Baby Soul Mathew Turany’s cause of death still a mystery more than a decade later

Source: Radio New Zealand

The cause of a Canterbury baby’s catastrophic head injury remains a mystery more than a decade after the child’s death.

Soul Mathew Turany was 16-weeks-old when he was flown to Christchurch Hospital after emergency services were called to the rural home near Darfield where he lived with his mother Storme Turany and her then-partner Tony Farmer.

Doctors at Christchurch Hospital found the boy had a fractured skull and bleeding in his brain and eyes.

He died in the early hours of 31 August 2014. No-one has been charged over his death.

Soul would have turned 12 on Saturday but the circumstances that led to the end of his brief life were instead being examined by Coroner Ian Telford during a two-week inquest in Christchurch.

“His life was short but he was precious. He was a gift to the world for every second of the three months, 22 days that he lived,” he said.

“One way that I describe the coronial task is this – where there are shadows, we are there to turn on the lights. It’s not my role to find who is liable, attribute blame or discipline anyone. It’s to work out what’s happened and to see if anything can be done better in the future.

“My inquiry to date has led me to a place where I have a reasonable idea as to the cause of Soul’s death. The physical injuries that led to Soul’s death will be looked at very carefully this week. However, what has never been established is how Soul received those injuries, the circumstances of his death.”

Telford said he was there on behalf of Soul.

“I am Soul’s coroner, as such my core responsibility is to him. Shining a light into the shadows that surrounded his death is not only important but necessary. The passage of time, even though it has been a long time, does not change that,” he said.

During the inquest, Telford would hear from Soul’s mother and her former partner, as well a clinicians, police officers and those involved in the baby’s life.

The inquest heard Storme Turany contacted Healthline early on 30 August 2014 because she was concerned Soul was unsettled.

The child became unresponsive.

Emergency services went to the home, where they tried to resuscitate Soul and flew him to hospital.

His condition deteriorated and he died early the next day.

A pathologist found the boy suffered a head injury from blunt force trauma.

The lawyer assisting the coroner Jamie O’Sullivan told the inquest Soul suffered traumatic injuries.

“Soul suffered a serious head injury caused by a hard impact resulting in fracture to the back of the skull, severe damage to the nerve fibres in the lower part of the brain and the top of the spinal cord and widespread brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen to his brain,” she said.

The first witness to give evidence to the inquest was Christchurch Hospital consultant neurosurgeon Dr Simon John.

John was not working at the hospital when Soul arrived in 2014 but reviewed images and notes about his injuries and provided a police statement in December 2015.

Scans revealed a “brain that is dying, essentially”, he said.

“The MRI showed that the vast majority of the brain – so all of the thinking or processing parts of the brain, the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes, occipital lobes – all dead or dying. The only parts of the brain that were alive or with an adequate blood flow were the central, deep processing parts of the brain,” he said.

“It’s an irreversible, fatal sort of picture.”

John told the inquest Soul was too small to have injured himself and the injuries could not have been the residual effects of birth trauma.

He told the coroner the injuries were consistent with head trauma and Soul was likely unconscious from the moment he was injured or very soon after.

“By the time Soul made it to the emergency department he was critically unwell. He was dying by the time he reached the emergency department,” he said.

“It’s most likely or most probable that he was unconscious or significantly affected from the moment of impact.”

It was unlikely that Soul had suffered an injury that went unnoticed, John said.

“I’m just purely basing the opinion on the facts and the facts are the black and white imaging with time stamps rather than what anyone said happened because the problem is that someone’s not saying something,” he said.

“The imaging is awful, the pathology report is horrible, this is a really catastrophic high-energy injury and I think [Soul being] unconscious from the point of impact is the most probable.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand