Jonathan's plight and his persistent struggle against the disease soon became well-known to Denver newspaper readers.

Chris Schneider © News Staying fit: Jonathan bench-presses at the gym in Vernal, Utah, where he works out as often as his job and health allow. He is sometimes chided for going at it too hard. "Easy man, you'll kill yourself," one person tells him. Jonathan bench-presses 215 pounds.

At 5, he was giving an interview to a reporter when another boy walked up and stopped Jonathan in midsentence.

"I can't play with you," the boy said. "I might catch your blood."

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Jonathan looked toward the ground and then at the ball in his hand.

"Bad ball," Jonathan said, slamming it on the concrete. "Bad ball."

Then he walked away, his oxygen tank trailing him.

That's how Jonathan was told to react. Just walk away, his mother told him. Don't be embarrassed.

The AIDS panic seemed to have no boundaries. Two churches asked Sheila to take her family elsewhere to pray. Seeking to be prepared for the inevitable, Sheila called two funeral homes. Both said they didn't want Jonathan's body.

Baby sitters who once cuddled Jonathan no longer returned phone calls.

The playmates in the park had no idea what AIDS was, but their parents did. The neighborhood pool emptied at the first sight of Sheila and her sick little boy.

When Jonathan looked in the mirror, he saw a shy boy dressed in overalls who loved to draw, who loved watching Denver Broncos football.

Everyone else saw a boy with oxygen tubes.

Sheila tried to prepare Jonathan for the taunts, for the people who told him he was a bad person because of his disease, as if he somehow deserved it. She coached her son: You be the one to tell people you have AIDS, and you be the one to show them it's OK.

So, when Jonathan entered preschool and the six students stared just like the neighbors did at the pool, he took a deep breath and said:

"I have a disease in my blood. I got it from a blood transfusion when I was a baby. It is called AIDS, and it can kill you. If I fall down and hurt myself so that I bleed, you have to run and get help.

"Stay away from my blood."

It was an eight-month battle to get Jonathan into a classroom. It started with a phone call to the Jefferson County School District in 1987.

"My son Jonathan is ready for preschool," Sheila told the person on the other end of the line.

There was no need to explain who Jonathan was. In Lakewood and other parts of the county, his first name told the story: Jonathan represented AIDS. AIDS equaled death.

The district instructed Sheila to get a home tutor, to prove that Jonathan was ready for school. The tutor later would threaten to sue the district, saying he never had a chance to refuse the assignment.

Chris Schneider © News AIDS lifeline: Jonathan selects the pills on which his life depends. In addition to nutritional supplements that keep down his weight, send more oxygen to his muscles and improve his sight, he takes a $1,600-a-month drug cocktail that forms his chief defense against AIDS.

Sheila met with school administrators, each time drawing more and more media attention.

There were several reporters at a meeting inside the Patterson Elementary School gymnasium in 1988, a year after Sheila's first call.

A doctor from the Jefferson County Health Department stood and told 120 parents that it was safe to be around Jonathan. But some were so scared that they compared him to undetonated fireworks.

News reports at the time said that dentists were contracting the disease from patients. Parents worried that the new student would bite and kick and might bleed on another child.

The doctor was blunt. The school district had to accept Jonathan. The law said so.

Advocating for Jonathan gave Sheila focus. She had quit her job as a waitress at Stuart Anderson's Black Angus, feeling more alienated from her friends each day. She faced financial disaster.

Jonathan was a celebrity by then. There were fund-raisers to pay his $20,000-a-month medical bills; a book, My Name is Jonathan (and I have AIDS), was published and sold thousands of copies worldwide; and stories of his school struggles appeared in newspapers across the country.

At Patterson and then Irwin elementary schools in Lakewood, though, he was a pariah.

Jonathan went to the bathroom at school and got urine on the toilet seat. An administrator called Jonathan's grandmother to come clean it up.

Jonathan's life was chronicled in headlines.

"State's first AIDS child learns to cope," one said. "AIDS boy takes to school like a diplomat, mom says," another said.

"Tale of tot with AIDS tugs at heartstrings," another read.

