San Jose Girl, an Old Woman at 15, Dies

Alicia Gowans, the San Jose teen-ager forced by a rare and ravaging disease to live her abbreviated life in the body of an old woman, is dead, it was learned Tuesday.

Alicia, whose struggle with progeria became known around the world in 1981 when she toured Disneyland with two other victims of the disease, died Sunday night.

At her death at age 15, she stood only 3 feet tall and weighed less than 50 pounds.

And like other progeria victims, she suffered heart ailments, arthritis, wrinkled skin and baldness.

“We were prepared for it,” her mother, Maria Gowans, said. “I think it was for the best because now she is not suffering anymore.”

Her father, Kenneth, said she had been in relatively good health until she complained of chest pains. An ambulance was called, but she died en route to a hospital.

“She was very much alive, in school and happy,” he said, adding that he was grateful for “the 15 years we had her.”

Alicia’s odyssey to Disneyland came about when she read of the planned rendezvous there of two other children stricken with progeria, whose degenerative effects strike about one child in 8 million. Until she learned of Fransie Gerlinger, 8, and Mickey Hays, 9, she had not known there were others like her.

But unlike the two boys who had come to Disneyland from South Africa and Texas, respectively, Alicia’s visit was temporarily marred by her excitement and exhaustion, and her tour was postponed a day.

A reporter for San Francisco television station KGO, which chartered a plane for her trip, said the then 11-year-old girl was so excited she was unable to sleep or eat just before the flight south.

After a night’s sleep, the three children met at the Disneyland Hotel and Alicia finally got her tour of the park, wearing a brown wig to hide her baldness and guided by a particularly favorite character--Snow White--who met her at the gate with gifts and a pink balloon.

The three children kept in touch over the next four years, and Alicia continued to vacation with the help of the Sunshine Foundation, a Philadelphia-based group that helps wishes come true for terminally ill children.

“Last year she went to Orlando (Fla.) to Disney World,” Kenneth Gowans said Tuesday. “She always loved the Disney characters.”

He said Alicia was as wide-eyed, happy and excited in Florida as she had been in Anaheim on her 1981 trip to Disneyland and her journey through the park with Snow White. There, her father said, she seemed especially captivated by the statues of the Seven Dwarfs.