Woman had heart missing after she died on vacation in Turkey
A mother died in mysterious circumstances on a family holiday and allegedly had her heart removed.
Beth Martin, 28, from Britain, fell ill during her flight - something she initially blamed on food poisoning - and within hours of arriving in Istanbul began feeling 'delirious' and was immediately rushed to hospital.
She died the next day. Beth's family claim they were kept in the dark about the seriousness of her condition and suggested doctors seemed unaware that Beth was allergic to penicillin.
Her husband Luke, who had accompanied her on the family holiday with their two young children, was also accused of 'poisoning' his wife by the Turkish authorities and thought to be a suspect in her death.
After days of battling with officials, Luke eventually arranged for Beth's body to be flown back to the UK and taken into the care of British coroners - who later said her heart had been removed.
Beth's family has now been left desperately searching for answers about how and why she died - with Luke saying he has suffered the 'deepest level of trauma'.
The Turkish Ministry of Health has now revealed Beth died after a 'cardiac arrest due to multiple organ failure' - but stopped short at explaining the exact cause of this.
Officials also said that Beth 'did not undergo any surgical procedures' during a preliminary autopsy at the hospital, but would not say whether this was also true after she was transferred to the Forensic Medicine Institute for a second autopsy.
The Health Ministry said: 'The patient was recorded in the hospital records as a "forensic case" in line with the statement of Martin's wife that they may have been poisoned by a meal they ate in their country before the trip, and the initial findings.'
It added: 'A preliminary autopsy [without incision] was performed at the hospital in accordance with the forensic case procedure and his wife's request in this regard.
'The exact cause of Martin's death could not be determined with the current findings in the preliminary autopsy, which was carried out with the participation of the Public Prosecutor and the forensic medicine doctor.
'Beth Martin did not undergo any surgical procedures during her treatment at the hospital, and there was no question of any organs being removed.'
The update still leaves Beth's family with so many questions and it is still unknown whether doctors missed a problem with her heart, or failed to acknowledge her allergy to penicillin.
It has been alleged that doctors may have given her the drug before her death.
The Marmara Pendik hospital, which sits a short distance from the city's Sabiha Gokcen international airport, is facing a negligence investigation over Ms Martin's rapid and as-yet-unexplained death, according to her family.
But the Martins face a six-month wait for a coroner's inquest that could give them all of the answers they desperately need.
'It has been the worst and most traumatic week of my entire life,' husband Luke wrote on social media.
'If anyone can take anything away from this... hold your loved ones a little longer, don't sleep on an argument, take photos, take videos, tell them you love them more.'
Friend Robert Hammond has also launched a GoFundMe in support of Beth's family, which has so far raised over $340,000. On the page he laid out the traumatic ordeal in detail.
His account has been expanded upon by Ellie Grey, a wellness influencer who described Ms Martin as her 'very good friend' and appeared to have gone to Turkey herself to help.
Hammond, writing on the page, said Ms Martin was taken to hospital on Monday April 28, where she was examined by medics and admitted.
Mr Martin then left for a few hours to take his children back to the hotel, before he was summoned back to pay for a scan upfront. He then went to be with his children as his wife was admitted into intensive care.
Her husband was, Mr Hammond says, 'banned from seeing her'.
Mr Hammond adds: 'From there, no calls and no updates despite him trying to contact the hospital to see if his wife was OK. Just silence.'
Overnight, Ms Martin was transferred to another hospital for an angiography - a type of X-ray used to show up blood vessels - due to what her family would be told were 'concerns with her heart'.
This scan reportedly showed no cause for concern, according to Ms Grey.
Ms Martin was then transferred back to the first hospital - which allegedly refused to provide paperwork to a private hospital contracted by her travel insurer.
But Mr Martin and his wife's mother, who had flown out urgently to see her, were frustrated when they asked to see her on Tuesday - unaware of her rapidly deteriorating condition.
The crisis was complicated by the arrival of Turkish police officers at the Martins' hotel, where they handed Luke a document stating his wife had died at 9.am, even as she remained on life support - still alive, barely.
Police then informed him he was suspected of poisoning her - before her death was even formally confirmed.
As he watched his wife being loaded into a Turkish ambulance on Monday, Luke had told medics that she was allergic to penicillin - a common medicinal allergy affecting around one in 10 people around the world.
But doctors at the hospital did not seem aware.
Mr Hammond said: 'The doctor asked if Beth had allergies. Luke had already told the paramedics when Beth got in the ambulance that she was allergic to penicillin.
