And switching gears now, on Christmas Eve, 16-year-old Keenan Young passed away at the Belize Medical Associates after he complained of serious head and stomach pains and began coughing up blood. Police are now investigating whether his death can be classified as a murder since he was punched in the face by his older brother, professional boxer Alex Neal, on December 8th after an argument.
But there is no direct link connecting the incident to Young's death, and one of the attending doctors, Fernando Cuellar, told us today via Zoom that it's best to wait for the postmortem. Still, he told us more details about the time between when Young was admitted into the hospital at 11:05am and when he died at 11:59am.
Dr. Fernando Cuellar, Internist
"He had come in after that day complaining that he had a cough and cold and fever, so he was initially swabbed for Covid and that was negative, the results were forthcoming in about 15-20 minutes. After that he was moved to the emergency room where he was a big agitated complaining of headache and pin the abdominal area. It must be added that his vital signs, meaning his blood pressure, his heart rate, his oxygen levels were all normal and an IV was started and some blood samples was taken and whilst he was lying on the bed he started coughing and coughing up blood, a very little bit amount of blood and then he suddenly just became motionless and he was checked immediately then only to find that he did not have a heart rate and he was not breathing. In essence that is what we called "crashed" and that is where I came in. I was called to the emergency room immediately. I was very close by the pharmacy and it took me about maybe 5 seconds to reach there and already CPR had been initiated by the doctor in the emergency room and the nurses where they had him on a backboard already doing chest compressions and ventilating him with a face mask. I took over, I intubated and we started advance CPR which we did for 30 minutes, but unfortunately that was fruitless and we were not able to get back a heartbeat, so we had to unfortunately pronounce him dead at that time that we did about 30 minutes after the CPR initiated."
"The history told to me is that he had suffered a knock to the face, a punch actually and had seen the neurologist a couple times before. They had actually done a CAT SCAN which was unremarkable, they didn't see anything strange on the CAT SCAN and he was just treated symptomatically, something for pain. So all in all the diagnosis for sure from that information and the sudden turn of events, it's impossible to say what was the cause of death and this is one of the few times I insisted to the parents that a post mortem would need to have been done to establish cause of death."
We also asked Dr Cuellar if such an injury could actually lead to someone's death.
Dr. Fernando Cuellar, Internist
"If you have brain swelling and the swelling gets to a certain critical point, you can develop nausea and vomiting because of the same increase pressure in the brain, so that is quite possible. From a clinical standpoint there are few connections that you can make, but that strong connections at this point and that is why we need that proper medical forensic which of course you know sometimes we don't have the best in Belize."
Reporter
"Hypothetically how hard would you have to hit somebody else for them to receive extreme trauma to the brain, swelling, bleeding all of that?"
Dr. Fernando Cuellar, Internist
"We have many of cases that people underestimate head injuries. We have many of circumstances that oh he just knocks his head, he just fell down, he just develops a guava and then serious things are happening within the skull. So you should never underestimate a knock, an injury to the head. Always get it checked out. This famous incident where you get knock on the head and you get blackout a little bit, something that we called concussions - that also needs to have it properly checked out and that is why I insist and I take every opportunity to do so that we need to have CAT SCANS in the hospital and I am speaking particularly the Karl; Huesner Hospital, because this is a valuable tool. This isn't a luxury. We don't need a Lexus, we need a little Volkswagen - gone the days of mule and cart. We need a proper functioning at Karl Heusner."
However, Dr Cuellar also added that without the postmortem, other factors need to be looked at, including whether Young had any interaction with drugs, so he recommended a toxicology report - but noted that it would delay the process.
