Boy Who Needed Transplant Dies

A 13-year-old Santa Ana boy whose search for a bone-marrow transplant drew scores of volunteers but no successful matches, died Monday, hospital officials said.

“He passed away yesterday,” Ron Yukelson, a spokesman for Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where Armando Garcia was being treated, said Tuesday. He added that while he did not know the precise cause of death, Armando was being treated for leukemia.

Armando, who suffered from a form of leukemia known as mylodysplastic syndrome, made his plight nationally known with the help of the Life-Savers Foundation. From the start, however, he and his father recognized that finding an acceptable donor would be difficult.

The chances were roughly 1 in 20,000, doctors said. But because the odds improved slightly if the donor was Latino, Armando and his supporters concentrated on trying to find a donor from the Latino community. Advertisements were placed in Latino newspapers and on Latino radio stations.

At one point, Armando and his father went to a supermarket in Santa Ana, where shoppers stopped to offer blood samples.