A teenage camp counselor reported a rodent problem and got dropped at a Toledo train station after midnight. When her father asked the conference to sit down and talk, the president wrote back to say no. His reason was that the father had gone public about his concerns.
What Happened
Lucia Heilig is eighteen. This summer she counseled at Camp Mohaven, the Ohio Conference's youth camp in Danville, and within a couple of weeks she and the rest of the staff were trapping mice in the cabins where they slept. They documented it. They complained. Her father, Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, says that complaint was the only real conversation his daughter ever had with camp director Joe Ottinger. Adventist Today laid out the account on June 23, and what follows comes from that report and from Heilig's own posts on Facebook and on his blog.
According to Lucia, Ottinger pulled her aside and told her she was done (fired). The reason he gave, according to a Facebook post from her father, was that she "did things differently" than he did. Fine. Her contract as a camp counselor did not require a reason, and a camp can let a seasonal worker go. That is not what should bother anyone. What came after is troubling.
She was told at nine o'clock on a Saturday night to pack. Ottinger then drove her and a second counselor about two and a half hours north and left them at a train station in Toledo, alone, past midnight. Apparently he had considered the airport first—Mohaven sits about an hour from the Columbus airport, which is staffed and open all night. He passed on it, Heilig says, because two teenagers hauling luggage through a train depot would look "less suspicious” whatever that means.
He did not stay with them at the train station, or help them buy a ticket. He just left. He later told the father he was tired and busy. In the same post, Heilig said the children sat there close to five hours, trading off who stayed awake to watch their bags and the door.
The boy’s father was three hours out, and got in his car the moment he heard about his son at the Toledo train station. On the way he hit a deer and totaled his vehicle. Relatives finally reached them and got them home. When Heilig got Ottinger on the phone and asked him how this happened, the answer was that he had the authority to do it, because Lucia was eighteen. Her father's response has stuck with people who have read this story. Leadership is not defined by authority.
The rodents are not a story Lucia made up to get out of work. A county environmental health officer with Knox Public Health confirmed the infestation, and Heilig says the county is now looking into it. In a review he left on Yelp, he counted more than twenty rodents trapped over a span of days and described one counselor waking up to find a mouse on them. There is video going around online of a rodent stuck in a trap. This was real, and the camp knew.
The Hardest Version of the Story
Picture the least sympathetic counselor you can. Give her an attitude, a messy home life, a chip on her shoulder. It still does not move the needle, because the job of a leader was never to care only for the people who make it easy. Jesus tied the whole accounting to the least likely person in the room:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren," he said, "ye have done it unto me."
You measure a shepherd by the shepherd, not the sheep. Lucia was the one who turned out to be right. She flagged a genuine health problem, the county backed her up, and she got shown the door for it.
Camp Mohaven tells parents that every staffer is background-checked, trained in child safety, and certified in CPR. Maybe every box got ticked. What happened to these two young people is what child safety looks like when it is a binder on a shelf, not something a person believes.
This Isn't the First Red Flag
If this were one exhausted man making one bad call at the tail end of camp season, an apology and a new policy would go a long way. The trouble is everything around it.
Once Heilig went public, his inbox filled up, much of it on Facebook. A former Great Lakes Adventist Academy classmate of Lucia's messaged to say the same thing happened to someone else at the camp last summer. He says he has heard since about other incidents, about docked pay, about a counselor once threatened with a drop-off at a police station. None of it is confirmed, and it is all secondhand on social media, so treat it as what it is. But it puts a fair question on the table. If this happened before, who in leadership knew, and what did they do?
This is a conference that can move quickly when it decides to. Early in 2025, when Canton pastor Jesse Santos was arrested in a criminal matter that has nothing to do with any of this, the conference had a statement out and him on administrative leave within days. He later pled guilty and is headed to prison. Different man, different situation, no connection to Mohaven. The only thing worth comparing is the reflex. An arrest hits the news and the machine moves. A father says his daughter was abandoned at a train station, and it goes quiet.
