According to a study by forensic pathologists at the Medical University of South Carolina, Raniya had a condition called arteriovenous malformation, a tangle of abnormal blood vessels in the brain, and died after one of them ruptured.
There was no sign that the fight contributed to her death, said Duffie Stone, a county prosecutor, and he would not be filing any criminal charges.
The death of Raniya, a fifth grader, caused an outpouring of grief and made national headlines, with her parents and many others demanding answers for how an elementary school could have allowed a fight to lead to a child’s death.
But county officials said that was not what occurred.
“There was no evidence of trauma on or inside the body,” Stone said. “There were no bruises, no cuts, no scrapes, no busted lips, no black eyes.”
The only internal trauma was linked to the ruptured blood vessel inside the brain, he said.
Headaches are a symptom of the condition Raniya had, and she had complained of headaches and dizziness seven times over the past two years, Stone said at a news conference.
Raniya had been involved in a short “slap fight” in her classroom March 25, the day she collapsed, Sheriff R.A. Strickland of Colleton County said at the news conference.
The fight occurred at Forest Hills Elementary School in Walterboro, South Carolina, about an hour west of Charleston. Raniya died two days later.
Her mother, Ashley Wright, said that Raniya had been bullied in her class. On Facebook, Wright posted a photo of her kissing her daughter’s cheek, as Raniya lay in a hospital bed, wearing a neck brace and hooked up to tubes.
“Stay woke PARENTS!” she wrote.
After the news Friday, there was no immediate response from Raniya’s parents, but supporters writing on Wright’s Facebook page quickly expressed skepticism that the child could have died from natural causes.
“The full truth WILL come out,” wrote one person, Ceryl DeLong King.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.