Man dies after 31 years in coma

Ignazio Okamoto

 BRESCIA – A man who had been in a coma for 31 years following a serious car accident, has died aged 54, doctors said Monday. Ignazio Okamoto was just 22 years old when an accident on Father’s Day in March, 1988, left him in a vegetative state.

 In the car with friends when it left the road along the A22 Brennero motorway at Nogarle Rocca, in the province of Veneto, Ignazio was saved (along with two others, a fourth died on impact) but ended up in a coma from which he never recovered.

 “My husband left work and for 31 years followed our son into the house,” said Ignazio’s mother Marina, a Brescian, from the northern Italian region of Lombardy. 

 “For 31 years we have isolated ourselves from the world.”

 His father Hector, 77, a Mexican of Japanese origin, quit his job two years after the accident to dedicate himself to his eldest son.

 “It was necessary, we could not hire nurses and we chose not to leave him in a facility,” Hector told Corriere Delle Sera.

 “We were not prepared, but I became a cook, a nurse and also a physiotherapist for my son,” although “the first years were very hard, our lives changed completely.”

 At the funeral, alongside the coffin, was Alessandro, the driver of the car on that fateful night in 1988. 

 But Hector has never held a grudge. 

 “[Alessandro] suffered a lot too,” Hector said. 

 “When they went out, it happened that my son would also drive [so] the opposite could have happened.”

 cc