At a 20-week scan the baby’s head was hard to see. At 24 weeks fetal specialists in Missouri told Tom and Jessica Masterson that the brain and skull were forming abnormally. A later ultrasound and fetal MRI at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis produced a diagnosis of acalvaria: absence of the flat bones of the cranial vault, often with missing dura and scalp muscle, while the skull base and face are present. Skin may cover the brain. The condition is extremely rare and is usually lethal at or soon after birth. Doctors said he would not survive delivery. After an earlier miscarriage, the couple chose to continue the pregnancy. Owen Matthew Masterson was born alive on September 13, 2017, crying. He had no skull above the eyebrows and ears. A physician told the family he knew of only about ten children who had lived more than a few hours.

Owen went home. He did not walk or talk in the usual way. He had an older sister, Ryleigh. In July 2021 the family welcomed Judah—named for “praise”—and described Owen smiling and laughing around the infant. Volunteer photographers from On Angels’ Wings documented him from pregnancy onward. Parents said they loved him as he was and treated extra time as gift, not a rewritten medical textbook. Acalvaria leaves the brain mechanically unprotected; survival for years is an outlier, not a typical course. There is no operation that grows a missing calvarium in this malformation the way reconstructive flaps rebuild a nose. Care is protection, feeding, and comfort.

Owen died on September 13, 2024, his seventh birthday, at Mercy Hospital in Springfield. An obituary listed his parents, Ryleigh, and Judah. The Spanish caption that still circulates was written while he was alive and Judah was new. The later fact does not cancel the earlier years. It completes them. A child with no cranial vault who reached school age remains medically exceptional. It does not mean the original prognosis was wrong for most fetuses with the same diagnosis.

Sources
Springfield News-Leader and KSDK profiles (2018); On Angels’ Wings family essay, “Owen: God’s Lasting Miracle” (2021); Springfield Daily Citizen obituary for Owen Matthew Masterson (September 2024).