Alfie Evans, toddler at center of UK legal battle, dies

Alfie Evans, the toddler at the center of a heated UK legal battle, has died.

Evans, who suffered from an unidentified neurological degenerative illness, was almost 2 years old when he died at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool, England.

His father, Tom Evans, posted the news on Facebook, saying “My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings... absolutely heartbroken.”

The debate over whether Alder Hey Hospital should remove Evans from life support against the wishes of his parents attracted national and international media attention, with everyone from US Sen. Ted Cruz to Pope Francis weighing in.

Evans was born on May 9, 2016, apparently healthy. By December 2016, however, a series of mysterious seizures had left him in a permanently vegetative state. A judge presiding over the case later reported that “almost the entirety of Alfie’s brain [has] been eroded leaving only water and cerebral spinal fluid.”

Doctors recommended that it was in Alfie’s best interest to be taken off life support and provided with palliative care. His parents, however, disagreed and argued that they should be allowed to pursue treatment elsewhere.

In the UK, as a result of the 1989 and 2004 Children’s Acts — which were developed in response to well-publicized incidents of child abuse — the state has the power to override parental wishes about their children’s welfare in limited instances if it is believed to be in the best interest of the child. When, for example, doctors and parents disagree about the best course of treatment for a child, this is generally resolved in the courts.

As in last year’s similar Charlie Gard case, the series of court battles over Alfie Evans attracted international media attention, as well as the attention of Pope Francis, who tweeted his support for Evans’s parents.

As in the Gard case, the Vatican children’s hospital, Bambino Gesù, offered to treat Alfie (and, unlike in the Gard case, Italian authorities made Evans an honorary Italian citizen). However, doctors at Alder Hey argued that keeping Evans on life support would not just be ineffectual, but actively harmful to Alfie’s well-being.

Catholic groups were divided over the case, with Liverpool’s Archbishop Malcolm McMahon and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales coming out in support of the hospital, and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Irish advocacy group the Catholic Association advocating for the parents.

The media firestorm over the Evans case grew heated, with mobs storming the hospital, and sending death threats to hospital staff. One American former lawmaker, Joe Walsh, used the case to bolster the cause of limited gun control, arguing that Alfie Evans’s case showed the necessity of legalizing AR-15s “to make sure what’s happening to #AlfieEvans never happens here.”

Pope Francis has tweeted his sympathies for the Evans family.

Read Vox’s explainer on the Alfie Evans case.