Long story short: Teenager who received a controversial heart transplant in 2013, steals a car, attempts a burglary and leads police on a chase, where he hits a pedestrian, crashes and dies.
“So I can live a second chance. Get a second chance and do things I want to do”
Those are exact words said by the teenager back in 2013 when asked why he wanted the heart transplant that he needed to live.
I guess nobody suspected that carjacking, breaking and entering, shooting at an elderly woman, and leading police on a high-speed chase and striking an innocent bystander were the “things he want to do.”
This whole story disgusts me. Makes me feel like I’m having a lack of faith in people, and their lack of capability of making objective, educated judgment and choices.
In short, back in 2013, this teenager was denied a heart transplant due to “non-compliance.” In other words, he wasn’t taking his required medicine or going to any of his scheduled checkups to follow up on his degenerating health. Basically, if he wasn’t going to take care of himself, medical professionals didn’t see him fit to deserve the heart transplant that perhaps others might be a little more willing to appreciate.
It also didn’t help that the teenager was already a delinquent, demonstrating poor school performance and repeated incidents with the law, despite being just 15.
Anyway, the story got out, and because the teenager was black, it was mutated into this completely irrelevant racial matter, and a story that the big mean racist bigot doctors didn’t want to give the poor innocent sickly black kid a new heart, that would save his life.
Naturally, the public shaming, and the teenager was given the needed heart transplant.
At the time I’m writing this, there are nearly 500 people in the South region alone on the waiting list for a heart transplant. There are over 4,000 people in the United States overall.
Are they all saints? Likely not. But it doesn’t matter, because Children’s Health Care of Atlanta was bullied by a guerilla public relations smear campaign to basically rush a rare and valuable heart to someone that had shown little interest at taking care of it.
A second chance at life was given to someone who was deemed to not deserve it. But honestly, who knows, maybe he would understand just how blessed and lucky he was to get this transplant, that it would turn his life around, make him cherish what he almost didn’t get to have, and he’d live a bright and fruitful life afterwards.
Aaaaand, nope. Instead he steals a car, breaks into someone’s home, opens fire on an elderly woman, and hits an innocent pedestrian while trying to evade the police, before crashing his stolen car and dying.
This story would be fifty times worse he actually killed the elderly woman, or if the pedestrian he struck did not survive. The only casualties instead are the hundreds and thousands of people still on the regional and national heart transplant waiting list at the thought of a perfectly good heart wasted on such a bad human being.
Honestly, it’ll never happen, but I would really love if someone representing Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta went on record and basically said “I told you so.” I couldn’t be mad at that, one bit.
