600 Line Up, Take the Needle for Adam : Leukemia: Their blood tests will show if they can donate bone marrow to save the life of the 11-year-old boy.

Eleven-year-old leukemia patient Adam Brock sat on the steps of a stately Brentwood manor on Sunday and marveled at the hundreds of strangers lining up for a chance to save his life.

During the day, more than 600 people visited the home of family relatives Mark and Rhonda Slater to be tested as possible bone marrow donors for the boy, who may have only months to live.

“It’s amazing there are so many thoughtful people,” Adam said.

With the odds against two unrelated people having matching marrow about 20,000-to-1, Adam was cautiously optimistic. Earlier testing on ruled them out as potential donors.

“I don’t like needles, so I don’t look at the people getting tested,” said Adam, who suffers from acute myelogenous leukemia. “When they leave, I say, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ”

Over the last two years, more than 2,000 people across the nation have stepped forward to offer bone marrow for the boy but none of them have proved compatible.

But that wasn’t the only reason the Slaters sought the aid of Life-Savers Foundation of America, one of several national bone marrow donor registries, to hold the blood tests at their home.

After watching a television news report about Adam, “we discovered Adam is a relative of ours,” Rhonda Slater said. “As it turns out, Adam’s grandfather and my husband’s grandmother were brother and sister.”

Many of those who turned out Sunday were similarly moved by TV news reports.

“I saw him on television,” said Robert Ruen, 42, of Yorba Linda, who waited in line for more than an hour. “He leaned into his mother’s shoulder, cried and said, ‘I don’t want to die, mommy’--that did it for me.”

“When you see his face, you can’t say no,” added Joey Wilson, 29, who roared up to the home on a black motorcycle, Jimi Hendrix blaring on the bike’s tape deck. “It’s not what he said on television, it’s how he said it.”

In August, Adam underwent an “autologous” transplant, in which doctors filtered cancerous cells from his own marrow and reinjected the purified marrow.

“The procedure didn’t work,” his father, Larry Brock, 43, said. “The leukemia came back even before Adam was out of the hospital. . . . He still needs a donor within 90 days.”

But Adam said more is at stake than his own life. Each volunteer’s name, he said, is added to the Life-Savers Foundation registry of 90,000 potential donors.

“These people are not just helping me, they might be able to help someone else,” Adam said. “You just have to keep your hopes up and never give up.”