Girl at center of debate over brain death dies, mother says (Jahi McMath)

Now she can finally rest.

The poor kid was very obese and had obstructive sleep apnea caused by the obesity. The tonsillectomy was part of an effort to relieve swelling in the throat and hence somewhat relieve the apnea.

While in the hospital recovering -- and here it gets very murky -- the girl's room was full of relatives, after medical personnel said she had to rest quietly and not eat any solid food. Suddenly, according to her mother, there was hemmorhaging and choking, and mom was trying to treat this by herself before calling the nurse. Which was bad enough, but somehow a big ol' hamburger enters the story, with a lot of denial it ever existed.

The rest is sad, sad history. She was dead, but as long as she was on life support a lot of people denied it -- her chest was rising and falling because of the pump -- and right to lifers got hold of the story... and she was taken out of the hospital which did not wish to keep the body in a state of slow decay.

What a mess. Rest in Peace, little girl.

ETA: Another news article last night reminded me how extensive the throat surgery was: tonsils, and adenoids were just the start. The docs did a lot of tissue-trimming to try to relieve her severe sleep apnea. So Jahi was supposed to rest and not talk -- and the room filled up with chatty relatives talking to her and each other. She was not supposed to eat solids, and -- did someone offer her a treat?

So family took her to New Jersey where brain dead does not necessarily mean legally dead on religious grounds.
It takes a lot of work to maintain the heart beating after brain has died.

Eventually the cells outside the dead brain just refuse to regenerate -- which no doubt was the origin of Jahi's "intestinal issue."

Uck. I read about a similar case years ago. The mother kept tending the body, and would take it to the ER from time to time. One time the esophagus was clogged with dead cells, said the author of the other case.

least in Ca.

It’s amazing how these dumb fucks lived long enough to have kids.

And my sincere condolences to her grieving family.

There is no group I despise worse on Earth. I despise horrible groups like ISIS equally, but not more.

For starters, one of them burns people alive in cages and throws gay people off of buildings. One of them conquered cities by force and attempted genocide against a religious minority, while putting the women of that minority into sexual slavery. One of them had children execute people. One of them sawed the heads off of live prisoners.

I'm not defending the ideology of the evangelicals here, but to equate them to ISIS is frankly ludicrous. Get back to me when the Southern Baptists conquer a city and start executing people.

The evangelicals hold opinions and beliefs you don't like. ISIS committed multiple large-scale atrocities and crimes against humanity. They are not remotely comparable.

They wouldn't hesitate to do those things, IMO. What extremists do is in direct proportion to what they can get by with.

There's a long league of distance between saying shit like "homosexuality is immoral" and "let's throw gay people off of buildings!" There are definitely nutjobs among the evangelicals who will say things like "gay people should be killed." But those are the exception rather than the rule. The evangelicals I talk politics with say that gay marriage shouldn't be allowed. I've never once had them express a desire to commit wholesale murder or genocide.

Eric Robert Rudolph evaded apprehension for a long time because a good number of Christians in that area didn't have a problem with his choice in victims.

I hadn't heard that anyone sheltered him while they were hunting for him, though. Do you have a link, by chance? Were the people who helped him charged with anything? They definitely should have been if they helped him evade capture.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/2003/0604/p01s02-usju.html

Found this interesting article above.

They knew he murdered a lot of people and just... looked the other way? How can a person do that and still sleep at night?

Going back to our original topic, though, I didn't see much in there indicating that they didn't turn him in for religious reasons. The article made it sound more like a general mistrust of the federal government and law enforcement, like most areas with a "militia" type presence. And the pastor of the local church wasn't sheltering him in the rectory or anything like that.

The corpse has been literally rotting for years -- they stopped posting pix or vids for their money grab a looooong time ago.

What Nailah Winkfield did was beyond grotesque, it was obscene.

i can understand a coma, brain trauma, shock ... 5 years is a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time

a few weeks to a couple months would test my toleration for life-support, though a coroner's ruling could convince me very rapidly

This was almost 5 years ago. Hope this will bring some sort of closure.

Family was able to get medicaid coverage since New Jersey considered her alive and not dead.
"When the family moved Jahi to New Jersey it was able to get free Medicaid healthcare coverage, because the state still recognized her as alive."
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/30/jahi-mcmath-death-could-have-costly-implications-in-civil-case-against-hospital-doctors/

this never should have been allowed. There was no medical evidence she was alive. This is what happens when religion gets involved with medical care - people are given false hope by God-botherers that think prayer works, and Jesus comes down to resurrect dead bodies. It’s insanity.

