Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 2, 1995 TAG: 9503020070
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was hard to tell there was a thing wrong with Kris Willis.
The William Fleming High School senior lifted weights and joined pickup basketball games. He was on Fleming's ROTC step team and worked part-time at the Foot Locker athletic shoe store to save money for a car. He was looking forward to attending the senior prom with his girlfriend this spring.
The 17-year-old had made two demo rap tapes with his friends. He wanted to go to college and make music his career. His rap name was k/os - as in "chaos."
Quietly, that's exactly what sickle-cell disease was inflicting on his body. It killed him Saturday.
Many classmates didn't know he had the disease. If they did, they had no idea it would end his life so soon. With new treatments, sickle-cell patients now often live to middle age.
"He was really pretty much a normal teen-ager. Under the circumstances of his disease, that's quite a feat in and of itself," said his physician, Dr. Ron Neuberg, director of pediatric hematology and oncology programs at Community Hospital's Medical Center for Children.
At a time in American medical history when AIDS gets so much press, it's easy to forget that illnesses like sickle-cell disease still kill people. Most of sickle-cell's victims are blacks like Kris Willis. It killed 17 Virginians last year; all but one were black.
Students at Fleming are becoming acutely conscious of all that. Sickle-cell has taken a friend. "He was very, very loved by the students here and they are having a difficult time accepting this, as are the adults," said Hallie Carr, a hall principal.
"Every time you saw him, he either had a smile on his face or he'd be cracking a joke," said his friend Mosley Hobson, another Fleming senior. Willis would tell people a little bit about sickle-cell if they asked, but "he didn't worry about it. He just got on with his life."
Said Carr: "You thought, 'Nothing in this world is going to happen to Kris.' Because he believed it, because he lived his life that way, it led us to believe it."
Though the tall, thin Willis hid his disease well, he sometimes spent weeks in the hospital recovering from the excruciating days of pain that plague sickle-cell victims. His ROTC instructor, Sgt. David Spangler, said one of those bouts is not an easy thing to behold. "I've been to Vietnam." But, he said, "That really got to me."
Sickle-cell is an inherited blood disorder that affects an estimated 72,000 black Americans. Their red blood cells are misshaped, reducing their ability to carry oxygen. Their pain comes when small blood vessels become clogged, often over large portions of their bodies. Victims are susceptible to infections and to chronic organ damage.
Doctors and his guardian and step-grandfather, Harold Buckner, warned Kris not to do strenuous exercise, but he did it anyway, said Buckner's wife, Germaine. "He'd sneak downstairs" to Harold Buckner's weight room. "He knew I didn't like him lifting those weights too much."
She said he was in the hospital with a pain episode about two weeks ago. "He got out; and two days later, he was right back in."
Neuberg, who is setting up a sickle-cell clinic at Community Hospital, saw Willis in the hospital Friday night. "He was still having pain, but he was able to tolerate it. I don't think anyone expected him to die as suddenly as he did."
Kris Willis' fellow ROTC cadets will perform a special step - a very solemn one - at his funeral this afternoon at the Holiness Tabernacle Church of God in Christ.
All week, friends have been collecting money in the school cafeteria for flowers and other funeral expenses. They're contemplating other ways to pay him tribute - maybe the planting of a campus tree, maybe a gift to a national group like the Sickle-Cell Disease Association of America.
"I called him 'the man in the little boy's suit,''' Germaine Buckner said. "To be so young, he had a lot on his mind."
by CNB