The boy, a seventh-grader and a class clown who already weighed more than 200 pounds, was one of the most popular students at school. He would become an all-state football player in high school and earn a college scholarship.

Chris Schneider © News A watchful eye: Jonathan plays with his his wife's children, Alicia and Stanley, on the trampoline at home hours before his wedding. The two children, ages 4 and 5, are Amber's from a previous marriage. Now that he is married and expecting a child in July, Jonathan has the family he yearned for but never thought he could have.

Brendan Boese also would become one of Jonathan's best friends.

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They were kindred spirits, two kids who loved riding bikes and playing football in the park. Brendan treated Jonathan like a regular guy. Jonathan would live a long time, Brendan told him. They'd be best friends forever, Jonathan told Brendan.

Once, when Jonathan crashed on a bike and bled from his nose, the other boys stood and watched in horror. Brendan took off a sock and gave it to Jonathan to stanch the bleeding.

"Jon was never the guy who had AIDS," Brendan said later.

"Jon was my friend. My buddy."

Brendan became Jonathan's protector, the one who told other kids to back off when someone called Jonathan a fag.

Years later, as the two neared high school graduation, Brendan was told to write about the most influential person in his life.

He chose Jonathan.

Jonathan was an inspiration as a person, but he struggled as a student. He had been diagnosed with dyslexia shortly after arriving at middle school. His special education teacher, Debbie Kimmel, was shocked that her seventh-grader was reading at a third-grade level.

"No one had ever given him any structure," said Kimmel, who has now taught for 27 years. "They thought that he would die, so why shouldn't he just enjoy the day?"

The teacher knew about Sheila's problems and how Jonathan ended up in Wisconsin even though his mother was in Iowa and his father was somewhere out West. She had first met Sheila during Jonathan's eighth-grade year, when Sheila was so high that she staggered into school.

Kimmel noticed that Sheila's earlobe was split and apparently glued together, but she couldn't have known that an irate drug dealer had ripped an earring from Sheila's ear.

Kimmel grew to love Jonathan even more after seeing Sheila. The two would leave together after school and drive around for hours, meandering through the hilly Wisconsin landscape.

He would go to her home, visit her children and talk to her husband.

They would eat dinner, and Kimmel would drive Jonathan home, where they would often talk for another hour in the parking lot of Neil's town home.

Even with this acceptance and support, Jonathan's progress could not be measured in a straight line. He sometimes pretended to take his strict regimen of medications, then hid the pills under the couch.

Chris Schneider © News A mother's sadness: Sheila Swain, Jonathan's mother, cries during an interview in federal prison in California.

He grew to resent that he had told his story to classmates.

The thought that everyone saw him as "AIDS boy" gnawed at Jonathan.

Neil's mother, Barbara, one of Jonathan's high school teachers, would be on the verge of tears when Jonathan lashed out at her.

How could she have him over for dinner Sunday night, only to have him disrupt class Monday morning?

No one, not even Jonathan, can pinpoint when his attitude began to change.

Neil got Jonathan the best doctors in Milwaukee. He surrounded Jonathan with his friends. One found him a job in a warehouse; others took him to baseball games or out to lunch on the weekends. They helped with his homework.

"I never had a man in my life," Jonathan would say later. "Neil was a friend, but he became like a dad to me. It was everything I wanted."

Neil had strict expectations for Jonathan's homework, medications, punctuality at dinner and bedtime.

They argued about scuff marks Jonathan and Brendan made on the wall when they threw their shoes down the stairs. Neil yelled when Jonathan didn't help carry groceries to the kitchen.

He hugged Jonathan when he earned good grades or made another student feel special, and Jonathan grew stronger and more confident as Neil worked with him lifting weights.

"I never second-guessed myself whether it was right to take Jon," Neil would say later. "It felt right. Jon wasn't suffering anymore."

As Jonathan matured under Neil's tutelage, he started studying and planned to graduate from high school. His reading scores improved. He took his medication.

Jonathan was determined to put the past behind him. But a there was another complication. A few months after his move to Wisconsin, Sheila showed up at the door. She wanted to rejoin Jonathan's life, but said he could remain with Neil. She promised that she was OK, that everything would be OK.

Chris Schneider © News Just for fun: Jonathan and Amber play-fight at their home. Soon after they began dating, Amber told her mother that she and Jonathan loved each other and might one day marry. Amber's father was shocked by her matter-of-fact attitude. "It's like we're dealing with a kid who's playing with suicide," he said.

A 'good' mother goes to prison

Two years before, back in Iowa, she had sat at the edge of Jonathan's bed, tucking him in. She did it almost every night she was home.

As she leaned in to kiss Jonathan goodnight, she paused. She had a question.

The two were living on welfare, and jobs were scarce, Sheila said, especially since Jonathan had AIDS. Did he know how much his medical care cost each month? Thousands of dollars. Jon, it costs thousands of dollars.

