Adrift in a Teen’s Sea of Pain : Life Has Long Been Tough for O.C. Hemophiliac With AIDS. But Lately, It’s Gotten Even Tougher.

Channon Phipps had already crafted an emotional life raft by the time he learned in fifth grade that he had the AIDS virus.

By age 11, he had been saddled with daily injections of blood-clotting products, painful shin splints, and the chronic infections of those with hemophilia. So he created his own imaginary friends to comfort him through the darker days of his adolescence.

Then came the disease that led to his becoming California’s first studentwith HIV to be banned from school. Yet he still managed to live a relatively normal life, complete with close friends and a teen-age fiancee.

But now Phipps, who turned 19 last week, seems adrift, buffeted by a series of tragedies that have left him devastated and in trouble.

Today he is in criminal court, facing a charge of possessing methamphetamine, a drug he says he used when family traumas overtook him.

He was abandoned in the family’s Laguna Hills driveway by the aunt he called Mom. In May, Deborha Phipps Franckewitz, his guardian, was convicted of stealing his only means of support, the $52,000 balance of a lawsuit settlement. The prosecutor said more than half of the money was spent on “living it up, possibly buying drugs.”

Phipps’ father, who had kicked drugs and developed a close relationship with his son, died in June. His grandmother in Montana died about three months later. And he has been unable to find a job, living on a Social Security stipend as his health deteriorates.

“The reason I used crystal meth was to take my mind off my problems. I guess I was trying to escape,” Phipps said of his earlier drug use, during an interview at the Orange County Jail. “You can’t explain it, but that’s the way it is. . . . I’d really just like to go away somewhere where nobody knows me and start over.”

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“He’s a nice kid--real respectful of both the authorities and the adult figures in his life, and he’s an honest kid,” said Joseph D’Agostino, the deputy district attorney who came to know Phipps after prosecuting the aunt. “Also, I never saw any self-pity in him. He kind of stands up and takes the shots life gives him without crying over it.”

Channon Phipps’ life, of course, was never easy.

Born with hemophilia to drug-addicted teen-age parents, Channon became the responsibility of Franckewitz when he was a year old. She was only 18 at the time and has said that she struggled with demons from her own rocky childhood.

In school, Channon was frequently absent because of side effects of hemophilia, an inherited disorder in which the afflicted lacks the protein that clots the blood and prevents uncontrolled bleeding.

He learned, at age 11, that the weekly infusions of blood-clotting products had been tainted with the human immunodeficiency virus that would lead to his AIDS.

When Saddleback Unified School District officials wanted Channon tutored at home until they could draft an AIDS admissions policy, Phipps’ aunt sued and Channon was eventually reinstated.

Years went by uneventfully, until high school, when Phipps began falling behind as he developed some of the AIDS-related health ailments like pneumonia. So he was tutored at home. By then, he already had a girlfriend and a cadre of close pals.

Within a matter of months, he would say later, the loving-family veneer began to crack.

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By last fall, he was battling with his aunt. Often the bickering was about ordinary parent-child disputes, such as curfew, safety and what-are-you-doing-with-your-life questions. But more and more, they were arguing about drugs. In court, it was revealed that both aunt and nephew accused each other of abusing them.

When Phipps turned 18 a year ago Nov. 1, according to court testimony, his aunt convinced him that the government would try to place liens against his nest egg: the $52,000 balance of a lawsuit settlement over tainted blood products.

They went to the bank, where Phipps withdrew all but $700 of the money and deposited it in his aunt’s account. Not long after that, Franckewitz took her nephew’s Mustang, emptied her account and, with her son, her husband and his son by another marriage, abandoned their home.

After spending about $31,000 of the money during a trek to Idaho and back, Franckewitz was arrested in a Laguna Hills motel room. She pleaded guilty to one count of theft, was sentenced to nine months in jail and ordered to pay Phipps $21,000 restitution in monthly payments of $400. That was in May. He has yet to receive a dime, he said.

“The kid has had a tremendously difficult life,” D’Agostino said. “Here you have this kid with all these terrible health problems, a really dysfunctional family. Then he gets hit in short succession: He’s diagnosed with AIDS, his natural mother dies, his surrogate mother (Franckewitz) steals his money, his natural father dies. Then his grandmother died. Then he gets arrested.”

It is, added D’Agostino, “an incredibly sad case.”

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Stoic about most of his recent difficulties, Phipps also appeared visibly fatigued by them.

“When one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong,” Phipps said with a sigh. “When I started to slide, it just seemed someone pushed me. It started with Debi (his aunt)and just kept on getting worse and worse.”

This summer, a month after his 39-year-old father died apparently of a heart attack in his sleep, Phipps was arrested for the first time.

“The first one, I copped to it,” he said, running his hands slowly through his closely cropped hair during a two-hour interview at the jail.

It was about 4:30 a.m. on July 11 when an Orange County Sheriff’s deputy patrolling an El Toro industrial area stopped the car Phipps was driving. There was another young man in the car, and after Phipps submitted to a search of the vehicle both of them were arrested.