Money has been a problem at the top here, too. This past January the Dayton Daily News reported that a forensic audit turned up 46 people who took in more than $3.2 million in improper "excess benefits" from Kettering Health between 2016 and 2022, and the Ohio Attorney General opened an investigation. The names on that list reach the corner office. Former Ohio Conference president Ron Halvorsen Jr. and his wife took in $391,609. Columbia Union president David Weigley and his wife, $293,000. The sitting Ohio Conference president, Bob Cundiff, came in at $62,654, plus $21,415 for his wife Tanique, a tally that included a 2021 "Board Chair Retreat" in Hawaii. Adventist Today went with the harder word and called the payments "illegal." I would be careful there. The case is still open, nobody has been charged, and the church says the money was repaid. "Excess benefits" is a tax term, not a verdict. Even so, this is the same conference that managed to lose Mount Vernon Academy, the oldest boarding academy the denomination had, to financial and spiritual mismanagement in 2005-2013, under a previous president.
And when ordinary members in Ohio have pushed to bring the conference back in step with the world church, leadership has dug in. Ohio keeps ordaining women in defiance of three General Conference votes, and the Columbia Union it belongs to has been sitting under a formal warning from the General Conference Executive Committee since 2019. When COVID came through, the conference did not plant a flag for liberty of conscience. It pushed vaccination, talked up "herd immunity," and moved to enforce the federal employee vaccine mandate, then walked it back only once the Supreme Court killed the rule.
What the President Wrote Back
Which brings us to the email. Heilig asked the conference for a meeting. According to Adventist Today, which printed the exchange, President Bob Cundiff answered on the morning of June 24, and his answer did not touch a single thing the man had raised. Not the rodents. Not the firing. Not the drive. Not whether two teenagers were safe. Here is what he wrote:
"I'm in receipt of your email and have noted your concern. I'm genuinely sorry you have had a bad experience.
I am also aware of your recent blog post. Such posting disqualifies you as a productive conversation partner in this matter. As such, no appointment request will be granted.
"I do hope that you can find a way to lead your family through this in a way that restores peace to you all. I will be in prayer for you all to that end."
So a parent raises an alarm about a kid left at a train station after midnight, and the president tells him that going public has "disqualified" him, that there will be no meeting, then signs off with a promise to pray.
I don't know much about Cundiff, but he certainly didn't respond redemptively. An apology and a meeting would have cleared it up, but it looks like he wanted to put the father in his place.
When asked what he would like to see happen, Julian Heilig responded:
“A simple apology and a commitment to never let it happen again would have been enough. Instead, the response makes it easier to understand why this kind of behavior continues… and why issues like the rodent infestation they were told about was allowed to persist.”
Heilig's reply was calm, and it should land hard. "I appreciate the clarification of the Ohio Conference's position," he finished.
By Their Fruit
Jesus kept it simple, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Not the brochure. The actual fruit. Look at it here,
A girl who reported a real hazard and got fired for it.
Two teenagers guarding each other through the small hours at a train station because the adult responsible was too tired to stay.
A father wrecking his car trying to reach them.
And a conference president meeting a family's plea with a locked door and a prayer.
Ezekiel had the number of shepherds like this a long time ago. They ruled hard, they let the weak fend for themselves, and they let the flock scatter with nobody going out to look. Heilig is not some doctrinal hardliner with an axe to grind. He asked for the bare minimum, basic human care. Ellen White described the Saviour's method as the inverse of all this:
The Saviour mingled with men as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He bade them, "Follow Me."
The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Here is the thread running under all of it. A church that built its whole identity on a message, the three angels of Revelation 14 and a last call to keep "the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus," gets judged by how it treats its own people. The way this conference treated Lucia Heilig, and then her father, did not come out of nowhere.
It points at people who would rather pray for a family from across state lines than sit across a table from them. And administrators who are little more than social justice gatekeepers. This is their culture, and it is the kind of culture that keeps surfacing in the same corner of Adventism that long ago made its peace with women's ordination. That pairing is not an accident. Fulcrum7 has laid out the connection before: the same move that bends Scripture to ordain women, the claim that the inconvenient passages are merely "culturally conditioned," is the move that bends it again to accommodate the LGBTQ push. Every mainline denomination that took the first road, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, ended up walking the second.
Ohio's defiance on women's ordination is documented and ongoing. When leaders have already decided they can overrule the world church on one matter, and shut the door on a grieving father on another, what else have they quietly decided they are free to set aside?
More than a century ago, Ellen White named the one thing the cause of God needed most, and it is the same thing missing here:
The greatest want of the world is the want of men: men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.
Ohio has men in its offices. Whether it has the kind of men described above is the real question of this whole story.
****
Jerrod Boling
