Lisa Tremond

Lisa Tremond is both a pediatrician and the paternal grandmother of Yolanda Berrueta’s children, a dual role that places her at the center of a dispute over how the children died and why their bodies were not autopsied. As head of pediatrics at the hospital where they died, she says she treated them from birth and was present when they died. Her account makes the absence of an autopsy not a mere procedural gap, but a decision she personally made under the pressure of family grief and professional responsibility.

Identity and Position

Lisa is introduced to Amaia Salazar by Judge Markina during a meeting attended by Marcel Tremond, Yolanda’s ex-husband, and Marcel’s parents, Lisa and Jean Tremond. The family has come voluntarily to report concerns about Yolanda’s behavior. Markina identifies Lisa as the head of pediatrics at the hospital where the children died, giving Amaia the opportunity to question the doctor who signed their death certificates and was responsible for ensuring that the appropriate examinations were performed.

That introduction sharpens the significance of Lisa’s family connection. She is not an outside physician reviewing the case after the fact: she is the children’s grandmother as well as the senior doctor involved in their care. Her testimony therefore brings professional authority and personal attachment into the same account.

The Decision Not to Perform Autopsies

When Amaia asks why the children were not autopsied, Lisa says they died in hospital and that she had treated them since birth. She attributes their deaths to pulmonary deficiency present from birth and rejects sudden infant death syndrome as the cause. She distinguishes that medical explanation from the reason no autopsy was conducted: Yolanda, she says, repeatedly asked that the children not be subjected to an examination that would add to her suffering.

Lisa acknowledges that she knew the protocol for sudden infant deaths. Nevertheless, she says she judged that honoring Yolanda’s request was the right decision, invoking her own position as the children’s grandmother as well as her professional judgment. She accepts responsibility rather than presenting the omission as an administrative accident or someone else’s choice.

Conflicting Accounts and Investigative Significance

Lisa’s explanation enters an investigation in which the classification of infant deaths depends on what examinations were carried out and what alternative causes could be established. In other cases Amaia reviews, autopsies found no evidence contradicting an initial classification of sudden infant death syndrome; in the Tremond children’s case, by contrast, Lisa says they had a known pulmonary deficiency and that the deaths were not sudden infant death syndrome. The absence of autopsies leaves her clinical account and the circumstances of the decision especially consequential.

There is also a direct discrepancy between Lisa’s account and Yolanda’s reported version: Amaia notes that Yolanda had said the children died of sudden infant death syndrome. The exchange does not, by itself, resolve that contradiction. Instead, it makes Lisa’s testimony a crucial point in the inquiry, while emphasizing that the same person who can explain the hospital’s care was also a grieving relative who chose not to follow the usual examination procedure.