The family needed money.

"Is it OK if I sell drugs out of the house?"

Inmate No. 05682-089 steps into the stark white room, flanked by a guard who stops her at the glass door.

Her blue eyes radiate in the northern California sunlight. She has a broad nose and pockmarked cheeks. Her hair is dark red going gray at the roots.

The inmate opens the door and extends her hand.

"Hello," Sheila Swain, 51, says, her hand quivering. "I'm a little nervous today."

The room, with rows and rows of tables, is empty, except for two prison administrators. The newly buffed blue-and-white linoleum floor shines under the fluorescent light.

She walks to a corner table and sits. She fidgets in her seat next to a window overlooking a few inmates in a yard wrapped by razor wire and the spring green hills of Dublin, Calif.

Federal Correctional Institute Dublin: Sheila Swain's home. It has been almost five years since she was locked up after FBI agents broke open her Wisconsin apartment door and pulled her from bed, almost five years since Jonathan wrote a letter to a judge, begging for leniency.

"I wasted 10 years of Jon's life," Sheila says, tears welling in her eyes as she sits at the prison table. "I couldn't blame my children if they hated me. If they couldn't forgive me, I would understand."

Chris Schneider © News Sharing an embrace: Jonathan and Amber hold each other on the bedroom floor. The couple met while working at the restaurant Jonathan's father owns. At first Jonathan kept quiet the fact that he had AIDS, but three waitresses, including Amber, confronted him one day with rumors of his illness. Soon, there was a budding relationship between Jonathan and Amber, which frightened and dismayed her parents.

Before the drugs put her in a chokehold and wouldn't let go, AIDS had given her life meaning. Her son's sickness put her in the spotlight as an advocate for children who suffered with an incurable disease.

She was a woman who had helped chip away the wall of ignorance around AIDS. She had helped her son obtain life-prolonging treatments at some of the country's most respected medical centers.

But as Jonathan's life extended year after year, that purpose faded. Another took its place.

She was a nickel- and-dime drug user as a teenager, preferring marijuana and diet pills. In her 20s, she moved to Valium.

Sheila stopped only to have her first child, Troy, at 17, and later to meet Dee as she searched for a waitress job in Colorado. Dee hired her; they fell in love.

Later, the two would scream and swear and fight, pulling hair and threatening each other's life. And that was before AIDS came into their relationship — and before a friend showed up at Sheila's Lakewood apartment with a hit of cocaine.

Swain Family/ Special to the News Colorado visit: Jonathan, center, then 12, visited his father, Dee Swain, and brother, Josh, in 1995.

Less than a year after that first cocaine high in 1989, Sheila, then 37, would stand in her bedroom, a gun to her head, a boyfriend at her side. Jonathan was at Taco Bell with his brother Josh when the gun fired.

"Mother of Jeffco boy with AIDS wounded," the headline read the next day.

The boyfriend ran out the door a few seconds after the blast. Sheila bled from her abdomen. The boyfriend had grabbed the gun, put it to her stomach, asked if she wanted to die. The gun went off.

Police ruled it a suicide attempt. And, in a way, it was.

Social services wanted to remove Sheila's three sons — their half-brother, Troy, had already left home — but her family intervened. Sheila promised to clean up her life, move to Iowa to be near her parents and start over.

On her first day outside Colorado, she dropped her children off at the new home, found a dealer in Des Moines and got high.

Sheila was a good mother, Jonathan would tell his friends when they called her a crack whore and a drug dealer.

She was a good mother, he'd say, even when she'd leave $20 in food stamps on the kitchen table on Friday and not return home until Monday.

She was a good mother, he'd say, despite the glass pipes on the floor, the crack cocaine on the family Bible and the needles stolen by a junkie friend that Jonathan needed to take the medication that kept him alive.

Chris Schneider © News My baby: Jonathan and Amber look at the first ultrasound picture of their baby at the doctor's office in Salt Lake City. When Jonathan saw the image of his unborn child, he said: "My baby. That's so cool." Jonathan would later tell Amber he wanted to frame the picture.

She was a good mother who ran through at least a six-figure settlement from Jonathan's tainted transfusion.

But there was little left for Jonathan to say that October day in 1999 when an FBI agent came to his Mequon classroom to tell him that his mother had been arrested — less than three years after she'd shown up in Wisconsin promising that everything was fine.

She had been unable to leave her old life behind. She had returned to Iowa often to visit friends and resume old habits.

Back in Des Moines, Sheila had dealt marijuana, a kilogram of methamphetamine and 50 grams of crack to an undercover officer. More than 20 people would be arrested in the sting.

Sheila faced three life sentences in prison, was sentenced to 23 years and may get out with good behavior after serving less than six.

