Argentine football icon Diego Maradona’s daughter told a court Tuesday that his death “could have been avoided” if the medical team overseeing his post-surgery recovery had done their jobs properly.
Maradona died Nov. 25, 2020, at age 60, while recuperating at home from brain surgery to remove a blood clot. He had long struggled with cocaine and alcohol addiction.
Seven members of his medical team are now on trial, accused by prosecutors of turning the football legend’s final days into a “horror theater.” If convicted of criminal negligence, they face up to 25 years in prison.
Maradona was found to have died of heart failure and acute pulmonary edema – a condition in which fluid accumulates in the lungs – two weeks after undergoing surgery.
“If they had done their job, this would have been avoided,” his daughter Dalma Maradona, a plaintiff in the case, told a court in San Isidro, north of Buenos Aires.
“They deceived us in the cruelest way,” she said of the medical team.
Dalma Maradona, 38, testified that physician Leopoldo Luque, one of the accused, had assured the family that home hospitalization was “the only option.”
She said she was told her father would have everything he needed, including 24-hour care and an ambulance on standby.
“This never happened,” she said. “It was a house where, occasionally, a doctor would come to see him.”
After her father's death, she said she found the house “disgusting, and it smelled like urine.”
She claimed she had tried to visit the ex-footballer days before his death but was denied entry by Maradona's lawyer and an assistant.
The defendants are accused of “homicide with possible intent” – pursuing a course of action despite knowing it could lead to their patient’s death.
Prosecutors allege the former footballer was abandoned to his fate for a “prolonged, agonizing period” before his death.
Nearly 120 witnesses are expected to testify in the long-delayed trial, which is expected to run through July.
