I first posted about Jamie Devenport-Tull more than two weeks ago when she went missing. The kindergarten teacher from Modesto, California just up and vanished one day, it seemed. Her car had been damaged in a crash near her home, but her physical body was nowhere near the scene, and speculation was that she had walked away… somewhere.

What made the story even more complicated (and depressing and infuriating) was that Devenport-Tull, who has bipolar disorder, wasn’t taking her medication anymore because a pastor and his wife said the pills were a “gateway drug to the devil.”

There’s finally some good news. Just as the efforts to find her were set to scale back on the assumption she would never be found, she was discovered less than a mile away yesterday morning.

Her phone was found near a water trough where cattle drink. “We saw her moving,” Tull’s step cousin Lynn Garber said. “And we said, ‘It looks like she’s alive,’ and she says, ‘I’m alive.'” … The three people who found Tull said she could barely move because of her severe sunburns. She is said to have survived by drinking from that trough and eating insects.

She told law enforcement she was trying to get to Yosemite, more than 60 miles away.

At least she’s in the hospital now getting treatment. Let’s hope the staff can put her back on the medication she needs by convincing her she doesn’t need to fear Satan.

I wish I could say there were charges filed against the pastor and his wife, but they didn’t do anything legally wrong here. Spreading lies that stem from your faith is still, and always will be, allowed. We just need to do a better job inoculating people against bullshit.

