A 14-year-old girl has died of complications from a brain tumor just days before starting the chemotherapy a court ordered despite her parents' wishes.

The young girl, who the Cleveland Plain Dealer called by the pseudonym Zara Ali, was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor in July.

Her tumor was a low-grade one, but it was pressing on her optic nerve, damaging her vision and, because it was too large to operate on, doctors recommended chemotherapy.

Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic placed a shunt to drain the fluid that was giving her headaches, but Zara's parents - identified as Omar and Rosalind - did not want their daughter to receive what they saw as 'toxic' chemicals in the form of chemo.

For months, the tumor continued to press on Zara's optic nerve, increasingly limiting her vision while her parents administered turmeric and frankincense.

Finally, the Ohio court mandated at the end of July that Zara could wait no longer and had to start chemo within 12 days.

But on Thursday August 10, the little girl died.

Dr Stacey Zahler (left) diagnosed a 14-year-old girl with a noncancerous brain tumor and recommended chemotherapy to shrink it, but the girl's parents wanted to treat it with natural remedies. Despite a legal battle before Ohio Magistrate Judge Ginny Millas (right), the girl died

Zara started getting frequent headaches and even vomiting in September 2017.

Too much cerebrospinal fluid had been building up in the girl's brain, causing her unpleasant symptoms.

She was soon booked for surgery to have a shunt placed to drain the excess liquid from her brain.

Diagnostic imaging revealed that the cerebrospinal fluid had probably gathered around Zara's brain in an effort to protect it from something her body knew shouldn't be there: a tumor.

The mass wasn't cancerous, but it was thoroughly tangled up with the blood vessels feeding Zara's brain, pressing on the pituitary gland in her brain, her brain stem and thalamus, threatening every region it touched.

Already, it had ruined much of her optic nerves. By the time doctors saw her, she was legally blind in her left eye.

Zara's tumor had grown too big and complex to operate on and her doctors worried that if they waited too long to act, the surge in hormones that might come with puberty could fuel the tumor, as could radiation therapy to shrink it.

But if the tumor's size couldn't be reduced, Dr Stacey Zahler, a pediatric oncologist and hemotologist at Cleveland Clinic, feared Zara would lose her vision altogether, or worse.

In October, Dr Zahler told the family that Zara's best bet was chemotherapy, but her parents didn't want her anywhere near the treatment.

Omar and Rosalind wanted their daughter to be treated only with natural or homeopathic remedies.

The Moorish American couple feared that the hospital was only pushing drugs on their daughter because it served the institution's financial interests, according to the Plain Dealer's account of court proceedings.

Instead, they wanted to treat her with turmeric and frankincense instead.

'Turmeric is being peddled for everything from joint pain to cancer,' Dr Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University told Daily Mail Online.

A handful of studies on frankincense and cancer have been done. The ones that show promise are done in petri dishes. In animal models, frankincense seems to do very little.

When asked in court about the the pair of treatments, one of Zara's doctors testified 'tuurmeric has been used in Ayurvedic medicine, which is a form of medicine based in India and primarily used for inflammation. It has never been used [for] brain tumors.'

Dr Lisa Lystad, a Cleveland Clinic neuro-ophthalmologist demonstrated in court how Zara's vision was rapidly disappearing thanks to the untreated tumor

She drew a diagragram of the tumor's location and size to explain the pressure it was putting on Zara's optic nerve. As it grew, it was making the 14-year-old blind

Frankincense 'has never been shown to be useful in any medical condition,' she said.

Omar took the opposite view: 'Chemo is man-made - it's not organic,' he later said in court, according to the Plain Dealer.

In court, Dr Zahler testified that the pair of chemo drugs she had intended to put Zara on - vincristine and carboplatin - shrinks or stabilizes tumor size for 70 percent of patients.

In theory, Zara's treatment hung in the balance of these two numbers, Dr Caplan explains.

For cases like hers, 'the first question is what is the likelihood of success? The more likely a treatment is to prevent severe disability or death, the stronger the case for overriding the parents or appointing a guardian is,' Dr Caplan says.

The Cleveland Clinic team conceded, agreeing to try the parents' natural route for awhile, as long as they brought Zara in regularly for tests to monitor the tumor's growth.

When doctors said the word, it would be time to give up on homeopathy and use the traditional recommendation made by Dr Zahler.

But when Dr Lisa Lystad, a neuro-ophthalmologist saw Zara in December and told the family that the time had come, Omar and Rosalind were no longer willing to keep up their end of the bargain.

By January, the two doctors, the three Alis, the testimony of a social worker and attorneys for each appeared before magistrate judge Ginny Millas in Juvenile Court, where the Plain Observer gained special permission to attend the proceedings.

It had been six months since Zara had been diagnosed. Remarkably, her tumor seemed to be holding steady.

But the already poor vision in her left eye was rapidly deteriorating. In February, she couldn't read a an eye chart or count fingers in front of her at all.

Omar, who wore a fez style hat to every court appearance, missed the day of testimony on his daughter's eyesight, but insisted that she had been telling her parents her vision was actually improving.

'Some ethicists say that children should have more input in their treatment the older they get, but I don't prescribe to that unless they're almost 18,' says Dr Caplan.

The girl's father wore a fez, Moorish-style hat, to court every day

'Until then, they are still very much under the influence of their parents and want to please them.'

The Alis tried to find a second opinion but by March, Judge Millas had decided enough was enough.

She would not take Zara away from her family, but she did order them to take her to chemo treatments in a March ruling.

By the end of April, the Alis had gotten a second opinion from a doctor at University Hospitals (UH) Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital.

He had agreed to start a milder chemo treatment, though disagreed with the court's ordering the family to do so. Zara still hadn't had her first dose of chemotherapy, and the attorney for the county investigator pushed the court once again to ensure that the treatment was started, but back at Cleveland Clinic.

It took another three months for that order to come through, issued by Judge Michael Ryan on July 31.

Unbeknownst to the judge, it was already too late.

Two days earlier, Zara fell unconscious at home and was rushed to UH where she was placed on a ventilator.

The girl never woke up again.

Omar and Rosalind told the Plain Dealer that the UH doctors had blamed Zara's death on a shunt malfunction, which happens in about 50 percent of cases, within two years of placement.

Daily Mail Online asked the hospital to clarify the cause of Zara's death, but UH responded by saying: 'Our deepest sympathies to the family for the loss of their child. However, due to patient privacy laws we cannot comment further.'

On Thursday, 14-year-old Zara was taken off of her ventilator. She died in the hospital with her mother by her side.