Child Killed at Random Gives Sight to Others
Roxanna Green is the mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old girl who was killed when a gunman fired into the crowd at an outdoor meeting for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011. She remembers, as in a nightmare, her daughter covered with a sheet and she, beside her, kissing her face and stroking her feet, willing her to live.
But, even as she and her husband, John, grappled with the enormity of their loss, they found the strength to donate her corneas, restoring the sight of two people, for whom there was no other cure. The child, born on one day of indiscriminate killing, September 11, 2001 – ‘9/11’ – and dying on another, gave the nation a reason to believe that, even in the most heart-wrenching circumstances, selflessness can overcome senselessness.
Shot at random: Christina-Taylor Green with her mother, Roxanna.
(Courtesy: the Green family)
This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’