What I've read but I've never seen confirmed and this is also mentioned in another post made by DUer Hekate in this thread is that the girl was fed a hamburger while she was recovering from her surgery and she began to choke and there was some delay in alerting medical staff as the mother tried to attend to her daughter herself.

She probably had a hard time trying to face that what went on in the room after surgery played a part. I can't blame her for feeling like that, I wish the religious extremist hadn't gotten hold of her so that she could have processed all that somehow.

Why should it NOT have been allowed?

If the girl was dead, and the parents wanted to pay (or find other people to pay) to keep her alive, what's the harm in that? You can't on the one hand say "she's dead and there's absolutely no hope" and "it's wrong to keep her alive, because she's suffering". I mean, it's a horrible waste of resources, but in general, we allow people to spend money on stupid wasteful things.

Now, the hospital that she was in was absolutely within their rights to say "she'd brain dead, and we're no longer willing to keep her alive". There would be no medical reason for any insurance company or government medical program to pay to keep her alive.

of recovery? As New Jersey considered her alive, apparently medicaid was involved in paying for her care.

What rights specifically do you think this girl had? The notion of a "right" is fairly well defined under US law, and as a general rule, people who are not born yet and people who are dead don't generally have rights. In fact, most pro-choice arguments go along the lines that a person who has not been born does not have rights, and it seems strange that we'd argue that once they've been born, but after they are dead, they somehow have rights.

I assume that you are arguing (given that we're in this branch of the thread) that the girl is legally dead. At that point, she has no rights. There are laws that restrict other people from doing things with dead people, but that's not the same as the dead person having rights. If her parents wanted to put her in a Lenin-style mausoleum, they could legally do so. The closest a dead person has to having "rights" is that if they have property, then there are certain rights relating to the property. In the case of a minor, this is a moot point. If you're arguing at some abstract level about "natural rights", then you are on grounds that are just as shaky as the parents' religious beliefs.

The parents exercised a choice to move their child to New Jersey. The post I'm responding to argues that "this should never have been allowed". The way that we as a society prevent people from doing things is to send guys with guns to make sure that people can't do a thing. That's how we generally enforce the law (though most people comply before the guys with guns get involved). When we talk about "allowed" and "not allowed", that argues that the state has a vested interest in using force to stop these parents from moving their child (child's body?) to New Jersey.

As an aside: I was on the opposite end of this for over ten years when I had a brother in a vegetative state after a car accident. Had it been legal for us to euthanize him, I'd have done so, and he was in vastly better shape than the girl in question. For me, this isn't about the morality of anyone's choices, but the specific _legal_ notion of "allowed" vs "not allowed" (though that distinction is sadly lost on many of the interesting topics here on DU).

if not sooner.

While all the courtroom drama was going on, the hospital called in four coroners and ended up with a signed death certificate retroactive to 2013. That's why she ended up in a house: what medical facility -- even in New Jersey -- is going to on record as accepting an "official" corpse as a patient?

What finally, uh, "died" out must have been the family's financial backing. They ought to be prosecuted for abuse of a corpse, and I hope New Jersey's new governor passes a law that recognizes brain deaths.


rocktivity

Rest in peace Jahi

By medical staff for their own protection. This is not the first case I know of involving an obese child who died after “concerned” family members fed the child solid food that they knew the child was not supposed to eat after OSA/tonsil surgery. Children with eating disorders get this way because someone in the family is over feeding them. It becomes a part of the family pathology to make sure that this child is never allowed to “go hungry.” These families can not make rational decisions. They are like the family members of drug addicts who will slip their loved ones the pills they “need.” I do not typically like to blame hospitals for harm people do to themselves, but the hospital owed it to this child to protect her from her family.

And yes, no doubt the family wanted to do “everything possible” because they were full of guilt. They should be.But The pediatricians should feel guilty too. They did not protect this child from her family.

was not suppose to have any food.
I can not agree more with you it is like drug addicts and a generational family issue to look out for while providing care .
What I witnessed was the last part of a full circle of this disorder between them

Sad what happened to the girl, and in the end imo, it is the sicko fundies that supported "life" and financed this that takes it from sad to macabre

people there are on all kinds of feeding restrictions and have visitors all the time, but the hospital does not sit there guarding the patient to make sure no one feeds them something they shouldn't (nor should they).

instead of insisting she's still alive in some other ghoulish abuse of her body.

The charade and grifting.