Court records indicate that the deputy found a small amount of methamphetamine in a metal container. “I had it on me,” Phipps said. “We were sitting in the car talking.”

Phipps started attending weekly narcotics intervention meetings in lieu of serving a 120-day sentence on the July drug arrest. The meetings, he said, helped him see that drugs were not helping him escape troubles.

“Lisa (Shultis), my fiancee, it’s hard to talk to her about that stuff. If I have problems, I don’t want to dump them on her. She has enough problems with school and stuff. I don’t think I had a problem with it because I didn’t have that feeling in me that I needed it. I liked going to the meetings and going home to see Lisa.”

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But his life took a sharp turn again Oct. 4. That afternoon, Phipps parked in a handicapped-only spot outside his bank, where he ran in to cash a check so he could pay his fiancee’s mother rent for the month. Left behind in the car was an acquaintance of two weeks, he said. When a deputy began ticketing his Mustang, Phipps approached.

He and the Sheriff’s department tell slightly different stories of what happened next, but the end result was that a deputy searched the car and found a quarter-gram of methamphetamine--”one or two lines in his bindle,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt McCormick, who is handling the second drug case against Phipps.

Phipps said the acquaintance saw the deputy’s patrol car trolling in the parking lot and bolted from the car because he has a warrant outstanding for his arrest, although Phipps did not know for what.

“He left it in between the seats of the car,” Phipps said. “I didn’t know it was there. I was going to a drug program and everything. I’d only known him for two weeks before I got arrested. Now I don’t have any way of getting a hold of him.”

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Some close to Phipps say it is representative of the poor character judgments he has made in his attempt to make new friends since three close pals moved away in recent months.

He is now serving the original 120-day sentence for the misdemeanor drug possession conviction because his second arrest constituted a failure to complete his drug-free intervention program.

He has been visited repeatedly by his father’s widow and his 12-year-old half-sister. There have also been pilgrimages by his 17-year-old fiancee, with whose family he lives in Laguna Hills.

Although Phipps’ attorney, deputy public defender Jamie Ollinger, never returned a reporter’s phone calls, McCormick said that she has noted in court that prosecutor and judge consider Phipps’ medical condition--he is in his 12th year with the disease--as they consider his fate.

Since Oct. 4, he has been serving his time inside Orange County Jail’s medical ward because of his hemophilia. AIDS periodically ravages him, forcing monthlong hospital stays. The stress of his ordeal with his aunt and more than a dozen medications caused his hair to fall out earlier this year.

But for now, he said, “I feel all right.”

“I have no money. Even if bail was set, I couldn’t afford it.”

After he got the Mustang back from his aunt, there was about $16,000 left of the money she returned.

“I used about a third of that for new tires and to fix up the car,” he said. A friend said much of the remainder was used to repay debts to friends and family who loaned him money during the months his aunt was being tried.

In addition to his girlfriend and her family, his primary support is from his grandparents, and the closest are in Kern County--his late mother’s parents.

His grandfather, he said, “is behind me 100%. He knows I can’t lie to him. I tried to and couldn’t. He’s . . . understanding. My girlfriend explained it all to him. I’ve gotten a letter from him. He said, ‘Keep your spirits up,’ and don’t let me get myself down.”

He has seen his estranged aunt only once since she got out of jail; they were both at the bank, but did not speak. But he talked about missing her son and her husband’s son--two boys he has lived with as brothers. He even seemed willing to see his aunt, but struggled with how to express it.

“I don’t know if I want to see her,” he said after a long pause. “That’s kind of hard.”

Does he forgive her?

“I couldn’t go back and live with her,” Phipps said. “I’ve been on my own over a year.” But the past is just that, he said. “I don’t want to bring that up.”

Gabriele Gallagher, his fiancee’s mother, said she believes he is no longer angry.

“I think he wants to make peace with her, and everyone, so that he can finally relax,” she said. “I think he just doesn’t understand how she could do that to him. I think he doesn’t even want an apology; he just wants to know why.”

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Of his future, Phipps said he hopes to get a job, even pumping gas, so he and his girlfriend can move out on their own and have a life together. Lisa will graduate from high school next spring and then enroll somewhere in college. But he has limited skills, and many entry-level jobs are in food service, which, he said, has frowned upon hiring him.

“Me and Lisa are gonna leave California; we’re just gonna go somewhere where nobody knows us, for a change of scenery,” Phipps said with a heavy sigh. “We need a new environment.”

His future mother-in-law said she “feels Channon’s pain” and supports him.

“Whatever kind of life they will have, all I want is for them to be happy. . . . After going through so much, you never really can start over. You just continue on. And I will do anything to make that happen for them.”

Unable to make anything but collect telephone calls from jail, Phipps has not talked to his future mother-in-law about the charges he faces today in court, but “Lisa believes me,” he said.

“This will probably be the last story you would do about me, because a lot will change when I get out of here. We’ll be gone. I hope people understand. I’ve been through so much.”