Sheila never tried to hide her son's secret.

But then one day the headline hit that puzzled everyone: "Mother of Jeffco boy with AIDS wounded."

Sheila, it would turn out, had a dark secret of her own, one that would unravel in time.

Chris Schneider © News Dose of medicine: Alicia Padigimus, Amber's daughter, 5, helps Jonathan with his morning dose of AIDS medication. Jonathan adheres to a strict regimen of taking the powerful drugs, which have strong side effects, including nausea, headaches and fatigue.

A gift from a friend who died

Jonathan was reluctant and afraid when he arrived at the National Institutes of Health in 1988. By then, his story was everywhere, and the renowned medical research center had reached out to Sheila.

Soon, Jonathan and his mother were making the 1,700-mile flight to Maryland every three months.

In those days, the 13th floor at NIH in Bethesda was the frontier of medical science in the fight against pediatric AIDS and pediatric cancer. In the course of quarterly visits over the years, Jonathan would grow increasingly comfortable.

After hours of tests and procedures, he knew he could look forward to seeing other NIH children at a nearby hotel and that he would play Foosball, watch movies and race wheelchairs down the hallways.

He met Sara, 10, and she would become his best friend. The two were among the youngest children on the 13th floor, and both were being tested with the newest medications.

A friendly game: Jonathan, right, plays football with Ryan Chedester, another HIV-positive child whom Jonathan met at Camp Heartland in Minnesota.

Jonathan's first test medication was didanosine, DDI, one of the first anti-HIV drugs approved in the United States. For every dose he took, there were four blood tests.

Jonathan and Sara drew and colored together and wrote about their experience with AIDS. They called it "The Secret Monster" and promised each other they would kill it someday with the "disgusting tasting medicine."

When Sara became so sick she couldn't travel, Jonathan wrote to say that he loved her.

Sara wanted Jonathan to have her silver ring. Her family sent it to him when she died after her 11th birthday.

Jonathan saw death everywhere. He learned to observe the children who were getting on and off the NIH bus, keeping count of who was missing.

Sheila had taught her son not to be afraid. One day they drove into Washington, D.C., and Jonathan saw the vast AIDS Memorial Quilt, each panel representing the death of someone's loved one. Sheila cried as they walked the quilt's perimeter.

But Jonathan confided to a reporter that he wasn't afraid to die.

"Because one day Jesus got nailed up and went to heaven, and that's where I'm gonna go," he explained. "To Jesus."

Losing a friend: Jonathan visits Ryan's gravesite in Whitesville, La. Jonathan lost many of his closest childhood friends to AIDS.

Reaching a turning point

Jonathan and his mother were waiting at a bus stop outside NIH one afternoon when Sheila made small talk with a handsome young man.

They couldn't have known it at the time, but the conversation would lead Jonathan to a crossroads.

Neil Willenson had observed the boy and his mother in the playroom on the 13th floor and had reached a conclusion about Jonathan. Children who lost their hair were the cancer patients, Neil had been told. The others had AIDS.

Neil, a film and television major at the University of Wisconsin, had produced an award-winning documentary about a 5-year-old boy from his hometown who suffered with AIDS.

A born activist, Neil was just 15 when he started a nonprofit organization for homeless families. He had run for the Wisconsin Assembly two years later, capturing 28 percent of the vote.

His work on the documentary had brought him face to face with the desperate reality and ugly discrimination faced by children with AIDS. He had accompanied the subject of his film, Nile Wolff, on several trips to NIH, where the children basked in acceptance.

Deeply touched by what he saw there, Neil's advocacy was about to take a turn.

He scrapped the plan of taking his film degree to Hollywood and instead took his $3,000 bar mitzvah savings and the $25,000 he inherited from a grandmother and dreamed up Camp Heartland. He intended it to be a first-of-its-kind retreat for HIV-AIDS children.

Foster dad: Jonathan, right, with his foster father, Neil Willenson, at a party for Jonathan's high school graduation in Wisconsin. Jonathan said Neil "became like a dad to me."

Neil's parents, Barbara and Ken Willenson, fretted that their son was too young to contemplate making AIDS his life's work.

