For two and a half years 11-year-old Jevon Mahler had been courageously fighting leukemia but on Saturday this inspiring young man lost that battle. On Saturday evening Jevon died after he began to experience respiratory problems. For his family it is an immensely saddening loss, but there's also sadness in the community...television and internet viewers have been following him and offering contributions of all kinds. Even as he fought to take his last breaths, wheels were in motion to get him to the United States where he was promised a full regimen of treatment. That goodwill remains, but those efforts however well meaning could not keep the young man alive and today his mother told us about her son's last moments.
Patricia Lanza, Mother
"I came home in the afternoon because Jevon asked me to push him in the wheel chair and then he told me to go home and wash. So I told him that I promise that I will hurry come back. When I came home my brother and his friends went to hail Jevon and they stayed with him for a little while. When I listened my brother called me and he told me to hurry come because Jevon was bawling for me because he couldn't catch his breath good. So I went and when I arrived I saw them pushing him in a wheel chair to take him to the other room and put him on a machine because they said they didn't trust. Later the doctor told me that Jevon is passing off slowly. So I said I can't believe it because he told me wasn't going to leave me and he will stay with me and he just pass off man.
I just want to thank everybody out there who helped and supported him. He appreciates it because he said it and he felt good when he got the letter to go and he told me that he was going to go and he told me he wanted to go to Disney Land too and he never made it. Those people who turned him down should have think twice.
More could have been done because Jevon was fighting, he didn't want to die, he was fighting. He was suffering for two and a half years but he was trying. He went through a lot of pain. In a way it is good he stopped suffering the pain because it is not a little of pain Jevon suffered but he fought it.
Its hard for me because I didn't want Jevon go from me because I loved him bad. I don't know what I will do without him. He also told me loved me. I always remember that Jevon was a loving little boy and his most favorite friends are not children but bigger people than him because he talked like a real man. Like he used to take care of his sister and older brother here. He knew how to motivate himself in everywhere and he always wanted to be a man. He told me he wanted to earn a Mitsubishi and he told everything he wanted in life."
Jevon will be laid to rest on Thursday.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited and Prepared for the internet by Keith Swift