'And yet when told again, they were shocked to hear this information - they had no idea and had been treating her for hours at this point.'
On Tuesday, Mr Martin received a call from the hospital, delivering the news that his wife was dead, two days after complaining of an upset stomach, with no clear cause.
'How did she die? We don't know,' Ms Grey said. 'Beth was ill before she got to Turkey. She started being sick on the plane, we started thinking it was a dodgy Chinese.
'The insurance company wanted to move her to a private hospital but the public hospital in Istanbul were not cooperating, they were being slow and delaying reports and not sending information over. They stopped her.
'They transferred her to another hospital to have an angiography done but they said the heart was fine and transferred her back and still didn't transfer her to a private hospital. then she died.'
Ms Grey has suggested the hospital may have been negligent in its duty of care.
She added: 'They said they did 45 minutes of CPR but anyone who has ever had CPR or has seen CPR knows how brutal it is.
'When I saw Beth in the morgue after she had her hair in two French plaits and they were perfect. There is no way they did CPR for 45 minutes, I know that.'
While Luke was being interrogated by police, the hospital tried to pressure the family into telling them whether they planned to sue over the death and handed them a piece of paper that they refused to sign.
'All they went on about is are you going to sue the hospital, sign this bit of paper,' Ellie added.
'I said: "Is there something we should be suing for? Do you know something we don't? Because that's really suspicious".'
Medical reports, while unable to confirm how Ms Martin died, have ruled out food poisoning as the cause of her death, Ms Grey claimed.
Luke was then dragged before police to hear accusations of poisoning his late wife. But as it dawned on officers that he played no role in her death, they dropped the charge and let him go.
The horrors, as alleged by Mr Hammond, continued: that Luke, alongside Beth's mother, was made to carry his wife's body in a zipped body bag, and threw thousands at repatriating her there and then, rather than waiting weeks for insurers.
'We got to see Beth for 30 seconds in the morgue then the guy (clicked his fingers) at us and handed us a corner of the bodybag that was zipped open and me, Beth's mum, Luke and a translator had to lift her body into a coffin,' Ellie Grey said in her video, appearing to corroborate the account.
'Losing her was traumatic enough but going over to Istanbul and seeing first hand the lack of respect and having to go the next day to the forensic examiner officer and saying "do not take any organs".
'They wanted to bury her or cremate her within 24 hours, we had to fight to repatriate her and pay ourselves.'
Backing: A GoFundMe has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Martin family
Luke then had to deliver the message to his young children that their mother was gone.
The final shock was to come as Beth arrived into the care of British coroners - who found that she had been returned to the UK minus her heart.
'The Turkish hospital has removed it. No explanation. No consent. They have invaded her body and they have taken her heart,' Mr Hammond wrote on the GoFundMe.
Official advice from the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) notes that Turkish coroners can take small tissue samples as well as complete organs for testing 'without the family's permission'.
'You will not automatically be told if this happens,' the advice notes.
And while they will often seek to return organs before a person's body is released, the FCDO adds, 'in exceptional circumstances, body parts might be kept without permission.'
There is, it should be said, no suggestion that Beth Martin's heart has been illegally harvested.
Ms Martin's friends and family are determined to fight until they get straight answers from the Turkish authorities.
'Luke has gone through something that no person should ever have to go through and he has done it with dignity and strength and pride for Beth,' Ellie Grey said.
'I swear to you, between her family and Luke and myself we are not letting this go.
'No way am I going to let them get away with taking her heart, lying about what happened and treating her as if she was somebody with no dignity.
'We will get answers.'
