Duke University’s news story on her death.
Statement by the surgeon performing the operation
The key paragraph:
FWIW, they’ve instituted procedures to ensure this never happens again.
Typical. Nobody thinks of checking procedures until a well-publicized death.
Or accident, even.
Why would a hospital need to get the family’s permission to disconnect machinery from a dead person? Legally, brain dead = DEAD. Period. The hospital no more needs the family’s permission to disconnect the machinery then they do to take the body down to the cooler in the morgue so that it doesn’t start to rot. The hospital machinery is meant to be used by LIVING people, not cadavers. (And contrary to popular belief, a brain-dead person’s body cannot be kept going indefinitely by using life support machinery.)
Generally, though, hospitals will delay disconnecting the equipment until the family has had time to adjust to the terrible news and gives their approval to unhook things - it’s easier on everyone that way. Why they didn’t do that in this case, I don’t know. I suspect, though, that the parents were probably in denial about their daughter’s condition (since the news articles I’ve seen said they were looking for an outside opinion on other treatment options); if that was the case, their approval might have been a very long time in coming, and if the hospital was running tight on bed space in the ICU, they might not have been willing (or able) to wait for it.
Just my speculations - we don’t have enough information available to know for sure. What a tragedy this whole thing was.