Domenico Caliendo death: parents ask for voluntary manslaughter charges against the heart surgeon

The parents of little Domenico Caliendo, the two-year-old boy who died on February 21st at the Monaldi hospital in Naples after the failure of a heart transplant, are asking the Prosecutor's Office to ascertain whether the heart surgeon who carried out the operation, the head physician Guido Oppido, can be charged with voluntary homicide by omission with possible malice and also a new crime of forgery. This is the content of the supplementary complaint filed by Patrizia Mercolino and Alfonso Antonio Caliendo, Domenico's mother and father, through the lawyer Francesco Petruzzi.

According to the lawyer assisting the family, both crimes could be plausible in light of the conclusions of the report of the investigating judge's experts who point the finger at the exclusion of the use of the extracorporeal artificial heart (Berlin Heart) thanks to which, instead, the child could have been subjected to a new heart transplant, and therefore saved.

The new act against Oppido, based on the outcome of the super collegial expert report filed by the judge's consultants in the context of the evidentiary incident scheduled for November, therefore focuses on the failure to use the Berlin Heart which could have been an alternative to the ECMO (extracorporeal life support technique used in intensive care to temporarily replace the function of the heart and lungs), to which little Domenico remained attached for sixty days.

In the supplement, in particular, the investigators are asked to verify whether the heart surgeon, currently under investigation for manslaughter and for a single forgery and indicated in the documents as "healthcare provider holding the position of guarantee and responsible for the decision-making process", foreseen that the continuation with the ECMO could lead to the irreversible loss of eligibility for a new transplant and the death of the child and whether, despite this, he accepted the risk by not promoting the conversion to the Berlin Heart.

Diametrically opposite assessments have already been expressed by the head physician's lawyers: "From the conclusions of the expert report that we have had the opportunity to read - explained the lawyer Alfredo Sorge after the filing of the documents - it emerges that Oppido's surgical conduct is absolutely free from any censorship, that is, it was fully compliant with medical rules; this is because even in the hypothesis contested by the Prosecutor's Office, i.e. that Oppido removed the child's heart before the donor's heart arrived in the operating room, one can affirm in light of professional rules that this is permitted in cases of particular urgency".