Tag: brain dead

More than two years after 15-year-old Jahi McMath of Oakland, California, was declared brain-dead, her mother has posted a new photo of her on Facebook and declared that her daughter is as “healthy and beautiful as ever.”

She is “a fighter, a warrior, a blessed child,” Nailah Winkfield wrote in her post about the teen, who went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced legally dead by doctors after surgery to remove her tonsils and treat her sleep apnea in December 2013.

Winkfield, who won a court injunction to keep Jahi on life-support, moved her daughter last year to an undisclosed New Jersey facility willing to care for her. In New Jersey, the law allows the rejection of a “brain-dead” declaration on religious grounds.

“God’s got your back little girl – keep fighting,” Winkfield wrote on March 15. “Your testimony will be a great one. All the prayers and good wishes combined with your mother’s love for you, which is pure and soothing, will definitely keep you going.”

Jahi’s family fought to keep her on a ventilator and have breathing and feeding tubes surgically inserted, because they believe that as long as her heart is beating, there is hope for a recovery.

“They said she was ‘dead, dead, dead,’ and they said she won’t last long and that she would start deteriorating,” Winkfield said in a post on Oct. 23, 2015, after braiding her daughter’s hair in preparation for her 15th birthday the next day. “They claimed she was just going to last a few weeks, or a maximum of a few months before her organs stopped working. Who are ‘they?’ Just mere human beings who will keep learning each new day that there is a ‘He’ who is greater than ‘they.'”

Winkfield is now fighting to have Jahi’s death certificate invalidated and have her declared legally alive. If her lawsuit is successful in federal court, the family’s insurance company will be required to pay for her medical treatment.

“I want her to have the same rights as any other disabled kid,” Winkfield told the New York Daily News in December. She said then that her daughter was showing some signs of life, including the twitching of her fingers and toes – something that doctors say could be spasms or reflexes commonly seen in clinically-dead people.

“Our prayers are being heard,” Winkfield wrote in a December Facebook post, accompanied by a video of her daughter. “We know ‘dead’ people don’t move their fingers and reflexes don’t happen on command. We will keep praying, as this beautiful child of God keeps fighting to get better.”