An FCDO spokesperson previously said: 'We are providing support to the family of a British woman who died in Turkey and are in touch with the local authorities.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
23 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Doctor guilty of misconduct over girl's death that led to Martha's Rule
A doctor has been found guilty of misconduct for his failings in the treatment of a girl whose death led to Martha's Rule. Prof Richard Thompson failed to escalate the treatment of Martha Mills, 13, before she died from sepsis in 2021, a disciplinary panel found on Monday. The teenager's death prompted the introduction of Martha's Rule, which gives patients and families the right to a second medical opinion if their own or a loved one's condition deteriorates in hospital. Martha died from sepsis after doctors missed its symptoms and did not heed warnings from her parents that her condition was rapidly deteriorating. A medical tribunal in Manchester has now ruled that Thompson committed 'misconduct which impairs his fitness to practise' during her treatment. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) panel found that the doctor, who was the on-duty consultant at King's College hospital (KCH) in London, had made 'particularly grave' failings. It ruled that Thompson should have referred Martha to intensive care on Aug 29 2021 and that he had failed to conduct an in-person assessment of her condition. The doctor was on-call at home for part of the day. Robin Ince, the chairman of the panel, said there was 'no sound reason' why Thompson did not assess Martha's condition himself. 'The tribunal was of the view that, as more serious and unexplained factors had come into play, there were clear points (at 17.00 and 20.30) when Prof Thompson should have taken action not only to see Martha himself but also to refer Martha to PICU (paediatric intensive care unit) and these combined failures to do so makes them more serious,' he said. 'The tribunal appreciated that it was assisted by hindsight but concluded that there were sufficient adverse clinical indicators at the time of something unexplained going on such that direct review and escalation to PICU was required.' Martha was only transferred to intensive care on August 30, by which point she had septic shock. She died from sepsis on August 31 at Great Ormond Street hospital (GOSH), where she had been transferred. A coroner ruled in 2022 that she would have likely survived if doctors at KCH had identified the warning signs of the condition and transferred her to intensive care sooner. The trust has since apologised for mistakes in Martha's care. Martha was in hospital with a pancreatic injury after a fall from her bike while on a family holiday in Wales. King's is a specialist national referral centre for children with pancreatic problems. 'Gravity of mistakes' In a statement, Merope Mills and Paul Laity, Martha's parents, welcomed the recognition of the 'gravity of mistakes' made before her death. 'It is important to us that allegations denied have been found proved and the gravity of mistakes that led to our daughter's preventable death has been recognised,' they said. 'We will always have in our minds the failures of culture, training and policy on Rays of Sunshine ward at King's College Hospital, as well as the responsibility of individuals. We'd like to thank all of the thoughtful doctors who have helped us to understand what happened to Martha.' Thompson's sanction will be determined at a separate hearing on Tuesday. Mr Ince said the panel believed he had been 'remediated' and that it was 'highly unlikely that anything like this will ever happen again and there is no current impairment of Prof Thompson's fitness to practise on this basis '. But he added: 'The tribunal concluded that the misconduct was such that a finding of impairment was required to uphold public confidence in the profession as well as uphold proper professional standards, and that it would be undermined if no finding of impairment were found.'
The Independent
35 minutes ago
- The Independent
Senior doctor's failures in teenager's care ‘amounted to gross negligence'
Failures of a senior doctor in his care of a teenager who died days later from sepsis were 'particularly grave' and 'essentially amounted to gross negligence', a medical tribunal has found. Professor Richard Thompson did not refer Martha Mills, 13, to intensive care despite her displaying several high-risk indicators of sepsis and the on-call consultant also chose not to return to London's King's College Hospital to assess her in person. Martha had been an inpatient on the hospital's Rays of Sunshine Ward at King's College Hospital after she suffered a serious injury to her pancreas when she slipped while riding a bike on a family holiday in Wales in July 2021. Weeks later, she experienced a fever, increased heart rate and had a catheter inserted into her vein, which was 'ultimately considered' to be a likely source of the infection that led to her death from sepsis, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) hearing was told. More spikes in her temperature followed, before the consultant hepatologist saw Martha on his morning ward round on Sunday August 29 at the hospital, one of three locations in the UK which specialise in the treatment of paediatric pancreatic injuries. The on-call consultant left the hospital at 3pm, but was phoned at home two hours later by a trainee doctor, who gave an update on Martha's condition. Medical records showed she had deteriorated over the course of the afternoon, and into the early evening, with a drop in her blood pressure, the appearance of a new rash and increases in heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature. Tribunal chairman Robin Ince noted that by 5pm there were 'several high-risk indicators' as set out in the Nice guidelines relating to sepsis. The duty registrar called Prof Thompson again at 8.30pm because of ongoing concerns over Martha's fever, but she was kept on the ward despite the continued