Her son died in North Providence. Then she started asking questions about the autopsy report.

Heartbreak befell Yolanda Madyun last year when she learned her 55-year-old son, Atif, had been found dead in his home in North Providence. Months later, when she viewed his autopsy report, outrage compounded the hurt.

“That’s not my son,” she said aloud.

At the bottom of the first page of the autopsy report, Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Zhongxue Hua had begun listing his findings of his internal examination.

“Body Cavities: The organs are in their normal situs,” the report reads.

“When I read that sentence,” Yolanda Madyun says, “a piece of my heart and soul was snatched from me.”

Situs describes the positioning or orientation of organs in the body. Hua was reporting that her son’s heart, liver, and the rest were in their normal places.

Yolanda Madyun says that was impossible.

When Atif Madyun was about 5 years old, doctors diagnosed him with “situs inversus totalis” – meaning his organs were in abnormal positions.

“When you do an autopsy, you do that wide incision,” Yolanda Madyun said. “They cannot miss a person’s organs completely reversed – oh my God."

“Either that was not my son at all," she says, "or they didn’t do a full report – they just assumed he was a druggie, laying on the floor.”

Identified by a medical examiners tag

Atif Madyun, who his mother says had a degree in administrative affairs from the University of Rhode Island, was a peer recovery support specialist helping people recover from substance abuse.

One day last March, a friend went by his home in North Providence to pick him up for work. He didn’t answer. The friend called police to perform a wellness check. They found him unresponsive on the kitchen floor, his mother says.

According to his report, Dr. Hua performed an autopsy the next day, March 20, in the mortuary of the Rhode Island Office of State Medical Examiners. 

Yolanda Madyun, who lives in Ashburn, Virginia, says a local funeral home denied relatives the opportunity to view and identify her son’s body; the autopsy report says the body was identified “by medical examiners tags attached to the body bag and left great toe.”

During the autopsy, the report says, organs were removed and weighed, and specimens submitted for toxicology analysis. In July, Hua ruled that the manner of Atif Madyun’s death was an accident and the cause of death “acute cocaine and fentanyl intoxication.”

Correcting the record

Yolanda Madyun, who is 76, a retired social worker and peer recovery support specialist herself in Virginia, says she was ready to accept the finding of how her son died – until she saw the glaring inaccuracy about the positioning of his organs.

She gathered up her son’s medical records and sent them to the medical examiner’s office to prove her son’s rare condition of “situs inversus totalis” and to contest the report.

Hua, she says, called her and said he had made a typographical error. He issued a revised autopsy report that now reads “the organs have a history of situs inversus totalis” – and refers to “medical records,” presumably the ones provided by Yolanda Madyun.

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“It is deeply distressing,” she says, that Hua is using “my submitted evidence to validate his revised report.”

Further, the revised autopsy report contains yet another inaccuracy, Yolanda Madyun says.

It adds another sentence on how the body was identified: “by visual comparison with state issued ID (driver[sic] license) and confirmed by relative.”

“No family member was allowed to [visually] identify my son,” she says.

“As a grieving parent, I find it unacceptable that almost a year after my son’s death, I am subjected to the mishandling of his case, which only compounds the grief I am experiencing.”

Case under investigation

Dr. Hua did not immediately return a telephone message left at the medical examiner’s office.

The case is now under investigation by the Board of Medical Licensure and Discipline, according to an email sent to Yolanda Madyun from the board’s chief administrative officer, Staci A. Fischer.

Joseph Wendelken, spokesman for the Department of Health, said, “We can only comment on any final disciplinary actions taken against licensees. However, I can say that we take concerns about health care quality very seriously, and that we carefully evaluate every complaint that comes into our office.”

Contact Tom Mooney at: tmooney@providencejournal.com 

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Mother questions whether the RI ME gave her the correct autopsy report