You may remember the headline-making courtroom drama from the late 1990s: A father who worked at a St. Louis hospital injected his 10-month-old son with HIV-positive blood, allegedly to avoid paying child support. The boy was expected to die before he turned 5.
The father is serving a life sentence. But as GQ magazine reports, the boy, Brryan Jackson, now in his mid-20s, is doing just fine—and often answers to the nickname Badger, which he picked up at Camp Kindle, a Nebraska retreat for HIV-positive kids where he eventually became a counselor.
Badger “lives a relatively healthy life now, down to just one pill a day, though he still deals with shingles and fatigue and has doctor’s appointments every three months to check his blood,” writes Justin Heckert in the riveting profile. “He wonders if his father knows he started his own HIV organization, Hope Is Vital. That he went to Kenya and told his story to a nursery full of children with HIV—‘It’s not a death sentence!’—and danced and sang to Miley Cyrus on a bus that wobbled through the mountains. He wonders if his father knows that he spoke before Congress. That he threw out the first pitch at a St. Louis Cardinals game while standing barefoot in a personalized jersey, B. JACKSON on the back, while the team put a couple of paragraphs about his story on the scoreboard.”
And that’s only part of the story. This week, Jackson is attempting to break the Guinness World Record for public speaking—specifically, for giving the most speeches in a 24-hour period (Ralph Nader holds the current record of 21). Jackson tells Fox News St. Louis that he hopes the effort will promote Hope Is Vital.
Learn more at brryanjackson.com.
Watch a 2009 video of Brryan receiving a HALO Award:
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