prosecution, a health official familiar with Baker’s case told ProPublica, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly. “There is a gap in regulation,” the official said.
The gap is magnified in 13 other states, where raw milk can be sold only as pet food, but regulators know people are still drinking it. Outbreaks this year in Louisiana and last year in Florida sickened multiple children, including at least one who developed the same life-changing kidney condition as Brooklyn. No dairy got in trouble. State officials said the milk was legally sold and clearly labeled.
In Baker’s case, the investigative report makes no mention of California regulators interrogating her about the pet food defense, despite the text messages they’d read. “She clearly knew the milk was going to a child,” Soares wrote to her team.
With such evidence in hand, they could have referred the case to local prosecutors. Instead, before the site visit, supervising special investigator Jeffrey Eggert wrote in an email to the team that pursuing charges was not the priority.
“The immediate goal here is to get the goat farm to stop all milk related-product manufacturing, and keep the community safe,” he wrote. His unit “typically pursues the criminal route; however, the legal process is lengthy.”
That decision appeared to inform how the regulators approached their visit to Baker’s farm.
They handed Baker a cease-and-desist order and a violation notice for operating as a food facility without a valid permit; neither carried penalties, but both threatened consequences if she didn’t comply.
Then, they told Baker they would return the next morning to collect a milk sample for testing, as the families whose children had fallen sick did not have any leftover milk.
The next day, they met Baker at the gate and accepted a half-gallon jug of raw milk she assured them had been collected the previous night from 11 goats.
Department officials told ProPublica that California law does not permit investigators to enter unlicensed properties, even when they receive reports of unlicensed activity.
At licensed farms, California investigators have collected the milk themselves. And because newer batches might not have the same contaminant that sickened consumers, they have also combed the farmland for the pathogen, sampling dirt, groundwater and animal droppings. In some cases when they haven’t found a pathogen strain in the milk, they have found it in the surroundings.
Eleven days after regulators left with the sample Baker collected, the state’s limited test results came back negative for several pathogens, including E. coli.
Regulators then pivoted to helping Baker get approval to start selling her milk again — still without a license, inspections or testing — so long as she labeled and registered it as pet food.
Baker soon wrote back to the undercover investigator to see whether they were still interested. “I have gotten confirmation from CDFA that I’m in full compliance for pet consumption milk!”
On Aug. 1, the Food and Agriculture Department closed its case, finding that Baker had “promoted raw milk for sale and sold unapproved milk products in commerce without a CDFA license.” She was given no penalty.
“I was unable to show that she sold milk intended for human consumption,” wrote special investigator Nancy Del Cid. “If this had been proven, the case would have been referred to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office for potential prosecution.”
The department didn’t respond to ProPublica’s specific questions about the investigation, including why officials had come to this conclusion despite evidence that had made at least one supervisor remark that Baker “clearly knew the milk was going to a child.”
Officials told ProPublica that seeking criminal charges would have slowed down their effort to stop Baker from selling more milk.
“Issuing a cease-and-desist order almost always results in a product being removed from the market more rapidly than a criminal referral,” said Devon Keeler, a spokesperson for the department, in an emailed statement. “In this case, CDFA acted to protect public health as quickly as possible by taking steps to stop this product’s distribution based on the evidence and information investigators collected and confirmed.”
In response to questions about why it did not pursue prosecution in parallel to its attempt to enforce a cease-and-desist, department officials told ProPublica that local law enforcement often does not pursue criminal charges unless a cease-and-desist order has been violated.
Earlier this year, Baker moved out of California and reopened her farm in Arizona. But before she left town, I visited Moonlight Ridge.
Heading down the same road the inspectors did months before, I came upon the same gate. This time, it was open, so I drove through it, past the sprawling estate of horse corrals and stables. I parked near a grove of peeling eucalyptus trees where I saw a small pen with a large herd of goats protected by a barking farm dog. About 30 yards away was an aging trailer. I climbed the dusty stairs and knocked.
Baker opened the door, in leggings and a tank top, her hair held back with sunglasses. After I explained why I was there — regulators had connected her farm with a recent outbreak — she told me that the case had been dismissed and urged me to call the state’s Food and Agriculture Department. “Everything was negative,” she said. “There were no pathogens.” She added that the results from her own private lab test had also come back clean.
Baker touted the resolution of the case as a total vindication, and the negative test results — from samples she had gathered unsupervised, weeks after the infections started — as proof that her milk had not caused the outbreak.
If her animals had carried E. coli, she said, she and her husband would have been infected at some point. “Quite frankly, we don’t care if we’ve cleaned the pen and then go grab a sandwich,” she told me. “We’ll eat with our hands filthy.”
She said she tested her herd for some goat diseases, but said she never claimed to have tested the milk for foodborne pathogens.
She also stressed that families had knowingly bought milk that was not for human consumption. “Everything is sold as pet milk,” she said. “What they choose to do with it is not my business.” She added that Marris made a poor decision and was “trying to find someone to take the blame for it.”
