Argentines will know how their “God” died. Eight health professionals will be tried for manslaughter with aggravating circumstances, potential negligence, at the end of the investigation into the death, in 2020, of Diego Maradona, with a worn body, alone on a convalescent bed.
A judge in San Isidro (north of Buenos Aires) followed the April requisitions of the prosecution on Wednesday, and sent these practitioners, including a neurosurgeon and attending physician, a clinical doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a nurse manager, to trial. as well as nurses.
Maradona died of a cardiorespiratory crisis on November 25, 2020 at the age of 60, alone, on a medical bed at a residence in Tigre, north of Buenos Aires, where he was recovering from a neurosurgery operation for a hematoma on the head.
The former football star suffered from multiple pathologies: kidney and liver problems, heart failure, neurological deterioration and addiction to alcohol and psychotropic drugs.
The death of Maradona, considered one of the greatest soccer geniuses, an idol in Argentina, the country for which he had won the 1986 World Cup, had created a planetary shock wave and upset Argentina. Tens of thousands of people had participated in the funeral vigil of his remains around the presidential palace.
The eight suspects are committed in court for “simple homicide with fraudulent intent”, an offense which is defined as a person committing negligence knowing that it could lead to someone’s death.
The neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque, the psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov, the psychologist Carlos Diaz, the medical coordinator Nancy Forlini, the nursing coordinator Mariano Perroni, the nurses Ricardo Almiron and Dahiana Madrid and the clinical doctor Pedro Pablo Di Spagna will thus have to appear.
No trial date
In his recitals, Judge Orlando Diaz considered that “each of the defendants, by the particular place he occupied in the overall configuration […] would have exercised control of the facts”, determining the final event “according to the contributions of each of them”.
The magistrate noted “the absence of intervention, of any saving action that could have prevented death”.
The defendants incur sentences ranging from 8 to 25 years in prison, but should appear free at trial, the San Isidro prosecutor’s office having never requested their pre-trial detention.
No date has been put forward at this stage for the holding of the trial.
According to prosecutors, the personnel responsible for Maradona had been “protagonists of an unprecedented, totally deficient and reckless hospitalization at home”, and had committed a “series of improvisations, mismanagement and failures”.
A damning expert report, produced in May 2021 by a medical commission as part of the investigation, concluded that the former player had been “left to his fate” by his medical team, which had led him to a “prolonged period of agony”.
Doctors ‘did nothing’
The suspects had all, during their hearings, defended their actions, within the framework of their field of competence, at the bedside of the champion. By sending the ball back into the court of other professionals.
Thus Leopoldo Luque, attending physician and confidant of Maradona, said he was “proud of what[il] did”, ensuring at all times that he had “tried to help” Maradona. He was “a family doctor, not responsible for hospitalization at home”, his lawyer had pointed out.
The psychologist Diaz had estimated that his work as an addiction specialist had had “no kind of interference” with the death, which had “nothing to do with a clinical or psychiatric matter”.
And the nurse Dahiana Madrid, who discovered Maradona lifeless, had assured that she had only “complyed with the indications of the doctors”. There were “a lot of warning signs that Maradona was going to die overnight. And none of the doctors did anything to avoid it,” his lawyer pleaded.
The prosecution had opened an investigation, seeking possible negligence or recklessness, following statements by two daughters of Diego Maradona, pointing in particular to the Dr Luc.
Other procedures remain pending in the posthumous wake of the legendary footballer: a civil procedure on the division of the inheritance of Maradona to the five recognized children. And a procedure between his two eldest daughters and his lawyer for the commercial use of the mark or the name.