OAKLAND (CNN)-
Jahi McMath is no longer inside the hospital where doctors declared her brain-dead after tonsil surgery last month.
But family members won’t reveal where they took the 13-year-old after Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland released her Sunday night.
“We’re very relieved that she got safely to where she needed to be, because we were all very afraid, given the fragile condition as she wasted away at Children’s, that she might not make it,” attorney Chris Dolan told reporters Monday.
The move ends one chapter of a weeks-long struggle between the hospital, which sought to remove Jahi from a ventilator after doctors and a judge concluded she was brain-dead, and her relatives, who fought in court to keep her on the ventilator and contended she showed signs of life.
“As a family, we are definitely relieved that she’s no longer at Children’s Hospital, but we’re all emotionally drained,” Omari Sealey, the girl’s uncle, told CNN’s Piers Morgan Live on Monday night. “This has been an incredible roller-coaster ride of emotions.”
He said so long as his niece’s heart is beating, Jahi is alive.
“She’s moving a lot more. She responds to audio and touch, and more compelling evidence is the fact that she can move her head and neck,” Sealey said.
The hospital released Jahi on Sunday to the Alameda County coroner, who then released her to her mother’s custody, said Dr. David Durand, the hospital’s chief of pediatrics. The hospital had previously said it needed the coroner’s consent for the transfer because Jahi was legally dead.
Jahi — who was declared brain-dead December 12 after post-surgery complications that her family says included severe bleeding and cardiac arrest — was moved from the hospital Sunday accompanied by a critical-care team. She was attached to a ventilator, but with no feeding tube in place.