She suggested she didn’t know the Galindo family well, or that they were drinking the milk. It was just a coincidence, she maintained, that the two families, who hadn’t met each other, both had children who fell ill with the same rare strain of E. coli — one strongly associated with raw-milk consumption — after drinking her product.
Regardless, she said, she stopped selling it after Marris’ daughter fell ill.
“I was nice to Emily,” Baker told me in a sharp tone, describing how she gave the family special privileges by allowing them to visit her farm. “She has completely ruined it.”
Several of her assertions didn’t line up with what the families had shared with me, or what I had read in their text messages and the state’s internal records. When I followed up this summer and asked her about what I had learned, she refused to respond to my questions.
Through Facebook Messenger, Baker said she “vehemently” disagreed with ProPublica’s “distortion and mischaracterization of the facts,” but did not point out any specific errors.
When Brooklyn came home from the hospital, she barely resembled the active toddler who had started to cruise and speak simple words before falling ill. The disease had substantially interrupted her development. “It just all sort of stopped and stalled,” Marris said.
Brooklyn began physical therapy right away, but she walked with a slight limp and couldn’t sleep through the night without terrors. Doctors also warned that she would likely face long-term kidney issues. She would need to be seen every six months by a nephrologist and would not ever be able to drink alcohol.
Victoria, too, will require ongoing medical monitoring.
Not long after both girls had been discharged, a mutual acquaintance connected their two families, who gathered in Marris’ backyard. Sitting over a spread of cheese, crackers and blueberry jam, they compared the text messages that Baker had sent them.
It became evident, recalled Marris, that Baker had known that both children had become sick after drinking her raw milk, but had not informed the hospital or told the families that they weren’t alone. Together, they decided to file a lawsuit against Baker and her farm in Riverside County Superior Court, alleging they had negligently sold the families contaminated raw milk that was presented as “fit for human consumption.” The case is ongoing. Baker told ProPublica that the farm will “fully defend against the allegations by Plaintiffs.”
Marris said she felt she needed to hold Baker accountable for what she’d done, given that regulators had squandered their chance to do so. But she also carries her own heavy burden of guilt.
“I’m going to hate myself to the day I die for having allowed that to happen,” she said. Now more fearful of harming her children, she agonizes over whether meat is undercooked or pasteurized milk has been sitting out on the counter too long.
Hoping to spare other families the same pain, Marris posted another warning when she saw someone else advertising raw milk in her chiropractor’s Facebook group that summer.
“Just PLEASE PLEASE educate yourself and make choices about raw milk carefully. My 17 month old baby and one other little girl almost died last month from raw goats milk,” she began. “I’m posting this so you know what can truly happen if the milk has bacteria….know the risks, and make your own personal choices.”
When she later logged back in to see whether people had responded, she saw a notification at the top of the feed: “Your profile is suspended from this group.”
She texted the office of her chiropractor, Boman, one of the group’s three administrators. “I’m now banned from the group Chris runs, despite knowing what has happened,” she wrote. “I’m pretty disappointed.”
Boman texted back with his condolences but said he wasn’t a mediator. “You shared your story, we appreciate it, and people can read it and decide for themselves if they want to assume the risks or not,” he said. “Are you wanting anything else from the group?”
I visited Boman this January at his office in a Murrieta strip mall where he specializes in pediatric and prenatal chiropractics. I found him leaning on the front desk of his waiting room, wearing a sweatshirt that said “PRAY” across the chest. His neatly clipped facial hair framed a welcoming smile. He agreed to speak outside.
After Marris was suspended from the group, Boman said, he hoped it would calm down the conversation. She was “just drumming up a bunch of fear,” he said. “She’s coming out of this traumatic experience. … People need to see all perspectives.”
Boman said he had spoken with Baker to understand hers. “I don’t want someone in the group that’s doing shady things,” he told me. “People have been kicked out for selling bad cows.” But Baker assuaged his concerns. “From everything I understand, her standards are super high,” he said, citing her negative pathogen results. “Her milk came back squeaky clean.”
Boman said he connected Baker with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that assists raw-dairy sellers, which Baker said last January was representing her. Boman said the referral wasn’t, “You did something wrong, make sure you lawyer up,” adding that he has a membership that allows him to access the fund’s services. “If something arises, it’s nice to have someone in that corner.” The organization said it is not representing Baker in the lawsuit.
Boman still believed in raw milk, he told me. He’d only stopped selling it in his office because he had dried up his cow. He said he was supportive of what Marris had been through, but “I don’t want a product to get blamed if it wasn’t that.” Boman did not respond to follow-up questions sent by email.
For Marris, his response was a betrayal. But the experience didn’t keep her away from Facebook groups where people continue to spread misinformation about raw milk and advertise it for sale. At night, after tucking her children into bed, Marris scrolls through them, tracking the posts.
From time to time, she steps back into the comments and shares her story, hoping to prevent other mothers from making the worst mistake of their lives. Sometimes, she is attacked and accused of lying by raw-milk absolutists. And sometimes, the groups delete her posts.
