Originally posted by Susy K
What's the history with this dude?
Here are a coupla links i found....still quite odd IMHO....
http://www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-323516.html ... Advocate made girl his cause .... -- With his raspy voice and a white Panama hat permanently atop his head, Mack Mahoney made international news this week, challenging Duke University Hospital to explain how it transplanted a heart and lungs of the wrong blood type into 17-year-old Jesica Santillan.
Mahoney, a Louisburg homebuilder, has grown to love the Mexican teenager like a granddaughter since reading about her in his local paper. Three years ago, he started a charity in her name to help the families of critically ill children.....
Or maybe the Vietnam War veteran, who had part of his larynx removed during throat cancer surgery, knows what it’s like to face death.
He was discharged days before the Tet Offensive and watched on television as the Viet Cong overran U.S. positions where he knew his friends were stationed. He and his wife, Nita, also lost a child more than 20 years ago, a death they attribute, along with the cancer, to Mahoney’s exposure to Agent Orange.
....."I’ve never gone to Mack’s house without Jesica being there," said Gil Silva, a Louisburg businessman who helped him start the charity. "He is very close to all of the children, but because she was the first one, she’s actually like a grandchild to him."
Mahoney has two daughters and three grandchildren of his own. All help with the charity.
The Dallas, Texas, native moved to Louisburg about seven years ago. He is not a millionaire and drives a pickup truck, he and his friends said. Still, Mahoney has given tens of thousands of dollars of his own money for Santillan’s care.
The first campaign for Santillan was to raise $7,000 for a cardiac exam to diagnose her then-unknown condition. Mahoney and his wife "came out of the woodwork" to help, said Gary Cunard, publisher of the Franklin Times.
"It has become their cause, their reason for being," he said. "[Mahoney] just wanted to help this little child."
In one of its first reports, the paper wrote how Santillan’s family lived in a mobile home without a telephone or air conditioning, Cunard said.
"I think that was the first thing Mack Mahoney did, went out there and had an AC [unit] in that mobile home."
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Home Builder Champions Transplant Teen
http://www.newsday.com/news/science/...ence-headlines
By ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press Writer
February 22, 2003, 2:12 AM EST
DURHAM, N.C. -- Two decades ago, Mack Mahoney lost his 2-month-old son, Anthony, after an operation to correct a kidney defect. He felt the operation was botched, but didn't see the sense in taking any action.
This time around, Mahoney refuses to stay silent. ....
His involvement with Jesica started with what was supposed to have been an anonymous donation to help pay her medical bills. But when the family insisted on meeting him, Mahoney became the point man in the effort to raise money for Jesica's care.
Now, a man who nearly lost his voice to a false diagnosis of throat cancer has become the mouthpiece for a family struggling to communicate in a foreign tongue.
"Nobody else can fight for her," said Mahoney, who was left with a gravely whisper after losing half his larynx. "Her family does not speak English. They can bully them around and do all they want to, and I just refuse to let them bully me. That's the difference.
"I don't bully. And they can't intimidate me, because I don't intimidate." ......
Mahoney managed Elizabeth Dole's Senate campaign in Franklin County last year, and he reached out to her for help with Jesica's case.
"They gutted her like a fish," he told Dole tearfully.
While Mahoney was having a contentious meeting with the Duke brass, Dole called him on his cell phone and asked to speak to the hospital's top administrator.
Until then, he said, Duke was trying to find ways to get around his medical power of attorney and had threatened to kick him out of the hospital.
"He is a tough guy," says Renee McCormick, a land developer who is helping Mahoney. "This is not a guy who cries. ... Mack has lived this ordeal with her for three years."
Jesica's mother, Magdalena, has said that without Mahoney to raise a fuss, Duke would have let Jesica quietly die. McCormick agrees.
"I think she would have died from rejection, and no one would have known why," she says.
Mahoney learned Spanish growing up near Dallas and running a business in Mexico. He spends his days in the pediatric intensive care unit, translating for the Santillans and comforting them.....
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