Oakland teen Jahi McMath laid to rest nearly 5 years after being declared brain-dead

Nailah Winkfield leaves a funeral for her daughter Jahi McMath on Friday, July 6, 2018, in Oakland, Calif. Supporting her are McMath's stepfather Marvin Winkfield, left, and family attorney Christopher Dolan. Nailah Winkfield leaves a funeral for her daughter Jahi McMath on Friday, July 6, 2018, in Oakland, Calif. Supporting her are McMath's stepfather Marvin Winkfield, left, and family attorney Christopher Dolan. Photo: Photos By Noah Berger / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Photos By Noah Berger / Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Oakland teen Jahi McMath laid to rest nearly 5 years after being declared brain-dead 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Nearly five years after being declared brain-dead and placed on a ventilator at the insistence of a devoted mother who maintained she was alive and improving, Jahi McMath was laid to rest Friday in East Oakland.

Dozens of mourners streamed into Acts Full Gospel Church to memorialize the Oakland teen whose throat surgery gone awry inspired the latest national debate over the meaning of death.

Organ music thrummed. Daffodil bouquets brightened the altar. Jahi, who would have turned 18 this year, lay in a casket painted in her favorite lavender hue.

The hospital protests in which supporters of the family chanted, “Don’t pull the plug!” were long over, and relatives dabbed tears as they recalled Jahi’s cherubic smile, her love of manicures and her penchant for wearing hoodies and flip-flops during winter.

“The name ‘Jahi’ means prominent, famous and widely known, and she definitely lived up to her name,” said Wanda Johnson, a family friend and mother of Oscar Grant — the 22-year-old man who was fatally shot by a BART police officer in 2009.

Reading Jahi’s obituary to the crowd of mourners dressed in purple summer dresses and white boutonnieres, Johnson offered a vibrant portrait of the girl whose case pitted a deeply Christian family against what it said is a callous medical establishment.

Jahi was 13 in December 2013 when she entered UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland for surgery to correct sleep apnea. Within hours of the procedure, blood began gushing from her mouth and nose, filling a bucket at her bedside. She went into cardiac arrest and was declared brain-dead, over objections from her mother and stepfather.

Refusing to accept the doctors’ determination that Jahi was dead, Nailah and Marvin Winkfield flew Jahi to New Jersey — the only state that defers to a family’s religious beliefs when determining whether a person has died — and kept her on life support for years.

They said she died on June 22, from bleeding due to liver failure and a brain injury caused by lack of oxygen.

Yet as Jahi’s body lay peacefully in its purple coffin, her family’s legal fight waged on. Two lawsuits over the teen’s death are ongoing: a federal civil rights case to strike her 2013 death certificate and replace it with a new one issued June 22, and a malpractice case against Children’s Hospital Oakland over the tonsillectomy that her family said was done improperly.

During a news conference held Tuesday at the San Francisco office of her pro bono lawyer, Christopher Dolan, Nailah Winkfield insisted the doctors would have fought harder to save Jahi had she been white.

Dolan echoed those sentiments in his speech at the funeral, in which he recounted an emotional meeting between Jahi’s parents and the doctors at Children’s Hospital, days after Jahi was deemed brain-dead.

He said the doctors were dismissive, staring at Nailah Winkfield and telling her to accept her daughter’s death. Funeral attendees grimaced and shook their heads.

Photo: Noah Berger / Special To The Chronicle Pallbearers transport Jahi McMath's coffin from her funeral on...

To Jahi’s mother, the years in New Jersey were both a hardship and a victory. She sold her house in Oakland and quit her job to care for Jahi, who she said could move her fingers in response to commands and even began menstruating.

At the funeral, she said her case should serve as a lesson to other families.

“Stop pulling the plug on your people,” she said. “The doctors — they are not God.”

Though the memorial service had political undertones, many attendees focused on happy memories of Jahi.

“She was super sweet and always had something nice to say,” said Miranda Andrews, 15, who attended the same charter elementary school as Jahi, the E.C. Reems Academy on MacArthur Boulevard.

“She was quiet and smiling all the time,” said Vickie Viney, an administrative assistant at the school.

Photographs displayed on the altar showed Jahi as a little girl, with round cheeks and a saucy ponytail.

“Her favorite subject was science, and her goals in life were to go to college, become a doctor, get married and have twins,” Johnson said, eliciting chuckles from the crowd.

When the service ended at 1 p.m., an armada of cars headed off to Mount Eden Cemetery in Hayward, where Jahi was buried.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan