His photo appears here as the most prominent face centered on the front cover of the May 22, 1994 Awake! magazine.
The feature articles on "Youths Who Put God First" fill the first fifteen pages -- nearly half the issue. More than a third of this space is devoted to handsome, dimple-cheeked Adrian. The story relates cute anecdotes from his early childhood and reveals him to be a sensitive, intelligent, lovable boy anyone would be proud to have as a son.
At age eleven he rescued three orphaned raccoon babies he found alongside the highway and escorted them to a safe home at an animal shelter. The kindness and respect he showed for a mentally challenged girl in his class at school--the butt of other children's jokes--endeared him to the girl's mother. Adrian was fourteen when doctors found a fast-growing tumor in his stomach. A series of autopsies revealed a large lymphoma in his abdomen, plus evidence of leukemia in his bone marrow. Oncologist Dr. Lawrence Jardine at the Dr. Charles A. Janeway Child Health Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland, prescribed aggressive chemotherapy accompanied by blood transfusions. When it became clear that Adrian, at his parents' urging, refused the transfusions, child welfare workers went to court seeking protective custody.
Watchtower lawyers produced a strongly worded signed affidavit from the teenager: "The way that I feel is that if I'm given any blood that will be like raping me, molesting my body. I don't want my body if that happens. I can't live with that. I don't want any treatment if blood is going to be used, even a possibility of it. I'll resist use of blood." On July 19 Justice Robert Wells of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland ruled the boy to be "a mature minor whose wish to receive medical treatment without blood or blood products is to be respected." With only weeks to live, the brave young man fulfilled a few wishes. He visited the Watchtower branch office at Georgetown, Ontario. He went to a Blue Jays baseball game and had his picture taken with part of the team. On September 12 a handful of Jehovah's Witnesses held a special service in the hospital's physiotherapy room and baptized Adrian in one of its steel tanks, thus officially inducting him into membership, and he died the next day.
Why did young Adrian take this course? The AWAKE! article mentions that he "felt that his Biblical hope of eternal life would be threatened" if he agreed to a transfusion. (page 5) Like other JW children he had been taught that death on a hospital bed was to be chosen over "an even graver risk, the risk of losing God's approval by agreeing to a misuse of blood." His parents no doubt followed the organization's instructions to "review these matters with their children" and to "hold practice sessions in which each youth faces questions that might be posed by a judge or a hospital official." (THE WATCHTOWER June 15, 1991, page 15) In other words, Adrian was thoroughly indoctrinated.
Virtually all JW youngsters receive this training to one extent or another, but not all end up in circumstances that require them to go through with it. How many actually do? The caption for Adrian's cover photo states that "thousands of youths died for putting God first" in "former times" and adds that "they are still doing it, only today the drama is played out in hospitals and courtrooms, with blood transfusions the issue." Nowhere, though, do the articles specify exactly which "former times" are referred to. (AWAKE! May 22, 1994, page 2) Nor are any statistics provided on whether the number of Jehovah's Witness youths dying "todayŠwith blood transfusions the issue" similarly runs into the thousands, or not.