"My family and I have suffered severely throughout my childhood because of her actions and decisions that resulted from the drug use," Jonathan wrote from Wisconsin to the federal judge in Iowa after Sheila's conviction. "But never once have I doubted that she was the most warmhearted, loving mother in the world."

The phone rings at Jonathan's home.

It is his mother, making the 15-minute call she's allowed every Sunday from prison. She always calls Jonathan.

She says she had been in an interview a few days earlier and had talked about her life and how she dragged Jonathan down with her. She never realized how bad it got.

"I'm sorry for everything I've put you through," Sheila tells her son. "I love you."

Sheila must have said those words a thousand times, Jonathan thinks. But he hasn't given up on her. This time, he'd say, he is sure she means it.

Sheila's weekly calls may end in summer 2005, when she moves from prison to a halfway house and then to parole. On the condition that she stays straight, Jonathan has offered his mother a room in his home.

Finding the long road home

Solitude runs along U.S. 40.

The road winds among the sagebrush-laden fields of Colorado and Utah, a backdrop of red clay mesas jutting up like broken bricks strewn across the dusty landscape, dumping into one small town after another.

It passes 13,000-foot peaks, then widens from two lanes to four as it heads into Naples, Utah.

Chris Schneider © News On the job: Jonathan cooks with his father, Dee Swain, at the restaurant Dee owns in Vernal, Utah. Jonathan's relationship with his father is under constant strain as the two struggle to find common ground after so many years apart. Dee never sent his son birthday cards. But after Jonathan graduated from high school, he accepted Dee's invitation to move to Utah.

Two miles farther and the tangle of auto dealerships and fast-food restaurants gives way to a drive-in movie theater, retail stores and then a Mormon temple, to Vernal, Utah. Population 7,500.

Jonathan's home.

At the end of town, just a few hundred yards across from the Wal-Mart, is a hotel.

Enter the front doors, make a left into the dining room, a right at the soda machine and open the flapping kitchen door.

Inside, flames rise around a pan of garlic and mushrooms, and the sizzle of newly cut steaks rises above the barking of food orders and the whir of a portable air conditioner.

The kitchen has one grill, and Jonathan is flipping hamburger patties on it while checking a well-done sirloin.

His forehead is beading with sweat. He pulls a steak glistening with marbled fat from a cooler and tosses it onto the black iron.

It is here that Jonathan comes five days a week, cooking steaks, dropping french fries into the deep fryer and high-fiving other cooks — one of them his brother.

It's here that Jonathan came to find his peace, the place where he could simply be the guy whose father owns the steakhouse down the street.

Jonathan saw U.S. 40 as the route to a new life. AIDS wouldn't define him here. He would start over on his own terms.

Dee also would start over with the son he had ignored for most of his life. Dee had rarely called, had never sent a birthday card or a Christmas gift. He later would say he was forgetful, that he never remembered important dates.

Jonathan knew he was the forgotten one.

But when Dee caught wind that Sheila had gone to prison, he was prepared to take in his son. He had a job waiting in Vernal at the family restaurant. Dee had started the place with sons Josh and Jeremy, the family Jonathan had grown up without.

Dee is older and grayer now, his hair parted down the middle of his broad skull and his jowls drooping, but he is much the same intimidating figure he was in the hospital when Jonathan was born.

Jonathan's first instinct upon being offered the opportunity to join his father was to stay with Neil.

He had visited Vernal in the months following Sheila's arrest and had hated it. He hated the restaurant, hated the town and hated the fact that his father was at long last trying to become a presence in his life.

Dee had his own problems with Jonathan. He was a momma's boy — and Sheila's boy at that. He couldn't understand why Jonathan always defended her. Jonathan never told Dee about what really went on at those homes in Iowa, the guns, the drugs, the dealers, the prostitutes. He didn't have to. Dee knew about Sheila and her addictions.

As Jonathan weighed his decision, no one in his adopted Wisconsin family understood why he would consider going with Dee.

Jonathan had trouble explaining it himself. He had average grades and a 17 score on his ACT, not exactly college material. He had to go somewhere. Maybe it was as simple as escaping Neil's shadow. Neil had everything Jonathan wanted — the perfect life, the nice home, the girlfriend, the great family.

On the day he graduated from high school in June 2001, Neil's friends and family celebrated with him at a lake. Jonathan told everyone his news.

He was moving to Utah.

Out West, he wouldn't be "AIDS boy" and he wouldn't be the son of a crackhead.

In Vernal, there would be no cameras, no microphones, no stories to tell. In Vernal, he would be Jon Swain. The past would be tucked away.

Chris Schneider © News Taking a timeout: Jonathan donned his AIDS T-shirt in protest after learning that a member of Amber's family refused to attend a wedding party for her sister if he was involved with the cooking. He went home to cool off by watching TV. One member of Amber's extended family still refuses meals with Jonathan, but he believes he is winning them over one at a time.

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