The legend of football Diego Maradona “sometimes resisted” to be attended by doctors, said on Thursday one of his sisters in the trial of seven health professionals for his death in Argentina in November 2020.
Claudia and Ana, two of the sisters of Maradona, who are wanting in the case, gave testimony on Thursday on the fourth week of the trial that takes place in San Isidro, a suburb north of Buenos Aires, near the town of Tigre, where the former soccer player died.
Claudia, 53 and the youngest of Maradona’s five sisters, said Diego “sometimes resisted” to be attended by doctors and “had a strong character.”
She and Ana, 74, agreed that her brother “did what she wanted.”
Maradona passed away from a pulmonary edema generated by heart failure on November 25, 2020 while in home hospitalization after a neurosurgery.
The sisters said they participated in the decision to do home hospitalization and Claudia stressed that the experts had told them that “there would be clinical doctors” and equipment to serve him.
Other witnesses in the trial in his statements pointed out that there were no ambulances or medical equipment as a defibrillator in the house where the idol died.
The sisters said Leopoldo Luque, the neurosurgeon and one of the accused in the case, was Maradona’s trusted doctor.
Ana said he last saw his brother when he was hospitalized at the Olivos Clinic, weeks before his death, and that when he asked him how he was, he replied, “The soul hurts me.”
On Thursday afternoon, it was expected to be another of his sisters, Rita, and Verónica Ojeda, mother of Diego Maradona’s youngest son, depused.
Seven health professionals (doctors, nurses, the psychiatrist, and a psychologist) are accused of eventual offender, a figure who implies that they were aware that their actions could cause death. An eighth accused – a little – will be tried in a separate process.
This trial, which began on March 11, will last at least until July with the testimony of dozens of witnesses. The accused are in danger of taking between 8 and 25 years in prison.
Sisters’ lawyer Maradona, Pablo Juraura, contested some of the questions of other witnesses, who pointed to the contractual relations between the former player and his sisters.
For jury, answers can affect their customers’ interests in another case, in which the children of Maradona are processing their aunts for the rights of the “Maradona brand”.
The court did not accept the protests and the sisters had to answer about it.
The brands “are something he left to the family,” Claudia said and added that before his death Diego Maradona only “gave them gifts”.
