A MUM whose son’s brain was retained after he died in 1994 wants to know why the practice is still taking place.

Ryan Lee was one of triplets born prematurely at Poole Hospital in 1994. His mum Sue said he was given an overdose of a heart drug and died as a result 16 weeks later.

Although the hospital admitted the overdose, a post mortem examination blamed “natural causes” for Ryan’s death and said the incident was unrelated. Sue is the latest of a series of parents who have contacted the Echo about this.

But Sue underwent further heartbreak when she contacted Southampton General Hospital, where Ryan was sent for the post-mortem, following the Alder Hey organs retention scandal in 1999, to be told his brain had been retained.

She said: “It was horrendous to know that we had only buried part of him. You never get over it, you just get used to living with it.”

Sue, who also had a stillborn daughter, Jenna, in 1988, had already lost another of her triplets, Melissa, who was born at 24 weeks and did not survive. Ryan and his brother Shaun were both born at 25 weeks. Shaun is now 17.

Sue, of Liberty Way, Poole, said: “My son is autistic, but he understands what happened and for him to hear what happened to his brother it upsets him. He knows his brother would have looked like him, because they were identical.

“But this is obviously going on a lot and I feel that nobody has ever been brought to book about it. Where do they get off, doing this to babies?”

Jon Fisher, head of communications at Poole Hospital, said: “A post mortem report into Ryan’s death found natural causes were responsible, and not an overdose. And while the hospital admitted the medicines error at the time, the UK Central Council for Nurses decided not to take further action against the nurses that were involved.”

Matt Watts, press officer for Southampton General Hospital, said the organs had been discovered as part of an audit by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Permission to keep organs was not always needed, but the law changed in 2006 and Southampton General Hospital was used as a storage site for this particular type of post mortem.

ACPO told the Echo that police routinely retained material taken from bodies at post mortem and that sometimes material was retained for “significant” periods in order to fulfil legal requirements.