presence of moderate to high-risk indicators and the absence of meaningful clinical improvement, said the tribunal. On Monday, the tribunal concluded that Prof Thompson's conduct fell so far short of the standards reasonably expected of a doctor so as to amount to misconduct. Mr Ince said: 'The tribunal was of the view that Professor Thompson's omissions were 'particularly grave' and essentially amounted to gross negligence about the serious risk of harm to patients (albeit only on this one occasion) and were sufficiently serious in any event such as to amount to misconduct.' Martha collapsed on August 30 and was moved to intensive care, before she was transferred to London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she died in the early hours of August 31. At a 2022 inquest into her death, a coroner ruled that Martha would most likely have survived if doctors had identified the warning signs and transferred her to intensive care earlier. Martha's mother, Merope Mills, an editor at The Guardian, said she and her husband, Paul Laity, raised concerns about Martha's deteriorating health a number of times but these were not acted on. The couple later successfully campaigned for Martha's Rule to give patients, families and carers the chance to easily request a second opinion from a senior doctor in the same hospital in the event of a suspected deterioration or serious concern. The tribunal will now consider what sanction, if any, to impose on Prof Thompson's registration. The MPTS hearing, sitting in Manchester, continues on Tuesday.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
NHS trust and manager failed young woman who killed herself
An NHS trust and manager failed a young woman who took her own life at a mental health unit, a court found. Alice Figueiredo, 22, had made more than 10 attempts at self-harm before she died at Goodmayes Hospital in Redbridge, east London, on July 7 2015. Staff repeatedly failed to remove plastic items she had used to harm herself from the communal lavatories. After a seven month trial at the Old Bailey, the ward manager Benjamin Aninakwa, 53 was found guilty of failing to take reasonable care for the health and safety of patients. Jurors also found North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) – the trust which runs Goodmayes Hospital – guilty of 'failing to ensure the safety of a non-employee'. NELFT was cleared of corporate manslaughter – in only the second case that an NHS trust had faced the charge – and Aninakwa was found not guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence. 'You are not above the law' Ms Figueiredo's mother, Jane Figueiredo, said after the verdicts that patients would 'continue to come to serious, avoidable harm' if 'radical changes' were not made. She said: 'We truly hope the fact NELFT (North East London NHS Foundation Trust) has been through a trial of over seven months and convicted of a serious health and safety criminal offence at the Old Bailey will send a very strong message to mental health providers and their staff across this country: You are not unassailable. 'You are not above the law. You need to do far, far better to stop failing those people you have a duty of care to. 'If you don't make radical changes in your conduct and attitudes towards the people you have a responsibility to care for and keep safe, then people like Alice will continue to come to serious, avoidable harm, or senselessly lose their lives. 'This is happening with impunity, time and again, behind the locked doors of wards and in the community across the country.' Ms Figueiredo was first admitted to the hospital's Hepworth Ward in May 2012 with a diagnosis including non-specific eating disorder and bipolar affective disorder, jurors heard. During her time on the acute psychiatric ward, the trust failed to remove plastic items from the communal toilets or keep them locked, even though she repeatedly used the items to try to kill herself. She had used plastic from the toilets to self-harm on at least 10 previous occasions, but the court heard of eight more incidents involving similar materials before Ms Figueiredo took her own life. The suicide attempts were recorded in ward notes and other hospital records. Ward manager on improvement plan Jurors heard that Aninakwa, from Grays in Essex, who was subject to a performance improvement plan, had failed to remove plastic that could be used for self-harm and failed to ensure incidents of self-harm were recorded. Aninakwa and the trust had denied wrongdoing but declined to give evidence. As she paid tribute to her daughter after the trial, Jane Figueiredo said,: 'Alice's light and life shone so brightly, and everyone who knew and loved her has lived the last decade devastated by the immeasurable loss of her luminous, kind, thoughtful, generous, warm, humorous and deeply loving presence, always feeling her absence at every occasion and in our everyday lives, nothing, including these verdicts, will ever bring her back to us, and we will never stop thinking of her and missing her.' Detective Inspector Jonathan Potter, who led the investigation into Ms Figueiredo's case, said: 'This was a complex investigation led by the Metropolitan Police Service, into a unique case that has led to the conviction of the Trust and Benjamin Aninakwa for health and safety offences. 'While there are thousands of NHS workers that do a commendable job every day, today's result must also ensure that lessons are learnt to stop the same mistakes happening again.' Priya Singh, a partner at Hodge Jones and Allen advised that Ms Figueiredo's case now be included as a core participant in the Lampard Inquiry – a statutory investigation into deaths of more than 2,000 people at NHS-run inpatient units in Essex between 2000 and 2023. Ms Singh added: 'The outcome of the trial will be of disappointment to many families failed by mental health services and we can only hope that this trial will lead to a great deal of reflection on the part of those involved to ensure that cases like this do not reappear.'
