A Detroit family is grieving and looking for answers after a 25-year-old mother died shortly after giving birth to her second child.
On March 7, Alona White and her husband Derrick arrived at the hospital for a scheduled C-section. The couple — parents to 2-year-old daughter Aleah — welcomed their second daughter, Ari, that afternoon.
Katina Ponder, Alona’s mother, told Fox2 that her daughter was perfectly fine after giving birth, even getting the opportunity to nurse her newborn.
“She was excited,” she said of White. “We went from being joyful to devastated.”
Hours later, Ponder said White started complaining about a headache and by the time a nurse arrived at her room, she was already unresponsive.
“She went down for a CT scan and that’s when they saw like a really large massive bleeding on the left side of her brain,” Ponder recalled to the outlet.
White was immediately taken for an emergency craniotomy, which left her in the ICU for five days before she died.
“She only really got like an hour to spend with her [daughter Ari],” Ponder said. “It’s just so- it’s so unfair that she was robbed of life like that. I just don’t understand what happened.”
“I did not expect to get a call saying that my baby passed away,” she continued. “She was 25, perfectly healthy, I just don’t know what went wrong.”
Ponder told Fox that the family is waiting for autopsy results to understand what caused White’s death. A GoFundMe account was created to cover funeral costs for White as well as support her husband and daughters. The fundraiser has already garnered nearly $12,000 and Ponder said they are extremely grateful for the donations.
“It’s no amount of money that will bring her back and for these babies to live without their mother – no amount of money,” she added.
