A GRIEVING family is launching a legal battle to get answers over their daughter’s death.

In the week Amie Miller would have celebrated her 21st birthday, her family have begun legal proceedings against Basildon Hospital.

Amie was 15 and a pupil at Grays Convent School when she was taken to the hospital on November 16, 2008, after vomiting and fitting.

She died two days later from swelling on the brain.

The family claim they were pushed into donating Amie’s organs. An inquest into her death, held in September 2013, found there had been “serious failings” in care.

Her father, Mbarek Aitmarri, said: “Amie died in 2008 and we are still waiting for the hospital to give us their own investigation.

“After she died, they approached us within half an hour.

“I was asking what was going to happen to Amie and the lady at the hospital said there was someone there for organ donation.

“What they said was, if we do the post-mortem examination, we wouldn’t be able to donate Amie’s organs.

“But when we later had a meeting with the hospital, we found a postmortem examination could have been conducted without the organ donation being affected.”

The family marked what would have been Amie’s 21st birthday at home on Monday in Tomkins Close, Stanford-le-Hope.

Mr Aitmarri said: “All her peers and friends met up in the cemetery.

They are getting their degrees. I wish we were at that stage, but all we have is basically a hole in the ground.

“She left a hole in the family and we have all suffered post traumatic stress. Most people who lose someone go through a grieving process. For us, it hasn’t started in the first place.

“We usually come back here, sit in the garden and think ‘happy birthday’ and let a balloon out for her. As Amie is not here to get a present, my wife gives our children a present from Amie.

“She was adored by her brother and her sisters. She was warm and kind and was a real family girl.

“She wanted to be a paediatrician.

What she wanted to be is what the people who failed her are. The betrayal is unbelievable.”

The family decided to take legal action after an inquest in September.