‘Doubling Down With The Derricos’ Deon Reveals Tragic News
“Doubling Down with the Derricos” star Deon Derrico recently shared the “devastating” news of his nephew Amani Barkley’s death. Amani was only 24 years old.
In an Instagram post on July 12, 2024, Deon shared that Amani was “in the fight of his life.” He asked his fans to pray for Amani.
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Unfortunately, less than a week later, Deon shared the sad news that Amani had died. He explained that Amani was his late brother’s son, and they had only known Amani for 2 years but had had formed a strong bond in that short amount of time.
He added that Amani is survived by “his son Adonis, mother Stacey, and a complete host of other family and friends.”
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On July 20th, Deon posted a video where he thanked his fans for their messages and support and explained that there were too many messages for him to respond to them all. He also went into more details about how Amani died.
Deon explained that Amani needed a liver transplant, but due to issues with his insurance and hospitals not accepting his insurance for some reason, they kept sending him to a different hospital. Eventually, he was sent to the University of Michigan.
Deon added that the family was getting “conflicting information.” For example, they were told “he was going to live, then he was going to die, and it kept going back and forth.” He added that Amani’s mother, Stacey, was “under a great deal of stress,” so she wasn’t able to remember everything the doctors told her.
That’s when Deon decided that he and his mother, GG, needed to be closer to Stacey and Amani to find out what was really going on, talk to the doctors, and help support Stacey. They flew from Las Vegas to Detroit.
When they landed in Detroit, Stacey told them that Amani “had taken another turn for the worse.” He added, “I didn’t think that he would…that he was going to go.” He remained “hopeful” that Amani would recover.
Deon thought, “God wouldn’t allow us all this time not knowing him, for him to come into our life and then die.” He added, “I still can’t wrap my head around it, to be honest.”
Deon and Gigi visited Amani in the hospital and tried hard “to hold it together because we didn’t want him to see us break down.” He added, “We wanted to give him as much fighting hope as possible.”
Amani had a total of 3 liver transplants. The first one was in 2021. His second liver transplant was June 5th of this year. The 3rd liver transplant was shortly thereafter on Father’s Day weekend.
At first, they thought everything was fine after the 3rd liver transplant, but there were other issues. Deon explained, “He had sepsis. He had a fungus in the brain. He had, of course, the liver transplant that had just occurred. He was on dialysis.” In addition, “he had an infection in his stomach on top of sepsis.”
The family had a meeting with the doctors where they were basically told that they couldn’t treat Amani because of all of the issues he was suffering from, and if they treated one issue the treatment for that issue would make another issue even worse.
The doctors told them that they basically had no choice but to disconnect Amani from the machines keeping him alive, such as the dialysis machine, the feeding tube and the breathing tube. Keeping him alive was choosing to “let him suffer.”
Watch the video below to hear Deon explain why Amani died and how “devastating” a loss this is for his family.
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