Within a few months, though, Neil had rented land in the Minnesota woods and pieced together a staff. In spring 1993, he again flew east to NIH — this time to enlist campers.

One of the first to sign up was the boy from the bus stop.

In the decade that followed, Neil Willenson would lose 52 campers to AIDS. But Camp Heartland blossomed into an organization with a $1.9 million budget this year, befriended by the likes of baseball Hall of Famer Paul Molitor and TV personality Sharon Osbourne.

Accolades have poured Neil's way — appearances on Oprah, newspaper stories, requests for speeches, a mention in Fast Company magazine as one of the country's 50 unsung heroes.

But he thinks one of his greatest accomplishments began the day he engaged Jonathan and his mother in a brief conversation.

Sheila had prepared her son for death since he was diagnosed with AIDS at age 2. Neil offered a different vision, one of possibility, of hope.

Jonathan would seize it.

At the crossroads, he would veer sharply toward life.

A plea for help

Jonathan's desperate calls to Neil began in October 1995, two years after their first encounter. Neil was Jonathan's friend by then, the 24-year-old who listened, who never ridiculed or judged.

They spent time together at Camp Heartland, walking in the Minnesota woods. Neil told Jonathan about his parents and brother and sister and how he grew up in a beautiful town north of Milwaukee. Jonathan shared with Neil his dreams of being a grown-up with a family, and he wanted it to happen soon.

But the frantic calls were not about any of that.

Just months before, Jonathan, then 11, and seven other children living with HIV and AIDS boarded a chartered bus and traveled along the East Coast under Neil's direction. The tour, called Journey of Hope, was aimed at promoting AIDS tolerance.

As the boys and girls ran along the aisle and bounced like pin balls off the leather seats, Sheila was behind the locked door of the bus bathroom. A chaperone on this trip, she spent much of her time getting high, taking hits of crack cocaine from a pipe.

Jonathan's behavior changed drastically. He was suddenly disrespectful to the adults. He teased the other children and punched and kicked when he wanted attention.

Neil soon figured out the problem. The solution, confronting Sheila, was more difficult.

Neil settled on the tactic of telling her that Jonathan needed her guidance and that she needed to be around more.

Sheila looked concerned, nodded and disappeared to the back of the bus.

When Jonathan and Sheila returned home to Iowa, where they then lived, it was to what was rapidly becoming a crack house.

Jonathan called for two consecutive weeks.

"Please," he begged Neil. "Let me live with you."

The request seemed absurd. But Jonathan, with an addict for a mother and a father he barely knew, didn't have anyone else to ask.

Chris Schneider © News A special bond: Neil Willenson puts his hands on Jonathan's shoulders during a vacation in Las Vegas for Jonathan's 21st birthday in March. Neil, who founded Camp Heartland for HIV-AIDS children, is Jonathan's foster father and raised him through his teenage years.

The idea of a boy with AIDS living with a 24-year-old man would be perceived as odd, Neil knew. Neil's mother tried to convince him he was throwing away the best years of his life. She screamed at him.

Neil didn't listen. Jonathan moved to Mequon, Wis., in January 1996. Sheila, whose drug use had escalated to frightening levels, was willing to see her last son living at home go.

Class clown a close friend

One morning that winter in Mequon, Jonathan stood in the Steffen Middle School gymnasium, Neil at his side, facing an auditorium filled with classmates.

He was the boy with AIDS, Jonathan told them.

He explained how he got AIDS, what kinds of medications he took and how classmates could not catch his disease from a water fountain or in the lunchroom.

Please, Jonathan told 150 staring students, just treat me like a normal kid.

Silence.

Finally, Neil asked: "So who wants to be Jon's friend?"

"I do, I do," a voice mocked from the back of the gymnasium.

The students laughed.

Chris Schneider © News Comforting stepson Stanley: Tired and upset, Stanley gets support from Jonathan, who has treated Stanley and his older sister, Alicia, as if they were his own children. The three play a constant game of tag inside the house, and Jonathan often whips up nighttime snacks for everyone.

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